Biography
Allison Henry wrote her first computer program in BASIC to automate the painfully repetitive task of alphabetizing her weekly 4th grade spelling list. From an early age, she has been building and securing information technology solutions to solve problems and enable people to do what they do best.
After graduating from UC Berkeley with a Bachelor of Science in Integrative Biology in 1996, Allison started her Information Technology career as a system administrator at UC Santa Cruz.
Allison came to UC Berkeley in 2004 when she joined Communications and Network Services and pivoted to Information Security in 2006. In 2013 she started managing the Security Operations team, providing monitoring and incident management services for the complex and heterogeneous UC Berkeley campus computing environment. In that role she led initiatives to modernize security operations through custom built systems for automated alert processing and incident management. This allowed the Security Operations team to scale with the growth of the campus network. In 2018 Allison served as Associate CISO and provided oversight and direction for Information Security Assessments and Compliance activities, before assuming the role of Chief Information Security Officer in December of 2019.
In addition to information technology and security, Allison has a passion for the study of optimizing human performance through fitness and nutrition, and enjoys endurance athletics including trail running and triathlon.
The Role
The CISO provides leadership to campus-wide committees and workgroups of campus policy-makers, senior administrators, and lead technical staff from various departments in the active analysis, discussion and development of information security policy and strategic campus technology directions. The position also co-chairs the Information Risk Governance Committee; the primary governance body for information security and privacy at UC Berkeley
The CISO oversees the direction of critical operational Campus security functions and services, such as incident response, breach management, and network intrusion detection. The CISO reports directly to the Associate Vice Chancellor for IT and Chief Information Officer, Larry Conrad.
Committees
The CISO serves as a co-chair, along with the campus Privacy Officer, for the Information Risk Governance Committee (IRGC) to provide the campus framework for institutional governance of information risk.
