Dexcom

Paul Stapleton serves as the Vice President of Cyber Security at Dexcom, with 27 years of security experience. His career quickly moved from IT and networking into network, application and product security, where he found the work he valued most: helping teams keep products safe through design, development and operations. After leadership roles at AT&T, Verizon, Hewlett Packard, Time Warner, Dell and Lenovo, Stapleton now leads product security at Dexcom across the full lifecycle, from concept to commercial operations to end of life. His work is grounded in one belief: effective security must understand and align with the business, including its strategy, products, customers and partners.

Start With What the Business Cannot Lose

Security has to start with a thorough understanding of the organization and then designing and integrating security into every part of the business. This is critical.

Security professionals work for a business. The goal is to help it safely serve customers and grow. That cannot be done well without understanding business strategy, goals, partners and customers. None of those are afterthoughts. They are the foundation.

What follows is a discipline most security programs get wrong. You cannot secure everything equally. A strong program begins with knowing what assets exist, where they sit and what they are worth. From there, you classify assets and build control sets around each class based on value.

Some systems can go down without a major impact. Others cannot. In financial services, there is zero tolerance for downtime or breach, so investment reflects that. Every business has its own expectations. Security has to be built around them, not imposed over them.

The mistake security leaders sometimes make is applying so much security that the business cannot function. That is not success. Security has to be pragmatic. Protect what matters most, keep important assets safe and let the business move.

Build Security Before You Have to Fix It

Product security is where pragmatism becomes structural.

If you want secure products, security has to be involved from the start of product ideation and whiteboarding. That is when the security architect defines controls, requirements and design choices. The security team must engage early across all product types, including cloud infrastructure, mobile apps, hardware and firmware. We design security into the architecture from the start, then carry it through development, testing and operations.

The timing matters. The closer you get to the source of a problem, the easier and cheaper it is to fix. Push it further down the lifecycle and the cost and disruption grow significantly. Security gates at every stage of product development serve that purpose. Discover threats and vulnerabilities early, fix them before market launch and keep your customers and partners safe.

Discipline keeps speed, quality and accountability connected as the product moves forward.

Security that Moves With the Code

Secure-by-design cannot stop at architectural design. It has to continue through development and testing.

DevSecOps tools should watch code as it is written, with security controls built into CI/CD pipelines. Static and dynamic testing, open-source security reviews and compliance checks all have a role. When a developer is about to commit code, the security tools should scan for vulnerabilities. Synthesis developers fix critical and high-severity vulnerabilities immediately. This stops critical risks from traveling deeper into the lifecycle, where they become more costly to mitigate or remediate.

“Businesses are integrating ai into processes, products and operations. They want to improve internal efficiency and product quality. Security leaders have to understand that blocking ai innovation is not the answer. The business has to innovate. Security has to place governance and controls around that innovation so it can continue forward with a reasonable level of risk.”

Quality Penetration testing before launch still matters. It reduces the risk of important vulnerabilities being missed. At the end of the development lifecycle, it should be unusual for a strong program to be discovering obvious problems for the first time. Real security reduces risk steadily, not just at the end.

Ai Needs Speed and Guardrails

Nothing has shifted the balance between security and innovation more sharply than AI.

Businesses are integrating AI into processes, products and operations. They want efficiency, quality and proof that they have modernized their operations. Security leaders have to understand that reality. Slowing everything down is not the answer. The business has to innovate. Security has to place governance and controls around that innovation so it can continue forward.

That middle ground is where security leaders struggle most. AI governance matters because organizations need a clear process to review tools, whether bought or built. Security teams need to understand what those tools do, what data they touch, what risks they introduce and what controls are required.

The threat landscape is not waiting. AI-driven attacks are expanding at machine speed. Security teams have to learn and adapt at the same pace. Smart leaders are focused on building an AI native security team that can build and maintain the tools needed to guard and respond in real time. We have found tools from innovative young companies and built our own when we could move faster than the cyber market to build and launch the tools we needed.

Large vendors matter, but they often move slowly. Smaller companies are finding new ways to defend against AI-based threats, which is why the large vendors are acquiring them. Security teams cannot wait for the market to mature. The AI attacks are expanding and moving.

One Team, No Silos

Technical skill matters, but team alignment determines whether that skill produces results.

I reinforce one message with every team I lead. We are one team, one company. When teams protect territory, they lose focus on what matters. I do not tolerate division. Security moves too quickly for that; unification is key.

I tell my people that initiative is key to success in security, as in every field. If you see a problem outside, inside or outside of your function, help solve it. Pull together the right people and move forward to fix it. That ownership matters because the work is fast and teams have to work as 1 to be proactive to succeed.

The same principle extends across the business. Security teams work for one company. Other functions must share the business goals. When security thinks this way, partnership becomes natural. You ask what matters to other teams and how security can support them while protecting the business.

Lead Close to the Work

Never stop learning. The field changes too quickly to rely on what you already know.

Leadership means being willing to do what you ask others to do. It cannot become detached from the pressures the team faces. You have to understand the work, step in when needed and set the standard through your own behavior.

Security leadership today is not only about defending systems. It is about protecting innovation, building resilient teams and helping an organization move forward with confidence. That requires business judgment, discipline and the humility to keep learning as the landscape changes.