David McLeod is Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) at Cox Enterprises, a leading communications, media and automotive services company. A privately held and diversified company, Cox Enterprises is the holding company for both Cox Communications and Cox Automotive, as well as several other businesses and divisions with many disparate networks and assets that need protection at all times.
As such, collaboration across the organization is a key priority. “One of our greatest strengths at Cox is that we have multiple divisions with multiple CISOs who love to collaborate and challenge one another. It’s critical to have trust and healthy debates about how to make Cox brands stronger. Garnering support to improve our enterprise security policy when it comes to awareness and training has been a big enabler to building our enterprise-wide security policy awareness, training, incident management and other threat protections.” This collaboration brings out the best in every CISO, McLeod says. “Behind all initiatives are cross-divisional security teams. We learn from each other, and together, we advocate for initiatives with formal processes; therefore, we have a lot of muscle across the company.”