Cyber Leaders Advancing Critical Missions

There are many paths to cybersecurity at Booz Allen. Senior Vice President Melissa Sutherland started as a Marine, collecting signals intelligence in dozens of countries around the world. Vice President Becky Robertson discovered her skill in communicating complex details and putting pieces together through technical writing—and soon found herself “doing cyber before cyber was cool.”

Today, they’re part of Booz Allen’s national cyber business, an expert team supporting some of the nation’s most critical missions including exploring new possibilities in AI and machine learning, threat hunting and detection engineering, zero trust architectures, and beyond. And they’re helping lead the way in a field they’ve seen emerge, evolve, and rise in prominence as a national-level priority over the course of their careers.

They discuss the journey, what makes this work so critical, and why, in Melissa’s words, “everybody’s in the fight” in today’s interconnected cyber landscape.  

After her service in the U.S. Marine Corps and work in government as a signals intelligence officer, Melissa’s career took a turn toward digital transformation.

She took a leadership role supporting the Joint Transformation Command, Intelligence—which incorporated intelligence capabilities into training, integration, and interoperability across the armed forces—and served on the Army Science Board, providing scientific and technical engineering recommendations to the Secretary of the Army.

Her next career move put her on the ground floor of Booz Allen’s budding digital transformation business.

“I was one of the first to join what is now our chief technology office,” Melissa remembers. “At the time, we were just starting to deliver software for large systems and service-oriented architecture. DevSecOps was just emerging.”

Today, she oversees a team of experts who are developing new approaches to full-spectrum cyber operations, using automation, AI, machine learning, and more to detect vulnerabilities, develop exploits, and respond to threats faster and more effectively.

“I'm amazed at what our teams are doing every day,” Melissa says.

As for Becky’s start, “In college, I earned a degree that combined math, computer science, and communications,” she says.

She learned about Booz Allen through friends. “They told me that Booz Allen was my kind of place,” she recalls. She joined as a technical writer and soon had an opportunity to support a substantial—and pivotal, it turns out—project.

“The term ‘cyber’ wasn’t used back then, but it was the foundation for a lot of the cyber activity we do today and have done for more than 20 years,” she says.

“They needed a good communicator on the project and someone who could talk technical,” she recalls. “And from that point, my career has been a series of really fortunate opportunities.”

Today, Becky leads a team from Booz Allen’s office in Annapolis Junction, Maryland, bringing analytics, digital technologies, AI, and engineering together to drive innovative, effective cyber solutions.

“We thrive on a good challenge and finding a way to overcome that challenge,” Becky says. “It’s really been a privilege to be part of the journey Booz Allen and our government partners have taken,” she says.

“What we know today as the cybersecurity sector began in the federal government,” Becky explains. In the 1990s, “cyber was cutting edge, and if you weren’t in the government, you probably weren’t aware of it.”

All this changed at the beginning of the 21st century. The September 11, 2001, attack dramatically transformed the threat environment, and digital transformation—business, commerce, entertainment, and more moving online—changed what needed to be protected.

“There was a need to secure all of these things in the cloud in a way that still enabled that speed and scale,” Melissa notes.

Meanwhile, cybercriminals were taking advantage of this change with increasingly sophisticated and large-scale attacks, including high-profile cyber incidents and breaches that made national headlines.

“Our team of cyber experts started getting requests for cybersecurity support from industries they had never gotten pulled into before, like banking,” Becky remembers.

“Cyber wasn’t just for the military and government anymore,” says Melissa.

In today’s era of strategic competition, the stakes are higher than ever. “Our adversaries are getting more and more sophisticated, so we've always got to be leaning forward,” says Becky. “It’s a constant race.”

With one large and growing attack surface and escalating threats came the need for more consolidation and collaboration. “We realized we needed to bring our intelligence cyber efforts together with our work for the Department of Defense, our civil business, and our commercial business to have a holistic view of the adversarial landscape and take a ‘one battlespace approach’ to providing offensive and defensive full-spectrum cyber capabilities,” Melissa says.

Through the national cyber business, Booz Allen leverages cross-sector mission understanding to tackle cyber challenges of national importance. “We are set up to streamline and foster collaboration, and that opens up new paths of opportunity across our teams to support multiple markets and clients,” says Becky.

Throughout this collaboration, diverse viewpoints and experiences are essential. “Cyber requires understanding the varied environments in which you might have to operate and how your adversaries might think about things,” Becky adds. “There’s an art to cyber and to doing it well.”

In addition to their client and project responsibilities, Melissa and Becky mentor the next generation, encouraging people to get into the field, especially women and those from other underrepresented groups. “We need increased diversity and gender parity is essential to providing our clients collective ingenuity and diversity of thought,” Melissa declares.

Their advice: Seek out certifications. Embrace learning. Learn how to adapt and be a problem solver.

The field is transforming so fast that people from all backgrounds can find a place. “There’s room for everybody,” Becky says.

“You don't just have to love playing video games or do software development to get into cyber,” Melissa says. “The field requires critical thinking, thinking like the adversary, plus psychology, communications, and many other skillsets.”

“It’s an amazing field filled with many different roles for people to be successful,” she says.