Outgoing CISO reflects on his time at the U

After serving three years as the University’s Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), Dan Bowden will be departing the U in September and moving to Virginia Beach, VA to take on the role as vice president and CISO for Sentara Healthcare.

Three years isn’t much time, but Bowden has made the most of it – the biggest achievement being successfully getting the new information security policy drafted and approved.

“I think the reason it was successful is because our approach wasn’t based on the idea that we were going to change the culture of the organization,” said Bowden. “We wanted to build and represent something that would be adopted into the culture of the organization. And I feel like we accomplished that.”

Over the last three years, Bowden has also been able to grow the Information Security Office (ISO) into a well-rounded and high-functioning team.

“When I first started with the [ISO] team, I think we had five full-time employees,” he said. “And now, after the fiscal year 2017 budget cycle, we’ll have over 30 full-time staff.”

Thanks in part to the growth of the team, ISO will be transitioning to 24/7 security operations over the next 4-6 months – another huge success on the horizon.

“This is going to be an exceptionally well-matured and functioning security program, I feel, by any standard in the nation,” said Bowden.

“I’m not going to lie, it’s something I’m proud of; I can’t talk about it enough,” he added, smiling. “But at the same time, the team and the organization turned it into a program that’s bigger than me. And I’m proud of that, too. It’s not going to fall apart when I leave. The team knows what they’re doing, and they’re going to make good decisions.”

It’s safe to say Bowden has been an invaluable leader and it will be difficult to replace him – but the complexity and uniqueness of the role itself will make the task that much harder.

“There aren’t many CISO jobs in the country where the CISO is responsible for the healthcare organization, and the academic organization, and everything in between,” he said.

Bowden gave huge thanks to the U’s leadership for consistently supporting the efforts of the security team. And even though he’s moving on, the relationships he’s formed with the staff here aren’t going anywhere.

“My heart will still be thinking about and rooting for the success of the team here,” Bowden said. “I won’t be able to resist checking in to see how things are going.”

 

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