FUTR Showcase with Motorola Mobility CISO, Richard Rushing and Perdoceo CIO, Dave Czeszewski Panel
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Senior Vice President & Chief Information Officer, Perdoceo Education
Search every verified David Czeszewski interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote β each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. David Czeszewski, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Perdoceo Education, discussed his approach to cybersecurity and IT leadership in a September 2022 panel. He stated that he eliminated the dedicated information security team, making security a responsibility for all employees through performance objectives and bonuses. Czeszewski said that cyber insurance has become difficult to obtain at reasonable rates, as insurers require measures like multi-factor authentication. He noted that his board is "very advanced in cyber" and that he reports to them quarterly, adding that projects related to cybersecurity are typically approved. In earlier podcast appearances from September 2020, Czeszewski described his response to the COVID-19 pandemic, including adding 1,700 computers in four days and purchasing mobile hotspots to enable 100% work-from-home by March 21, 2020. He said that Amazon Workspaces was critical to this transition and that the company's culture, set by leadership, contributed to a smooth shift. Czeszewski also discussed his leadership philosophy, emphasizing the importance of balancing "challenge, compensation, and culture" to retain talent, and advised that executives should give direct answers rather than lengthy explanations. He described the CIO role as requiring technical, business, and people management skills, and said that during the pandemic, technology enabled the company to maintain operations and potentially save jobs.
“The number one priority is to keep the trains running like you know besides innovation besides projects you gotta keep everything going. Number two is to manage risk, compliance, cyber, operational, corporate. Number three, manage the money well. And I didn't put number one here but provide excellent student support fo...”
“Cyber insurance is a big deal just trying to get cyber insurance coverage at a reasonable rate seems to be a very difficult thing. The insurance companies figured out that they're taking on too much risk so they've hired the right people to do the right analysis to figure out the risk. They're not going to insure you u...”
“The best thing that I ever did was eliminating the information security team. I made information security everybody's job and put it into objectives and performance bonuses. Now everybody thinks about it and nobody blames information security for not doing their job because I'm blaming owners for not doing their job.”
“Security is everybody's job. There's no such thing as a security person. Everybody needs to have a security focus. To attract talent, you have to sell people on your mission. We're in education, graduating first-time learners and changing lives. People that never even knew what college was, they need a college degree....”
“Anytime I put a project towards cyber, it is approved. The best thing about being a publicly traded company is that the board is responsible personally, so if we get breached then they're personally responsible. Our board is very advanced in cyber compared to most boards, so I am very honest with them about our situati...”
“I report to the board every quarter on cyber and then to the entire board every two or three months. They want to know about it because quite frankly their asses are on the line.”
“We provide online education for about 45,000 students that are paying us money and very much like Netflix or other companies that provide a SaaS online content application, we provide excellent support when they need it.”
“We adopted quickly technologies like ServiceNow, Cohesity for backups, Abnormal Security, and Veronas for file security. We are about 50% cloud now but we moved to cloud when it made business sense, not just because it was a board strategy.”
“The biggest challenge in a CIO world is keep the lights on first, make sure your systems don't go down, then make sure your requests get handled, changes happen, projects are done, and then manage money and risk. If you don't manage to get the trains in on time, you're going to get fired.”
“When I go to the board and say this is a must-have, usually we get it. CFO and CEO approve before I even take it to the board. They're the gatekeepers and they trust me when I say it's a must-have or a nice-to-have. A nice-to-have doesn't get done.”
“Budgets are gonna get tight, having cash is gonna be important, and we don't know so many variables. It's a hard thing to tighten up and get creative, but that's what we're all coming upon now.”
“The way you treat your vendors will come back in a lot of ways. When there's a big problem and it hits the fan, are those vendors picking up the phone at 2:00 a.m.? You have to treat them fairly and with respect to get that help.”
“We got an email from a vendor that they were going to discontinue our service as of April 18th because of COVID and the load on their system, and they were taking us to a new platform with three times the cost. That two-week notice is not a good part, so guess what? We're doing something different.”
“The business world has changed; many companies had geographic dispersion with offices on East Coast, West Coast, north-south. Now, with work from home, productivity is good, some groups better at home than at work, so why not keep that going?”
“You have to standardize your equipment, your cloud, all your security around that, and be ready to go 100% again because it could come again.”
For those of you who missed it, we recently held an event showcasing a bunch of great young and innovative companies. We heldΒ ...
Hi everybody, welcome back to another FUTRtech video podcast. This is part 2 of our interview with Dave Czeszewski.
Hi everybody, welcome back to another FUTRtech video podcast. This is part 1 of our interview with Dave Czeszewski. Today weΒ ...
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