DENVER, Colo.—The Colorado Governor’s Office of Information Technology (OIT) is pleased to announce that Colorado has been named an honoree of a 2015 CSO50 Award from IDG's CSO for its “Secure Colorado” strategic plan. This prestigious honor is bestowed upon a select group of organizations that have demonstrated that their security projects/initiatives have created outstanding business value and thought leadership for their companies.

Both the public and private sectors are faced with ever-increasing threats to their IT landscape that makes their information and technology assets vulnerable to attackers. State government is uniquely targeted because of the amount of sensitive and valuable data it collects. At OIT, our security team averts as many as 800,000 malicious events each day. As the increased volume and level of sophistication of security threats continues to grow, Colorado recognized a new approach was needed for protecting State of Colorado information and assets.

Secure Colorado is the state’s first cyber security strategic plan. It is a three-year initiative focused on making strategic decisions and investments to protect the data Coloradans have entrusted to state government. Secure Colorado outlines the strategic goals and initiatives of the Colorado Information Security Program to safeguard the State’s information assets and assure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the information vital to achieve the State of Colorado’s mission. It is focused on achieving quick and sustainable risk reduction at a reasonable cost while promoting an environment of technology innovation, adoption of open source and cloud based technology and the open sharing of data where appropriate. Secure Colorado can be found on OIT’s website here.

To date, “Secure Colorado” has helped our state to identify and classify critical information assets, measurably reduce the risk to those assets, implement a base security configuration across the environment, and reduce the impact of and contain incidents more quickly. Additionally, it has given us visibility into the performance of our security program and highlighted the specific areas where improvement is needed.

Colorado Information Security Officer Debbi Blyth says, “It is critical that we prioritize information security for our state. This strategic plan is an important foundation for the continued stewardship of our citizens’ and state’s important information.” Joan Goodchild, editor for CSO adds, “For the third year in a row, outstanding organizations demonstrating innovation, creativity and understanding of business value in security were chosen from a large pool of submissions. We congratulate this year's CSO50 winners and applaud them for setting the bar high for security's role in providing value and ROI in business."

The CSO50 Awards honor critical viewpoints of today’s leading Chief Security Officers and Chief Information Security Officers as well as security executives at the nation’s leading CSO thought leadership conference. The awards will be distributed in February 2015.

About the CSO50 Awards
Launched in 2013, the CSO50 Awards recognizes 50 organizations for security projects and initiatives that demonstrate outstanding business value and thought leadership. The CSO50 Awards are scored according to a uniform set of criteria by a panel of judges that includes security leaders, industry experts, and academics. Awards will be presented at the CSO50 Security Confab + Awards conference.

About CSO
CSO is the premier content and community resource for security decision-makers leading “business risk management” efforts within their organization. For more than a decade, CSO’s award-winning Web site (CSOonline.com), executive conferences, strategic marketing services and research have equipped security decision-makers to mitigate both IT and corporate/physical risk for their organizations and provided opportunities for security vendors looking to reach this audience. To assist CSOs in educating their organizations’ employees on corporate and personal security practices, CSO also produces the quarterly newsletter Security Smart. CSO is published by IDG Enterprise, a subsidiary of International Data Group (IDG), the world’s leading media, events and research company. Company information is available at www.idgenterprise.com.

Tauna Lockhart, Chief Communications Officer & PIO