“40 under 40” Class of 2019 — Drew Weston, 37

Drew Weston, CPP, has been a technology evangelist with CodeLynx for the last nine years, helping federal, state and commercial clients understand the impacts to security programs from new technology and new ways of doing business. He has served in various leadership roles within CodeLynx including facility security officer.

In terms of his love for security and IT, Weston said it has always been a “family affair” for him. “I have family that worked in the DoD space doing access control and video. My mother was a programmer, and as physical security converged with cyber, cloud and AI, it was a natural progression.”

On the technology side, “it is all about artificial intelligence and the massive petabytes of data that video surveillance systems capture,” Weston said. “The systems of the very near future will learn and adapt, so they need to be monitored and conditioned appropriately to ensure correct responsiveness to a security incident. As we collect this massive data in these systems, understanding how to separate noise from something critical will be vitally important, particularly as we move from reactive to proactive incident responses.”

Understanding that cyber and physical security have converged is also an important issue, he noted.

Looking to the future, he's very excited about mixed reality and “the possibilities it brings to empower and decentralize security operators,” he said. “I think it will impact our realm as much as telecommuting changed the day-to-day for office workers. Mixed reality will allow us to see the first-person view from someone in the field and provide feedback in real time.”

Weston is the chapter chairperson for the Greater Charleston Chapter of ASIS, and has been involved with NCMS, Infraguard and ASIS for the last eight years.