Cybersecurity Leaders to Watch in California’s High-Tech Manufacturing Industry California’s high-tech manufacturing sector sits at the intersection of advanced hardware, connected products, cloud infrastructure, medical devices, and industrial-scale research and development. That makes cybersecurity a cross-functional discipline rather than a siloed one. The leaders in this feature reflect that reality. Their backgrounds span artificial intelligence security, cloud security, product security, compliance, risk management, secure engineering, and the protection of complex manufacturing and healthcare-adjacent environments. Kshitish Soman — Head of Information Security, Seagate Technology At Seagate Technology, Kshitish Soman serves as head of information security, with responsibility spanning artificial intelligence security, risk management, cloud security, and security architecture. His role builds on an unusual mix of product, engineering, and security leadership. Before moving into Seagate’s information security organization, he led engineering and later products, engineering, and operations for Lyve Cloud, giving him direct experience in the technical and operational environments that security teams are often asked to protect. Earlier in his career, Soman co-founded OmegaTrace, an IoT product engineering company focused on indoor location sensing and tracking, and also co-founded Digigel, a scalable IoT and fog computing platform. Previous leadership roles at KPMG, Pali Capital, Marsh, Aon, American Express, and other firms added experience in consulting, enterprise architecture, systems design, and large-scale software delivery. That blend of engineering depth and security leadership is especially relevant in high-tech manufacturing environments where cloud platforms, connected systems, and operational resilience increasingly overlap. Naor Penso — Chief Information Security Officer, Cerebras Systems Naor Penso is chief information security officer at Cerebras Systems, where he oversees security at a company building large-scale artificial intelligence computing infrastructure. Before joining Cerebras, he served as vice president and head of product security at FICO, following earlier leadership positions including chief technology officer for cybersecurity at Amdocs and chief information