The IT Security Guru’s Most Inspiring Women in Cyber Awards aims to shed a light on the remarkable women in our industry. The following is a feature on just one of the many phenomenal women put forward for the 2021 awards. Presented in a Q&A format, the nominee’s answers are written in their own words with minor edits made by the editor for readability.
This year, the awards are sponsored by KPMG and Beazley.
Alison Dyer, Group CISO at Urenco
What does your job role entail?
I’m responsible for all aspects of cyber security and information governance across Urenco’s operations in 5 countries. Urenco provides Uranium enrichment services and nuclear fuel products for power generation. The technology it operates is valuable, protected technology under nuclear non-proliferation agreements and is highly regulated.
As CISO, I have built a new function and a small team delivering both business-as-usual security operations and also an extensive improvement programme that will raise the bar on Urenco’s InfoSec capabilities. I’ve worked closely with the four government regulators and also with the intelligence agencies to understand and respond to the increasing threat to our critical national infrastructure. We partner with business teams to develop the business, ensuring new initiatives are secure by design.
The CISO role at Urenco is a broad role. In addition to protecting the internet-facing business IT networks, there are extensive regulated OT plant environments with legacy technologies. Information Governance plays a large part in the role. Both in ensuring correct information handling when collaborating with classified and export-controlled information, and also delivering the compliance activities under GDPR.
