John Wilson
Vice President, Chief Information Officer & Chief Security Officer, The MITRE Corp.
In 2021, John Wilson and his team implemented several IT and security initiatives to adapt to opportunities and challenges during the pandemic and to continue delivering innovative solutions to help MITRE succeed in its mission to solve problems for a safer world.
Providing a secure and connected knowledge enterprise for the six federally funded research and development centers MITRE operates, as well as the company’s public-private partnerships, is top priority for Wilson and his team. For example, they led the effort to provide a cloud-based environment for the COVID-19 Healthcare Coalition, allowing MITRE and over 1,000 member organizations to securely share data and collaborate for a coordinated response to the pandemic.
With constant change in MITRE’s IT enterprise, cybersecurity is a strategic focus area and capability.
“Our work to instrument all elements of our infrastructure for a great employee experience drives many of our data-driven and threat-based capabilities,” Wilson said. “We made a strategic investment at MITRE to enhance insider threat detection and response and were recently recognized by the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency with the Award for Excellence in Counterintelligence, from a field of more than 10,000 eligible organizations.”
Why Watch
Wilson has made shifting MITRE’s enterprise to zero trust a strategic priority, with the company being 18 months into its implementation.
“While zero trust has significant security advantages, we also view this achievement as enabling new ways to collaborate and co-develop solutions securely with our partners and sponsors,” said MITRE President and CEO Jason Providakes. “By creating the security strategy and implementation plan for this core architectural principle of IT modernization, John and his team have the firsthand expertise needed to support our sponsors in achieving zero trust.”
Read the entire Top 15 CSOs to Watch in 2022 here.
