End Users '20 under 40' 2017—Michael Glasser

Michael Glasser, 34

North America security consulting manager, Microsoft Global Security/LMC Consulting

Redmond, Wash.

Michael Glasser has always been around security. But his father, who has been working in security in Brooklyn, N.Y., for more than 40 years, told him as a kid—“Don't be an alarm guy; go work in computers.”

“So I started studying computers but the dot-coms fell and I couldn't get a decent job, so I started doing what I knew how to do, which is alarms,” he explained, noting that he spent summers in his youth pulling cable and handing out brochures at ISC East for the central station where his mother worked.

Today, Glasser oversees a team of about 12 responsible for security system installations and physical security planning for Microsoft North America.

A self-proclaimed “tech nerd,” Glasser said, “I am looking for things that don't actually exist today but are almost there—like fully software-defined readers so that we are not stuck with having to choose one brand of card. I would like to see us get to where we just pay licensing to whoever we want, and it is effectively just a software-defined radio that you can license with any technology you want.”

Glasser sees the industry benefitting from deep learning in the future, noting that business intelligence “is by far the biggest technology trend I see coming. I also see increased leveraging of video technology and data by allowing the cloud to process it.”

He also predicted continued improvement of force multipliers in security, giving a security professional much more power through the use of emerging technologies such as robotics and cloud computing.

A big proponent for training and certification, Glasser is one of about 100 people to earn all three ASIS certifications. “I also have held a CISSP for over a decade and have SIA's CSPM. I am constantly working to improve myself.”