Matthew Harding is a Partner Architect at World Wide Technology focused on the Palo Alto Networks Cortex portfolio. Widely regarded as one of the most certified Palo Alto experts in the world, he holds the CyberForce Elite designation—an honor reserved for the top one percent of global practitioners. With more than a decade of experience across Strata, Prisma Access, and the entire Cortex suite, Matthew helps organizations modernize and operationalize security operations at scale. Matthew launched his career supporting small businesses in a call-center environment while attending community college. He soon advanced to the help desk of a Nashville non-profit, where his rapid resolutions and steady leadership earned him a promotion to Systems Engineer. There, he became the first engineer in Nashville to migrate a legacy firewall to a Palo Alto PA-2050 running PAN-OS 3.0 and implemented early Zero Trust segmentation that enabled secure remote work long before it was standard practice. He later moved the organization to Palo Alto TRAPS and introduced MineMeld automation to streamline everyday security policy changes. Transitioning into the partner ecosystem, Matthew served as Senior Consultant and later Principal Consultant, leading complex security transformation projects across nonprofits, entertainment venues, state agencies, and large enterprise environments. His work included advanced integrations between Aruba ClearPass and Strata NGFW, automated endpoint isolation workflows, and designing scalable GlobalProtect and Prisma Access deployments. At WWT, Matthew has been instrumental in redefining how the ATC demonstrates the power of the Palo Alto Networks platform. He redesigned and modernized the ATC’s on-demand labs for Strata NGFW, Prisma Access, Cortex XDR, Cortex XSOAR, and Cortex XSIAM—creating immersive environments that showcase unified detection, response, automation, and network security. Today, Matthew serves as a leading Cortex strategist within WWT. He advises Fortune 500 organizations on SOC modernization, develops repeatable architectures for cross-portfolio integration, and helps customers realize the full value of the Palo Alto Networks ecosystem.