Thomas Henson and Erin K. Banks spoke with Mike Watson, the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) for the Commonwealth of Virginia. His agency ( Virginia Information Technology Agency ) has a two fold mission in Virginia, they do centralized technology providing infrastructure services for 67 lines of businesses including hospitals, museums, businesses, and public safety. They are also responsible for setting governance rules for how the Commonwealth is supposed to operate in a secure fashion. They also have a data centric approach. They look to create controls and monitor all transactions around the data that the agencies are using and sending place to place.

His job is to care mostly about the data. Computers are not worth anything, if they don’t have good data on them. They pay very close attention to the data that is out there and how to secure it. This is important because the Commonwealth is looking share information between agencies, while protecting the privacy of their citizens. They hired a Chief Data Officer to help with this and we talk about the projects that they are working on. We talk about the future of technology, combining security, privacy, with technology, and how they are dealing with it in the public sector

Music from this episode is by Andrew Belle.  Please go check him out...you'll thank us!

Link to shownotes - http://bit.ly/BDB_EP58