Verizon recognized for innovative approach to cybersecurity-first practices

NEW YORK – Verizon is the recipient of a CSO50 Award for using friendly competition to instill a cybersecurity-first mindset and practice into its technology initiatives through gamification – ensuring that privacy remains at the forefront of all Verizon practices.

Verizon designed ‘Cybersecurity Acceleration through Gamification’ to accelerate security defenses, improve developer security skills, and overall infuse a security-first mindset. Created by and implemented within the Verizon Business Group development team, this gamified approach allowed for the organization to find ways to scale security quickly, boost awareness, and drive efficiencies and integration.

“A strong Cybersecurity posture requires a multifaceted ecosystem of technology solutions, security domain expertise, and comprehensive, engrained processes. The pace by which IT organizations can react to new security initiatives, learn security skills, implement new tools, and address areas of risk is accelerated when the culture of the organization has a security-first mindset is a huge leap forward and a catalyst to sustain security-first habits.” shared Wael Faheem, SVP and CIO of Verizon Global Technology Solutions, Business.

Competitions were designed to target specific areas of cybersecurity risk. The Verizon Cybersecurity team gathered insights and feedback from fellow IT team members across the organization to focus on the biggest security challenges. The games were then designed for the application developers to learn and apply security skills, and use those skills to eliminate quantified, normalized security risk. Application teams which eliminated the most security risk within the game’s start date and end date won.

The CSO50 Awards recognize 50 organizations (and the people within them) for their security project or initiative that demonstrates outstanding business value and thought leadership. The awards are scored according to a uniform set of criteria by a panel of judges that includes security leaders, industry experts and academics.