Michael Molinaro, Chief Information Security Officer, BioReference Laboratories, Inc.
As Mike Molinaro prepares to collect his second graduate degree – an MBA from Florida Institute of Technology – he jokes, saying “I guess I’m educated beyond my capacity to learn now.” That’s hardly the case, as Molinaro’s career has been all about learning and adapting to new industries, jobs and challenges.
At the age of 16, Molinaro earned the FCC First Class repair license for marine and aircraft radio equipment. He worked at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, calibrating and repairing helicopter radio equipment, even before graduating from high school.
One of Molinaro’s early jobs was at RTE/Powermate, where he worked in many roles from assembly, quality, testing and electronics technician to an assembly language programmer for Automated Test Equipment. “I did a bunch of jobs at Powermate – testing power systems, designs, programming EPROM’s and building power systems. The toughest job I did was building test systems and developing assembly language programs for automated testing systems. It required a creative mind to write the code necessary to do the job while keeping an economical eye on computer and processor resources.”
Molinaro then joined the United States Army, serving in the highly decorated and first organized US Army Signal unit constituted in Fort Monmouth, the 51st Signal Battalion, as a Radio Systems and Security Communications Repairer. He spent four years on active duty and another four years in the New Jersey National Guard. While on active duty, he was stationed in Germany and deployed to various locations, but he always made it a point to take classes from any university or military colleges that were available. Through the G.I. Bill, and persistence, he eventually obtained an associate’s and a bachelor’s degree in Electronic Engineering Technology from Thomas Edison State University.
After leaving active military duty, Molinaro took a job with Cellular One, which became part of AT&T Wireless and then MCI telecommunications. At Cellular One and MCI Telecommunications, he worked as a programmer and telephone switch engineer. These jobs broadened his learning and skills in a variety of areas, including large-scale global voice and data systems, computers, networking, telecommunication protocols, and global telephone switch operations.
The shift work at these phone companies eventually got old, so he moved into IT, working as a programmer and systems engineer at Movado. He made the leap to IT management as a Director of Information Technology and Information Security Officer at a healthcare company, holding that position for almost nine years. He was lured into e-commerce following a long tenure at the healthcare company and took a leadership position at a startup as VP of IT & Operations, where he was instrumental in assisting the new CEO in turning the company into a profitable business with the goal of selling the company as a successful technology company. Molinaro’s next move took him to an insurance company as an Information and Security Officer.
He made his way to Florida, and to Bright House Networks as the VP of Enterprise IT and Chief Information Security Officer of one of the largest cable companies in the country. Molinaro was instrumental in centralizing and retooling the IT Department as a service oriented organization while building, from the ground up, the Risk, Governance, Security and Compliance program, team and operations. A major highlight of that position was the defense of public national events. He spent three years at Bright House, until such time when the company was acquired by Charter Communications. Molinaro found his current role with BioReference Laboratories, Inc. where he is the Chief Information Security Officer. This job brought him back home to his native New Jersey.
He just finished his MBA program at the Florida Institute of Technology. This is the same school where he earned his first graduate degree, Master of Science in Information Technology & Cybersecurity.
Molinaro has always had an interest in music as well as technology. “I started college majoring in Jazz Performance, before switching to computer science and engineering programs. My change in academic pursuits made my father and mother quite happy. My father, being wise and resorting to an approach in negotiations known as being the benevolent despot, ultimately ‘convinced’ me that I could be a great drummer and engineer. After speaking with my father 20 years later, he let me in on his little secret. He said, ‘Son, by getting you to better understand your full potential we guaranteed that you won’t be living with your mother and me until you were 50!’ This effectively set me up to maintain a dual career I could carry my entire life, that of a talented musician and a creative engineer and leader.”
Molinaro has been and continues to be a drummer in bands for most of his life. “I’ve combined my love of music, science and technology by using computers, technology and electronics as a musician performing in bands and to produce music,” he says. “Art, music, math, science and technology are inextricably married to each other in a way that allows a person to amplify their creativity, individualism and commonality with all people, everywhere. This allows me to relate with people anywhere on the globe as my communications and relationship tool kit is greatly expanded to sound, color, numbers, physics and logic. Oh yes, it’s also something I really enjoy, and I play all sorts of music as often as possible.”
There is something that he has observed as he has moved from one industry vertical to another over the span of his career. “I have been in a variety of industries, including military, manufacturing, e-commerce, insurance, healthcare and telecommunications, both wireless and wired, as both employee and in consultant roles. Things that are always the same regardless of the vertical is risk management, security and IT service delivery, as all companies use technology to deliver faster and better services at lower costs. They all use software, and they all need to be able to secure and manage what they have. The operational and information technology components are ubiquitous across all industries. Everyone wants to say they are different but my argument is, not so much,” says Molinaro.
What makes the real difference, he says, is the desire to build truly high performance, risk and quality driven business and technology services, designing them in a risk managed approach in a secure environment, versus giving it lip service. According to Molinaro, some companies just don’t want to make the investment in risk management and cybersecurity. “It’s my job as a CISO and IT executive to put a value on the protection of assets which may very often be overlooked, and to improve and protect critical infrastructure, secure the business, and ensure stock holder or customer investments. I focus on getting the executives to understand that a risk and security managed value proposition can be marketed and monetized to the benefit of the bottom line, and that unstated expectations of our customers and business stakeholders must be real considerations in a company’s mission in the age of the Internet of Things.”
This is a challenge that gives him great satisfaction. “Over the years, I’ve created challenging jobs and changed companies’ perceptions of what it means to deliver services for the business, yet do it well defended. I’ve always wanted to bring something to the table that makes the company better off than before I started,” says Molinaro. It’s a philosophy that shows there’s always room for more learning and more doing.