If You're Not First, You're Last: A Former Govt. CTO's Perspective

Season 2
Episode 1
Guest Steve Wallace, Public Sector CTO, F5

October 12, 2026

Steve Wallace spent 15 years at DISA, seven and a half of them as CTO, building some of the largest IT programs the Department has ever attempted. Now 130 days into his role as Public Sector CTO at F5, Steve joins Brian and Sean to share what those programs taught him. He walks through scaling DoD Enterprise Email to 1.8 million users before Office 365 existed, why a design only succeeds if operations can run it, and how a borrowed Lotus philosophy shaped his approach to systems engineering. Simpler systems are easier to troubleshoot, easier to operate, and far easier to defend because adversaries have fewer folds to hide in. That lesson drove the move from the Joint Regional Security Stack, with 20-plus vendors and a print job that traveled hundreds of miles to reach a printer down the hall, to Thunderdome, a zero trust architecture whose name came from the idea that two solutions enter and one leaves.

The conversation turns to cutting through AI hype the same way Steve once cut through blockchain and zero trust washing. He warns that the rush to deploy AI echoes the late-1990s scramble to install antivirus after the fact, and he flags API security as the screen door on the side of a house with a bolted front door. Steve and Sean dig into F5's acquisition of CalypsoAI, agentic red teaming that adapts its attacks in real time, why guardrails are never fire and forget, and how distillation puts fine-tuned agency knowledge at risk. Plus why the token party is over, the danger of cognitive surrender, and Steve's Monday-morning creed of delivering for people on the worst day of their lives, holding teams accountable, spending taxpayer dollars wisely, and never letting the adversary win on his watch.Resources Mentioned in This Episode

Featured Guest

• Steve Wallace, Public Sector CTO, F5, and former CTO, Defense Information Systems Agency

• F5 Public Sector

DISA and DOD Programs

• Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA)

• DoD Zero Trust Strategy and Reference Architecture

• DISA THUNDERDOME

AI Security and Guardrails

• F5 acquisition of CalypsoAI (AI guardrails and red teaming)

• CalypsoAI CASI leaderboard, a monthly security ranking of AI models

• OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications

• MITRE ATLAS, the adversarial threat landscape for AI systems