Colorado Earns National Award for Information Security
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.
Media Contact:
Tauna Lockhart, Chief Communications Officer & PIO