Governing Body Spotlight

Christopher Holden is the SVP, Chief Information Security Officer at Crum & Forster, a leading national property and casualty insurance company with a large, diversified specialty platform. He is also a Governing Body Member of the New York CISO community.

Learn more about the New York CISO community here.
 

Give us a brief overview of the path that led to your current role.

I earned my degree in Cybersecurity and have spent my entire career in that field. Over the years, I have worked in various internal and consulting roles, performing Digital Forensics & Incident Response, Penetration Testing, Risk Assessments, and Cyber Program development. I joined Crum & Forster as a Manager in 2017, quickly moving up to Director and then to CISO in 2020 before my recent promotion to Senior Vice President.
 

What is one of your guiding leadership principles?

I have a few, but my most important leadership principle is to focus on creating leaders at all levels of the organization. Beginning with my education, I have been very fortunate to be surrounded by amazing leaders, and the one thing that separates the great ones is their ability to build and develop future leaders.
 

With disruption being a key theme of the past few years, where do you see your role as a CISO going in the next 1-2 years?

The cybersecurity conversation has been rapidly escalating over the last several years, and it has been elevated to the most senior level within companies. Now, with recent and proposed regulations speeding that up, I expect the CISO role will become a truly business facing role rather than a technology support position that it is often seen as. Cyberattacks have real financial consequences, and CISOs need to be able to adequately communicate that to the technical dependencies in order to identify and manage cyber risk in a way that makes the most sense to each individual organization.
 

What advice would you give to someone just starting out in the role as a CISO?

You will never know everything, so build your network. The CISO position truly lives up to “Your network is your net worth.”  (Shout out Evanta!)
 

Tell us 3 fun facts about yourself.

1. I initially went to college only to play football. Fortunately, Utica College was one of the first schools to offer a Cybersecurity specific degree and it was in the same building as Criminal Justice (my initial major).
2. I was hired and relocated by my first job (internship) with no formal interview. It was the first resume the team had seen where the candidate had a Cybersecurity degree.
3. Risk reduction is mostly a professional endeavor for me, as I have many dangerous hobbies, including motocross in the summer and snowmobiling in the winter.
    

What is the value of participating in a professional community through Evanta?

The Evanta community affords me access to some of the industry’s leading experts. Furthermore, the Evanta summits and other events are always collaborative, insightful, and relevant. I leave every single event with a new idea, technology, or approach to a problem I am facing as a CISO.
 

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