Gunter Ollmann serves as Chief Security Officer (CSO) and helps drive the cross-pillar strategy for the Cloud and AI Security groups at Microsoft. He has over three decades of information security experience in an array of cyber security consulting and research roles. Before joining Microsoft, Gunter served as Chief Security Officer at Vectra AI driving new research and innovation into ML and AI-based threat detection of insider threats. Prior to Vectra AI, he served as CTO of Domain Services at NCC Group, where he drove the company's generic Top Level Domain (gTLD) program.

He was also CTO at security consulting firm IOActive, CTO and vice president of research at Damballa, Chief Security Strategist at IBM, and built and led well-known and respected security research groups around the world – such as X-Force. Gunter is a widely respected authority on security issues and technologies and has researched, written and published hundreds of technical papers and bylined articles.

Originally, Gunter had wanted to be an architect but he lost interest after designing retaining walls during a three-month internship. After that, he qualified as a meteorologist, but was lured to the dark side of forecasting Internet threats and cyber attacks. His ability to see dead people stoked an interest in history and first-millennium archaeology.