CISO Nicole Darden Ford has become accustomed to doing more with less since the COVID-19 pandemic suddenly upended her company’s workforce. “I got off a plane from India and saw all these people with masks at the airport in Washington, DC, and I wondered what was going on. I went straight to the office where my CEO and CIO explained our new reality: We were going into quarantine and we had less than a week to come up with a way for people to work remotely.”
This was at her previous company, a startup spinning out of a larger company and preparing for IPO while transitioning to the cloud. With “limited time and minimal resources,” she managed to pull it off. Now, as global vice president and CISO at the $7.8-billion industrial automation company Rockwell Automation, she’s prepared for the economic uncertainty being felt by businesses around the globe, some of which are Rockwell Automation clients.
