The best of the best: Inside this year’s CSO50 Awards

Providing safe and secure elections is a critical function of local governments – and has been part of a fraught national conversation. What could be more important to a democracy?

Taking a proactive approach to security, the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk developed the Elections Cybersecurity Operations Center to monitor its elections infrastructure and business networks and provide early threat detection that could jeopardize election operations. For the 2022 primary elections, the center collected nearly 670 million events from 20 unique data source types and produced 1,286 high-fidelity alarms over the 11-day voting period, amounting to 2 terabytes of data. The security team investigated and addressed all critical investigations within 24 hours.

The initiative is one of 50 winners of this year’s CSO50 Awards and will be recognized at the CSO50 Conference + Awards, held October 2-4 at the We-Ko-Pa Casino & Resort in Fort McDowell, Arizona. The event will also recognize this year’s inductees to the CSO Hall of Fame.

Other winners of the awards, which demonstrate outstanding business value and thought leadership, include Accenture, Allstate, Genpact, United Airlines, Wells Fargo, and Zoom Communications. Winning projects addressed issues such as identity and access management, threat mitigation and recovery, application security, and zero trust.

Recognizing these outstanding projects is one of the highlights of our year on Foundry’s U.S. events team. Successful security initiatives often go unnoticed because they prevent problems. Through the CSO50 Awards, we notice the effort and leadership it takes to plan and implement them.

The conference brings together not only the award winners but people who want to learn from them to bring the lessons back to their organizations.