James Williams

James Williams is a CISSP-certified security leader whose career spans more than two decades of building and running the operations that keep large, high-value networks defended. It began in the U.S. Air Force, where he served nine years in cryptography, and it has stayed close to the operational core of security ever since: monitoring, incident response, and the teams that do both around the clock.

He has stood up Cyber Security Operations Centers from the ground up more than once. At Symantec he ran global managed-security operations across three 24/7 SOCs — in Virginia, Sydney, and Chennai — defending Fortune 500 clients. At the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office he managed a 24x7 operations center for a 15,000-user enterprise, and as a vice president of cyber security and business operations he carried a portfolio of federal contracts worth tens of millions of dollars.

As Cyber Security Director and Technical Lead on the $1.5 billion Technical Integration program for the 2020 Decennial Census, he designed and built a world-class cloud SOC and led the security teams that carried the count through a pandemic and record-breaking event volume — correlating more than 3.5 trillion events, monitoring over half a million endpoints, and cutting the vulnerability landscape by 91%. It was also where he and John Riley worked side by side, the partnership that would become part of District Tech Group.

Today he leads DTG’s cyber operations lane through JLW Tech — continuous monitoring, incident response, endpoint and server protection, and the security awareness training that keeps everyday users from becoming the way in. Clients get the same operational discipline he built for federal programs and the Fortune 500, scaled to fit them.