Aisha Gautreau | Upstream

Fireside chat: How a large Canadian telecommunications organization built an OSPO

2:15 PM - 2:35 PM EST

When this Canadian telecommunications’ corporate security team came up with directives and policies, they realized that many of these security directives were around open source—and there was no shared foundation in IT on how to follow them. There was no support, tooling, guidance around licensing. This was back in 2019, long before Log4Shell shook the world. This telecommunications company knew that they wanted to leverage the strategic advantages of open source to compete in the telecom market, so they decided to build a process around open source internally, and the OSPO was created. In this fireside chat, Tidelift VP of product Lauren Hanford sits down with Aisha Gautreau, who leads the OPSO at this large Canadian telecommunications company, to hear about the journey of this nascent OSPO and what advantages they have leveraged so far.

About Aisha Gautreau

Aisha Gautreau, is the leader of the Open Source Program Office at a large Telecommunications company in Canada. She is passionate about growing the OSPO in her organization through not only secure practices, but focusing on developer experience and enablement as well.

She has quite the career journey working in theatre first as a dancer, and then moved to stage management and producing. She was enjoying her success in “the biz”, when a great opportunity came her way to join a telecommunications company in their training and marketing team, putting her artistic talents to use. After a while, she was hooked on working in the corporate world and it presented her with many chances to bring her artistic spin to other roles. Holding positions in application development, identity access management, and vulnerability management. She obtained her CEH (Certified Ethical Hacker) and began her new role starting the OSPO in 2021.

She is an advocate for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging, and co-leads a number of teams in the organization raising awareness and ally-ship for collaboration and diversity. She is a member of Women in Communications and Technology (WCT) and is a certified SCRUM master. In her spare time she enjoys travelling with her family and giving her daughter the opportunities to learn through world experiences, and of course still dabbling in the arts whenever she can.