In announcing Hoak’s promotion at the time, RegScale CEO Travis Howerton noted, “The CISO role is often seen as a lifetime achievement award in this field, and Dale has earned it. With decades of experience in the Department of Defense and private sector, he has brought deep expertise, a relentless drive, and a clear vision to our security program.”
In his years leading up to RegScale, Hoak “built security programs from scratch, fixed ones that were broken, operated in environments where downtime and data loss or failure had real consequences,” he says. “That experience gave me what I believe to be a strong operational background and mindset and healthy respect for practicality over theory. It’s how you do it, not how you think about it.”
RegScale agreed when it offered Hoak its first cybersecurity role. For Hoak, the mission was clear: “Build trust and scale without slowing the business down,” he says. “RegScale lives in some of the most highly regulated environments out there. Security has to be an enabler; it can’t be a blocker. The CISO’s role in every company is to help the organizations get to ‘yes,’ because organizations often can’t get out of their own way.”
