Ash Clements
Sr. Professional Services Consultant, SASE & AI Security
Seventeen years in enterprise security, nine of them at Palo Alto Networks, where I lead complex Prisma Access implementations for Fortune 500 organizations across critical infrastructure: gas & oil, telecommunications, and global financial services. I own the identity layer on those engagements, validate public exploits and their variants almost daily, and sit in customer breach and zero-day response. PCNSE certified, with deep expertise in Zero Trust architecture.
For the past year I have also red-teamed production language models in Gray Swan's frontier-lab-funded arena, where placements pay and the top finishers are recruited for private engagements. The defensive side of that work was graded too: AEGIS, a RAG pipeline that tokenizes personal data on ingest so a successful prompt injection walks away with tokens instead of personal data, placed second in Protegrity's 2026 AI Pipeline Security Challenge.
The conclusion I keep landing on is the one I reached about networks a decade ago. No single component can be its own last line of defense, because its judgment can always be talked around by someone patient enough. The controls that hold sit at the action, the data, and the boundary.
Experience
SASE & AI Security · Enterprise Architecture · Professional Services
- ›Lead complex Prisma Access (SASE) implementations for Fortune 500 organizations across oil & gas, telecom, and global financial services
- ›Architect Zero Trust network security for high-stakes enterprise environments: critical infrastructure, carrier-grade, global finance
- ›Ran proof-of-value work on Prisma AIRS, the AI runtime security platform, and built SCMReady, internal pre-cutover tooling for Panorama to Strata Cloud Manager migrations that two customers deployed after their own security teams approved it
- ›Red-team production language models in Gray Swan's frontier-lab-funded arena, and built AEGIS, a zero-exposure RAG pipeline that placed second in Protegrity's 2026 AI Pipeline Security Challenge
Prisma Access escalations · Lab reproduction · Knowledge base
- ›Owned the hardest Prisma Access escalations, reproduced them in the lab and handed engineering the repro; several became shipped bug fixes
- ›Wrote the internal KBs and customer-facing troubleshooting guides that came out of those escalations
- ›Promoted to Sr. Professional Services Consultant in 2021
Enterprise firewall policy · Network segmentation · PCI-DSS
- ›Migrated enterprise data center firewalls from legacy Cisco ASA to Palo Alto NGFW with automated rule conversion and validation
- ›Operated in a highly regulated PCI-DSS environment with direct exposure to financial-grade security standards
- ›Ran the HA clusters under continuous compliance in production and non-production
Telecom infrastructure · Channel partner relationships · Business development
- ›Channel partner relationships and business development for a regional telecom provider
- ›Leveraged deep network engineering background to bridge technical and commercial conversations
MSP · Enterprise network architecture · Security hardening · VPN architecture
- ›Senior network security engineering at a dedicated MSP serving enterprise clients nationwide
- ›Enterprise network architecture, security hardening, firewall design, and VPN architecture
- ›Deepened the enterprise consulting skillset that feeds directly into current PAN work
Federal network security · Government infrastructure · Data center operations
- ›Federal contractor given a dedicated office, rare for a contractor at the agency
- ›Spent the majority of time in the data center; deep hands-on federal infrastructure work
- ›Led unplanned DC recovery after a visitor hit the emergency power shutoff; had the data center back online in under 30 minutes
ISP / CLEC operations · Carrier networking · Network engineering
- ›Carrier-grade networking at a regional CLEC, where enterprise networking fundamentals got built
- ›Earned CCNA certification during this role
Core Competencies
Security Tooling
Production tools built at the intersection of AI security, cloud, and enterprise network security.
Multi-agent LLM security framework. Cross-service attack detection and runtime monitoring, built to pressure-test the runtime threat models AI security platforms have to defend against.
Second place, Protegrity 2026 AI Pipeline Security Challenge. Personal data is tokenized on ingest and stays tokenized through embedding, the vector store and inference, so a successful prompt injection walks away with tokens instead of personal data. Plaintext re-identified 100 percent of records on real embeddings; AEGIS re-identified none.
Automated scanner testing AI endpoints against the full OWASP LLM Top 10. Semantic detection catches paraphrased attacks that bypass pattern matching. 35+ payloads, production-ready.
Multi-cloud misconfiguration scanner mapping findings to CIS Benchmarks with executive PDF reporting. Covers AWS, Azure, and GCP in a single read-only scan.
The 2026 conference circuit
Worked the AI security track across Black Hat, DEF CON, and the AI Risk Summit in August 2026, self-funded. If you are building or breaking AI systems and we crossed paths at any of these, the contact form below reaches me.
What I Care About
The work funds the mission. The mission is bigger than the work.
I grew up going to St. George's Camp because people at my church donated so kids like me could go. Now that I do well, I pay it forward, funding spots for underprivileged kids to have the same experience I did.
Shrine Mont / St. George's Camp ↗One of the largest food banks in the United States. I give time and money here because food insecurity is a solvable problem and no one in Phoenix should go hungry.
St. Mary's Food Bank ↗I spend a lot of time in dark corners of the internet. If you see something (child exploitation, animal cruelty), say something. All of these resources accept anonymous reports. You don't have to give your name. You just have to make the call.
Report online child sexual exploitation, anonymous submissions accepted
Report child exploitation and abuse to federal law enforcement
24/7 anonymous crisis intervention and reporting, call or text
International anonymous reporting: CSAM, 50+ countries
How and where to report animal abuse, anonymous tips accepted
Report animal cruelty anonymously, national resources and local referrals
Report animal cruelty in Arizona, anonymous tips accepted
Report animal cruelty anonymously, no name required, potential reward
Contact
Available for consulting engagements, speaking opportunities, and technical advisory roles in enterprise security and AI security architecture.