Donald Heckman

Donald Heckman, a cybersecurity subject matter expert, is a Director in the Advanced Solutions. He leads Guidehouse’s Cybersecurity Team data protection offerings for Public and Commercial Sector clients as well as, developing and leading a strong cybersecurity offering for Commercial Financial Sector clients. Don brings over 36 years of experience in government leadership, spear-heading cybersecurity and secure information sharing initiatives across the DoD, IC, and National Security sectors.

Prior to coming to Guidehouse, Don served as both Principal Deputy for Cybersecurity and Deputy Chief Information Security Officer (DCISO), for the Department Defense in the Chief Information Office (DoD CIO). Mr. Heckman was responsible for overseeing the department’s $8 billion cybersecurity program and ensuring compliance with U.S. cybersecurity laws, regulations and standards. He was responsible for coordinating cybersecurity standards, policies and procedures with other federal agencies, foreign partners and industry.

Donald has also led the largest cyber security solutions development and services organizations at the National Security Agency (NSA), the Cybersecurity Solutions (CSS) Group. This organization developed capabilities and provided system security engineering services that spanned a large variety of technology areas, to include cloud and enterprise services, merged voice and data, mobile, high speed networks, cross domain solutions, encryption and key management, supporting a spectrum of national security customer environments ranging from strategic and tactical high speed network communications, to military weapon systems and architectures. Additionally, this organization provided cybersecurity services to the NSA worldwide enterprise including certification, accreditation and authorizations to operate, encryption, cross domain information sharing, identity and access management and 7x24 security operations center (SOC) for incident detection and response. He received the Meritorious Executive Presidential Rank Award in 2017, for his contributions to national security.\

Prior to the Cybersecurity Solutions (CSS) Group assignment, he was the Assistant Deputy Director of Trusted Engineering Solutions (TES) within the Information Assurance Directorate (IAD) and Chief of the IAD’s Architecture Group at the NSA. He has held key NSA leadership positions supporting Information Assurance, Systems Security Engineering and Key Management missions. Additionally, he served as the NSA/CSS Representative (NCR) to Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA). He also led the establishment of the DoD’s Cryptographic Modernization and Global Information Grid Information Assurance Portfolio (GIAP) offices.