John McDonald

John is currently the head of Governance, Risk & Compliance in the Americas, for the Financial Services Vertical at Amazon Web Services (AWS).

In this role, John is responsible for partnering with Financial Services Industry (FSI) customers, FSI agencies, and service partners on global regulatory, compliance, and security requirements in relation to cloud computing. He works closely with the C-suite to provide guidance and thought leadership to financial service firms’ CIOs, CISOs, IT security and risk management teams, to assist the movement of their sensitive workloads and regulated data into the AWS cloud environment.

One of John’s key focus areas is on the people and process transformation that must occur for companies to adopt cloud and other new and innovative technologies. Specifically he works with customers to develop training and education programs to train new employees, upskill current works, and develop a tech talent pipeline that provides a sustainable workforce across multiple technology, security & risk management, and application development protocols.

John also engages with regulatory agencies to understand the latest protocols required of Financial Services organizations who are already in, or considering migration to the cloud. John works with AWS services and solutions teams to ensure that the proper control frameworks are in place, so that customers can successfully move their regulated IT workloads to AWS, and demonstrate ongoing compliance.

Prior to joining AWS he was the Head of Cloud Program Governance at Capital One. In this role he led the transformation of the banks enterprise risk and controls framework to facilitate the adoption of cloud based services across the company.

He has over 25 years of IT and operations experience across multiple industry verticals. In previous roles John has held senior technology management, governance, and risk management positions at The Office of the Governor of Virginia, Genworth Financial, Qwest Communications and Microsoft.