SIA names winners for 2022 Denis R. Hébert Identity Management Scholarship

SILVER SPRING, Md.— The Security Industry Association (SIA) has named Alex Orr of Johnson Controls and Esteban Pastor of ZKTeco USA as the two recipients of the 2022 Hèbert Identity Management Scholarship.

Orr and Pastor are set to receive the $5,000 scholarships that will allow them to further their education in the identity management field.

This scholarship program is named after Nightingale Security Chair and Investor Denis R. Hébert, a past member of SIA’s Board of Directors who served as chair from 2016 to 2018. The program is designed to support the professional development goals of individual SIA members and student members who specialize in identity management – a field involving the systematic control of access, authenticating users, securing assets and protecting privacy. Identity management encompasses many aspects of risk management, public policy, fraud prevention, privacy, data analysis, risk and governance, information technology and security.

“SIA congratulates the 2022 Denis R. Hébert Identity Management Scholarship winners and applauds their noteworthy accomplishments and commitment to advancing this critical field within our industry,” SIA CEO Don Erickson said. “It is essential to continue building on our identity management knowledge to better address threats, protect assets and privacy and promote innovation, and SIA is proud to help foster the honorees’ career development and education in the identity management space through this scholarship program.”

Orr

In her role as Global Strategic Account Manager at Johnson Controls, Orr leads global building solution sales into Fortune 50 big tech clients of the company’s enterprise portfolio. She has a proven track record of experience consulting on enterprise-level access control system deployment, in addition to infrastructure and resource development scaling globally to support the enterprise within data center and commercial real estate markets.

Orr has served as a mentor in the SIA RISE community’s Talent Inclusion Mentorship Education (TIME) program since April 2021. She is dedicated to creating diversity of talent in the security industry globally by acquiring and retaining new talent from external industries and promoting opportunities within the security business to drive end-user behavior across the Internet of Things and better secure assets and foster innovative ways to utilize identity management to solve unique end-user problems.

Prior to her time at Johnson Controls, Orr completed her integrated Master of Physics degree from the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom. She is an avid soccer, golf and tennis player, and throughout her life navigating different cultures in Canada, the U.K. and the United States, she has found these games to be a universal language bringing communities together.

Orr is enrolled in the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s executive MBA in global strategic leadership program, which she will begin in September, and plans to use the scholarship funds toward earning her degree to learn new tools that can be implemented to work together impactfully across people, organizations and technologies to support her teams.

“Where I have found identity management particularly impactful in today’s climate is understanding space utilization as customers return to work in a hybrid model,” Orr said. “Additionally, ensuring that the right people have the right access as some companies move away from five-day work weeks and the pre-COVID expectation that you could simply recognize someone on site who isn’t normally there!”

Pastor

As Access Control Product Manager for ZKTeco USA – Pastor is responsible for the management of teams worldwide overseeing product design, delivery and promotion of all access control panels, software solutions and multicredential readers, including prox, Bluetooth, QR code, fingerprint, face and palm.

Pastor’s first involvement with SIA was back in back in 2017, when he was one of the recipients of the SIA RISE Scholarship, which helped him to obtain multiple certifications to help further his career. These courses and acknowledgements also provided the necessary credibility to engage with other security professionals working on important initiatives, including the SIA Open Supervised Device Protocol standard.

As a champion of SIA OSDP, Pastor has not only worked on ZKTeco USA‘s implementation, but has also taken the responsibility of educating industry professionals and customers on the future of access control. He is always looking for solutions, integrations, partnerships and technology to take access control and security to the next level.

Pastor plans to use the Hebert Scholarship funds toward furthering his identity management education in the business and sales side of the industry, as well as learning more new technology and exploring how using Web3 will play a part in identity management.

“Where I see the future of the security industry is more of what we are starting to see now with proptech garnering more interest from larger integrators and multitenant property management companies,” Pastor said. “The idea of having just about everything integrating with anything on a single platform is something that really excites me, and I have already dived headfirst into start to bring more complete and accessible solutions to our customers. There are a lot of exciting things that we are working on right now, and I think coupling it with our contactless biometrics will be a game changer.”

In 2018, SIA and the Board of Directors established the Denis R. Hébert Identity Management Scholarship program in recognition of the substantial subject matter expertise Hébert offered and continues to offer to SIA members. His input has helped businesses to interpret and influence identity management trends and achieve greater business success. In his role as a leader on the SIA board, Denis Hébert positively impacted SIA’s service to its members in the domain of identity management as evidenced through the development of many of its education, government relations and standards initiatives. Learn more here.