Resilience names Chris Wheeler CISO, stresses trust

Resilience appointed Chris Wheeler chief information security officer in 2024 after he rejoined the company earlier that year as vice president of information security. Wheeler had left Resilience in 2020.

Wheeler served six years in the US Navy beginning in 2010. His service included three years at sea on destroyers and three years in the Navy’s information warfare unit. He led a ship division of 15 sailors and took part in exercises that involved defending networks against an external red team, an experience he called formative for both technical skills and leadership.

After the Navy, Wheeler worked as a threat researcher and analyst at Efflux Systems and as threat analytics manager at Arbor Networks. He first joined Resilience as threat intelligence lead, moved to Morgan Stanley in 2020 as vice president and SOAR lead, and returned to Resilience in 2024.

Wheeler described trust as the single most important trait for a CISO and presented it as reciprocal: business leaders must accept cybersecurity advice when it affects priorities, and security leaders must trust their peers and team members. He said a CISO cannot know everything and must “know the right questions and the right people to ask,” and he added that team members must trust that leadership will “have their back.”

On hiring and team composition, Wheeler noted that generative AI and automation have lowered the barrier to some technical tasks. He looks for candidates who can incorporate AI into their work and who show emotional intelligence and social skills, saying those traits support a team-based approach to security operations.

Wheeler divided career guidance into philosophical and practical advice. Philosophically, he urged mastering the underlying principles of risk and security and improving risk quantification, including estimating probability, describing uncertainty, and mapping risk to financial terms. Practically, he recommended hands-on experimentation, such as building a home lab that can include cloud and AI tools.

He encouraged empathy in interactions with other teams and warned against seeking perfection in every security decision. He urged staff to take vacations and maintain family time to avoid burnout and to build working relationships that make it easier to share information and respond when issues arise.

Wheeler expressed concern about rapid adoption of agentic AI across enterprises and described a Resilience program that combines employee feedback, controlled experimentation, and risk-based guardrails. He said most new controls are tied to a zero trust architecture and that the company is increasing investment in identity and access management, data inventory and categorization, and automation.

He described his approach to security as “technology + security principles + business acumen + people empathy = successful cybersecurity.”