Victoria’s environmental watchdog is on the hunt for a chief information security officer, as incumbent Vijay Narayan’s moves to an undisclosed new organisation.
Reporting to the Environment Protection Authority Victoria’s (EPA) chief technology officer Abhijit Gupta, the new CISO will lead the agency's overall IT risk management portfolio and advise its risk and audit committee technology working group, according to the posting.
This will include managing compliance frameworks like the Victorian Protective Data Security Standards and Essential Eight while the statutory authority adopts new technologies to ramp up its efforts to lay down the law on polluters.
EPA, which concluded 98 cases in court in the last financial year, invested $3.8 million of its IT expenditure on developing new capabilities as part of its IT roadmap and data management activities “to keep pace with new opportunities and threats,” according to its 2022-23 annual report.
“Technologies such as artificial intelligence, cloud computing, connected devices and robotics are rapidly reshaping our world,” it states.
“These new technologies can impact traditional markets and the way regulation is performed, bringing both risks and opportunities for the management of pollution and waste.”
The outgoing CISO told iTnews in August that protecting the security of EPA’s information was imperative to its investigations into waste and pollution, which unauthorised disclosure could compromise or legally prejudice.
Narayan said that the EPA had invested in education, cloud environment controls and data leakage prevention to help maintain the integrity of its surveillance and legal actions against suspected violators of environmental laws.
This included raising cyber awareness by running tabletop exercises tailored to different teams like IT, operations and executive leadership and adopting DTEX software for improved threat detection, he said.
EPA also uses Microsoft cloud security posture management to provide recommendations for improving cloud security; Narayan said 70-to-80 percent of EPA’s IT operations are currently cloud-based.
Prior to EPA, Narayan held security roles at other public sector bodies including the Australia Health Practitioner Regulation Agency and VicRoads.
