Ransomware Readiness with Heather Renze

About Show #1048

The risk of ransomware is real - are you ready? Richard talks with Heather Renze about her experiences dealing with a ransomware attack and how to get prepared when it happens to you. Heather talks about how ransomware has evolved into a business that has operators, affiliates, and even tech support. Making a plan is essential - involving finance, legal, and IT. Cyberinsurance plays a big role, as do regulatory bodies - it depends on the business you're in. But your plan needs to know three essential things: what breaks first, how long your company can function with it broken, and who can decide on what to do next in the first hour of the event. The plan may or may not work perfectly, but not having a plan is far worse. Get ready!

Links

Ransomware Guidance from NIST

Recorded June 25, 2026

Heather Wilde Renze is a veteran technology executive, author, and AI Field Engineer at Fireworks AI, specializing in enterprise AI resource optimization and token economics. Globally recognized in the tech ecosystem as the "Unicorn Whisperer," she has served as a six-time CTO and was a founding team member at Evernote, where she led the technical operations that scaled the platform from its infancy to over 100 million global users. In her engineering role at Fireworks AI, she embeds directly with high-velocity organizations to design and deploy cost-conscious, multi-model AI architectures. With over 20 years of experience managing complex technical infrastructures - ranging from aerospace engineering program management at Spirit Airlines to production infrastructure for NASA and the U.S. Navy - she bridges the gap between deep code execution and executive-level strategy. Her current technical focus centers on the emerging domain of agentic AI, where she helps enterprise engineering teams build and implement the right tools to achieve their use cases. Heather is the award-winning author of Birth of a Unicorn: Six Basic Steps to Success and serves on the Advisory Board for the UNLV Howard R. Hughes College of Engineering. Her technical insights on AI infrastructure, agentic product design, and scaling are regularly published in Inc. Magazine and Forbes.

About Show #1048

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