Michael Redmond, Deputy CISO, City of Louisville, speaks with Christian Dreisbach, Business Development, Centric Consulting in a video interview about the City of Louisville, her role as a CISO, addressing security and governance challenges around AI, and working from a data point of view.
Speaking about the City of Louisville, Redmond shares how the city won an award for top innovation technology and is technologically advanced. Being technologically advanced creates challenges with cybersecurity, she adds.
When asked about setting up best practices, Redmond responds that the City of Louisville had an excellent setup in place when she came in. The office comes under the CIO who is well abreast with cybersecurity and aware of technology, she says.
Further, there is a day team that handles events, and Redmond notes that the City of Louisville has started a security operations center.
With a 24-hour operation, Redmond gets one week off every month, when she teaches certification courses around the world. From teaching cyber personnel in Fiji, to Saudi Arabia, to CISO courses in South Africa, she reflects on the past two years.
Delving further, Redmond mentions teaching environmental science, project management, business continuity, privacy management, asset management, and quality management. She mentions getting her hand on new materials every time she teaches, which helps her stay relevant. This also helps her to keep her team updated on the new standard changes, says Redmond.
Expanding further on her professional journey, Redmond affirms to taking three certifications, which includes a certified CISO course. The course is specifically designed for people in the CISO role for more than 5 years to take it to the next level in future.
When asked about AI challenges, Redmond states that the City of Louisville has put up a policy that says no to ChatGPT. Even if a department has it for some reason, it has to go to change control, she adds.
Adding on, Redmond reminds that only recently OpenAI agreed to not use information for training the model, however, it is a paid subscription. She shares an instance where confidential organizational data was fed to ChatGPT as the user used its free version.
Therefore, says Redmond, the city makes sure that the cybersecurity works in different areas. She ensures that there are disaster recovery plans for data centers while ensuring business continuity.
In conclusion, Redmond states that everything is done from the data point of view and the City of Louisville is actively involved with the Chief Data Officer. She mentions working collaboratively with various sectors on policies for data sharing and to come up with joint policies.
CDO Magazine appreciates Michael Redmond for sharing her insightful journey with our global community.