Senior IT and security consultant

Polle Vanhoof

Polle Vanhoof is a senior IT and cyber security engineer with experience in the financial and pharmaceutical sectors. He is especially proficient in securely managing cloud infrastructure, ensuring compliance and strict posture management at scale.

He is a skilled communicator who bridges the gap between executive stakeholders and technical teams, committed to best practices and to detailed documentation for reproducible results.

Before moving into cloud security he worked as a software engineer on safety-critical railway software, coordinated penetration tests at a critical market infrastructure, and ran vulnerability management and infrastructure as code for a large critical infrastructure.

certifications: 5; certifications
skills on record: 69; skills on record
years in ICT: 10; years in ICT

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Experience

UCB (through SecWise) · Brussels
May 2022 – Sep 2025
Senior Azure Security Engineer
UCB is a global biopharmaceutical company. As Azure Security Lead I was responsible for the security posture management and the secure architecture of its Azure cloud environment.
The focus was on developing and enforcing Azure Policy to ensure compliance with various frameworks, and on deploying Defender for Cloud for additional hardening and monitoring.
Task
Security posture management and secure architecture of the Azure environment.
Actions
Governance with management groups, Azure Policy and enterprise-scale exemption management
Compliance reviews against various frameworks and follow-up of exemptions with the application teams
Defender for Cloud for servers, App Service, databases, storage, AI services, Key Vault, Resource Manager and APIs
Resource logging and a scalable, tiered log analytics infrastructure with Azure Data Explorer and Sentinel
Secure architecture for networking (hub and spoke, firewalls, VPN gateways) and resource deployments
Identity and access with Entra ID, Azure RBAC, managed identities and least-privilege custom roles
Siemens Mobility · Brussels
Apr 2021 – May 2022
Senior DevSecOps / Security Engineer
Siemens Mobility is responsible for the security and safety of thousands of servers and workstations used to manage the day-to-day operations of the Belgian railroad network.
The focus was on migrating manually deployed legacy servers to infrastructure as code and on a regular patch cycle with vulnerability management.
Task
Secure and protect the servers and workstations of the national railway service.
Actions
Migrate systems and applications to a modern operating system
Develop automated systems for deploying these applications and managing server configurations
Aggregate data from these servers into an inventory management system
Create regular patch cycles that match the patch and release cycles of the operating systems
Handle newly discovered security vulnerabilities (vulnerability management and incident response)
Execute architecture reviews, threat models, security code reviews and penetration tests on new and existing software
Euroclear SA/NV · Brussels
Apr 2019 – Apr 2021
Security Engineer
Euroclear SA/NV is an established financial service provider specialized in securities trading. They hold over €31 trillion worth of assets and settle securities transactions worth over €837 trillion per year. It is considered a critical market infrastructure and is obligated by law to properly secure and protect all of its assets.
The majority of the work consisted of facilitating penetration tests on applications and infrastructure components, bridging the gap between application owners, executive stakeholders and pentesters.
Task
Manage, execute and review internal and external penetration tests.
Actions
Organize and document a new approach to managing ongoing penetration tests
Unify the way in which Euroclear provides and receives information to and from external vendors
Assist in setting up appropriate environments and accesses for planned penetration tests
Execute internal penetration tests
Evaluate discovered vulnerabilities and support the application teams in remediating them
Translate the impact of vulnerabilities on software components into impact on business objectives
Siemens Mobility · Brussels
Aug 2017 – Apr 2019
Software Engineer
Worked on EBP, the safety-critical railway software Infrabel uses to safely and securely manage the Belgian railroads.
Supported Infrabel in creating the architecture for the next release of the system and implemented parts of it. Performed in-depth analysis of the safety and security of the system and developed mitigations for the issues found.

These are some of the recent clients I have worked for. Feel free to contact me for my full portfolio.

Certificates

OSCP
Offensive Security Certified Professional.
This certificate shows the holder is well versed in penetration testing methodologies.
OSWE
Offensive Security Web Expert.
This certificate is the result of an extremely challenging 48-hour exam and attests to my skills in web application testing.
AZ-500
Microsoft Certified: Azure Security Engineer Associate.
Manages and monitors security for resources in Azure, multi-cloud and hybrid environments as part of an end-to-end infrastructure.
SC-200
Microsoft Security Operations Analyst Associate.
Proven skills in investigating, responding to and hunting for threats with Microsoft Sentinel and Microsoft Defender.
MS-500
Microsoft Security Administrator Associate.
Proven skills and experience with identity protection, information protection, threat protection, security management and data governance.