He declined to live tweet his upcoming wedding from the altar, but there is no doubt that Nick Hayes is the social media expert on Forrester’s S&R team. He has extensive knowledge of the security, privacy, archiving, and compliance challenges of social media, as well as the technical controls used to address them. He also specializes in the tools that monitor and analyze social data to improve oversight and mitigation tactics of myriad reputational, third-party, security, and operational risks. He is certainly aware of the reputational risk of staring at your cell phone when you’re supposed to say, “I do”, but maybe if you follow him (@nickhayes10), you might get lucky with a pic or two — and some good risk thoughts to boot.

Nick advises clients on a range of governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) topics, including corporate culture, training and awareness, and corporate social responsibility. He presents at leading industry and technology conferences, and he works with organizations of all sizes across all major industries.

 

Nick Hayes Image

 

Prior to his current role as an analyst, Nick spent four years supporting the Security & Risk management team and researching GRC, social media, and related organizational themes. Before starting at Forrester, Nick attended Wesleyan University where he studied International Politics and played on the Varsity Lacrosse team.

 

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What is one simple thing that a person can do to increase his or her personal security in less than 10 minutes?

I’ll give you three:

1) Review and update your privacy settings on all of your social media accounts. You can use a service like Secure.Me to see how private and secure your accounts really are.

2) Turn on two-factor authentication on all of your main personal email and social media accounts. It doesn’t take long, and it goes a long way towards safeguarding your personal information.

3) Use a product like LastPass or 1Password to generate unique, complex passwords for all of your usernames and passwords. Storing all of your passwords in one central place may sound like the exact opposite of what you want to do, but these services are secure, and are better than the alternative of using the same, easy-to-use passwords across all of your accounts.

 

What is your favorite security or risk technology?

Social risk monitoring solutions. The market is still emerging, but companies in the space are doing some really interesting things to help risk professionals track their external risk environment for security threats, potential data leaks, and even other operational and product issues.

 

Name an app which you could not live without.

The Starbucks mobile app. I like paying with my iPhone, and I definitely can’t live without coffee.

 

Tell us one (interesting) fact about yourself that most people do not know.

I drive a bright green Subaru Crosstrek. We call it "The Bean" because it looks like a lime green Jelly Belly.

 

What was your first job?

I was a bellman and valet at Chatham Bars Inn. Now I'm getting married there next month!