Telstra Purple appoints Luke Barker to lead security practice

Telstra Purple has added to its cybersecurity arm and appointed Luke Barker as group owner – Telstra Security.  

According to the enterprise brand, Barker will be responsible for Telstra Purple’s security sales strategy, working in close partnership with Telstra’s enterprise, government and business customers to help strengthen their defence against growing cyber threats.

He joins the Telstra team from BT, where he spent almost a decade in a variety of key security-focused roles, including leading BT Security across Asia Pacific and Japan, and Middle East and Africa, and previously the Australia and New Zealand region.

Before BT he held several security sales roles at Fortinet and IBM.

Oliver Camplin-Warner, head of Telstra Purple said after an extensive search, he was thrilled to welcome Barker into the Telstra Purple fold.

“With Luke at the helm, our new Security Practice is set to make an enormous difference to our business and government customers, bringing together the depth and breadth of our cyber experts, Telstra’s exceptional ecosystem of technology partnerships – and of course our secure networks and technology,” he said.

“We want to partner with Australian organisations to let them innovate with confidence, while we help protect their data, operations and reputation with integrated, multi-layered end-to-end security.”

On a LinkedIn post, Barker said, “I am absolutely pumped to get cracking with the team and to continue the brilliant work Telstra has been doing in supporting our clients with their security transformation initiatives.

“Some very exciting things in the pipeline that will be announced in due course as we continue our mission to be the most trusted Security partner for organisations across Australia.”

The news comes after Telstra announced a new technology alliance with Palo Alto Networks last week to deliver an enhanced suite of cyber security products and services enterprise customers.

Telstra Purple brings together Telstra Enterprise’s business technology services capabilities and a number of its recently acquired companies, to focus on outcome-based, transformative tech solutions.