Biography
Michelle Finneran Dennedy currently serves as Chief Executive Officer at Drumwave. She has a passion for developing software for business people, data scientists, analysts, students, all kinds of surfers - and you.
She is the co-author of The Privacy Engineer’s Manifesto and the Privacy Engineer’s Companion.
Before working at Drumwave, Michelle was a VP and Chief Privacy Officer at Cisco. She was responsible for the development and implementation of the organization's data privacy policies and practices, working across business groups to drive data privacy excellence across the security continuum.
Michelle founded The iDennedy Project, a public service organization to address privacy needs in sensitive populations, such as children and the elderly, and emerging technology paradigms.
Michelle has also served as Chief Privacy Officer for McAfee/ Intel and Vice President for Security & Privacy Solutions for the Oracle Corporation. These teams worked closely with customers to enable them to proceed with the confidence that information is protected and accelerated as an asset. Before the Oracle acquisition of Sun, Michelle was Chief Data Governance Officer within the Cloud Computing division at Sun Microsystems, Inc. Michelle also served as Sun’s first Chief Privacy Officer.
Michelle is a sought-after and provocative public speaker, evangelizing new approaches and business justifications for soundly-defined, transparent security and privacy policies and systems that protect healthy, safe global businesses.
Michelle has a JD from Fordham University School of Law and a Bachelor of Science degree with university honors from The Ohio State University. In 2009, she was awarded the Goodwin Procter-IAPP Vanguard award for lifetime achievement and the EWF – CSO Magazine Woman of Influence award for work in the privacy and security fields. In 2012, she was recognized by the National Diversity Council as one of California’s Most Powerful & Influential Women. In 2014 she was cited as an AlwaysOn Power Player in On-Demand Computing and was honored as the Gold Stevie award as Woman of the Year in Technology.