CMS Chief Information Security Officer to exit, will take on full time role with startup

OrangeSlices has learned that the last day for Robert Wood, the current CISO for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and one of the most dynamic leaders to enter the Federal sector in many years, is April 12th.

Wood joined the agency in 2020 and this outspoken and engaged leader ushered in a new set of ideas and energy that had never been seen before, ranging from the development of smarter and more efficient approaches that aligned with CMS’s aggressive movement of systems and data to the cloud, to the development of BatCave, a continuous authorization and verification engine approach modeled after the Air Force’s Platform One effort.

Wood will be taking on a full-time role with Sidekick Security, a consultancy he founded and whose website touts a focus on doing just a few things exceptionally well:

• Supporting customers with Fractional CISO retainers
• Penetration testing
• Breach readiness assessments
• Managing your third-party risk and supply chain risk program

Cybersecurity without the fluff.

More will be shared here as it is made available.

In sharing the news Robert posted:

This has now become public news so this won’t shock anybody, but I have officially decided to move on from my role at Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Serving as the #ciso here was absolutely the greatest honor of my career and I hope that I did the role justice.

My last day will be 4/12 and so for the next month I’m focused on buttoning things up and transitioning as much strategic context as I can to our leadership team and Keith Busby.

When I was brought in, the directive I was given fell along 3 dimensions:

1. Help improve the culture within the security team and about security across the agency.

2. Set a bold new technical strategy that moves us forward as an agency and enables mission owners.

3. Bring deep technical expertise to see through all the smoke blowing that can sometimes occur and get to the ground truth.

I feel that I can declare success on these dimensions and I hope that the team will continue to push the boundaries once I’m gone. As far as what comes next, I’ll be sharing more about that once my service is officially wrapped up. Thank you to everyone who put their trust in me as a leader here, I’m truly grateful.

See his post here.

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