Zinet kemal

About Me

My journey into cybersecurity began with a career change. I originally earned a law degree in Ethiopia before immigrating to the United States and starting over professionally. I returned to school, earning degrees in computer programming and computer science, followed by a master’s degree in cybersecurity from Georgia Tech. Over the years, I have built experience across IT audit, information security, and cloud security, and today I work as a Senior Cloud Security Engineer, helping secure complex cloud environments. I am also a multi-award winning cybersecurity practitioner honored with 15+ awards.

Beyond my day-to-day technical work, I am passionate about cybersecurity education and making the field more accessible. I am a LinkedIn Learning instructor, adjunct cybersecurity instructor, TEDx speaker, and author of four books. Much of my advocacy focuses on helping children and families understand online safety and helping students and career changers see the many pathways available within cybersecurity.

More recently, my work and learning have expanded into AI security and governance. I am particularly interested in how organizations can securely adopt AI, manage emerging risks, and translate governance principles into practical security controls. Across my engineering, teaching, writing, and community work, my goal is to make cybersecurity understandable, actionable, and accessible while helping prepare the next generation of cybersecurity professionals.

Experience Highlights

• Senior Cloud Security Engineer
• Mayo Clinic June 2025 - Present
• Securing applications and data in multi-cloud environments.
• Hardening enterprise Azure environments by implementing security best practices, including identity, network, and policy controls.
• Enabling centralized logging and monitoring capability.
• Collaborating with Cloud Engineering to ensure identified gaps and security findings are remediated, reducing risk.
• Contributing to a cross-functional AI Security project team securing generative AI across systems and databases, implementing safeguards aligned with AI governance frameworks to ensure safe, compliant, and resilient operations.
• Head of Membership
• GRC Engineering Club
• Cloud Security Engineer
• Best Buy 08/2021 - June 2025
• Secured enterprise applications in AWS cloud.
• Acted as subject matter expert for Enterprise Risk & Compliance, advising on secure architecture.
• Supported scalable migration from data center to cloud.
• Built forensic automation incident response workflow.
• Adjunct Instructor
• Anoka-Ramsey College
• Introduction to Cybersecurity.
• Digital Literacy
• TEDx Speaker
• TED Conferences
• Delivered Hack-Proofing Childhood: Ensuring Our Children’s Online Safety at TEDx Minneapolis.
• Focused on empowering children with cybersecurity awareness and safe online practices.
• LinkedIn Learning Instructor
• Developed courses:
• Cybersecurity Careers: Build Your Brand in Cybersecurity
• Securely Migrating to AWS
• Senior Information Security Engineer
• Minnesota IT Services
• Ensured security was part of the development of projects and initiatives so that citizens’ data was protected and safe.
• Served as a technical security resource to technical teams on the research, implementation, and evaluation of security measures.
• Conducted vulnerability assessments and application scans to identify security flaws, ensure vulnerabilities were remediated, and risks documented.
• Administered a security scanning tool and created metrics and dashboards for leadership.
• Information Security Engineer
• Minnesota IT Services
• Developed and implemented security solutions to protect citizens’ data by ensuring appropriate security controls were incorporated into project and initiative designs and aligned with state and federal requirements.
• Integrated security checks into the development lifecycle to strengthen application security before production release.
• Information Security Auditor
• Hennepin County
• Conducted cybersecurity audits to validate that controls were in place, adequate, and effective based on the NIST Cybersecurity Framework and industry best practices.
• Collaborated with IT and other lines of business to identify areas of risk and provide recommendations to strengthen cybersecurity processes, policies, procedures, governance, and controls.

Get in Touch

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