Sithembile Songo | Chief Information Security Officer
Eskom

Sithembile Songo has been crowned as the CISO of the year, Cyber leader of the year 2024, 50 Top of Mind Global Executives, one of the top 50 cyber professionals, one of the top 100 global women in cybersecurity, international speaker, one of the Top 100 influential women, mentor and is serving as a member of the board and advisory board member. She holds a Master of Science in Information Security from the University of London. She has spoken at major local, national and global IT and cyber security conferences. She has been specializing in information security for more than 20 years now and her experience is augmented by several leadership roles in both public and private sectors, including Financial, Telecom, Public Sector, Consulting firm, Energy sector and other State-owned entities.  Sithembile currently works as the Chief Information Security Officer, CISO, heading the information security pillar at the state-owned energy entity, which produce 95% of South Africa’s electricity. Her strategic role primarily focuses on protecting the national critical infrastructure from potential cyber-attacks, thus preventing a negative impact on the economy.  She also enables secure business operations, including secure generation, transmission, and distribution of electricity, which depend on operational technology (OT) that largely depends on secured computer networks and systems to produce electricity. She was recently nominated by her team and won two highly commended women of year awards at her workplace. She is passionate about cybersecurity and enabling organisations to achieve their business objectives in a secure manner to fulfil their mandates. Besides her extensive experience in other information/cyber security domains, she has also played a pivotal role in defining and implementing robust information security strategies to protect organisations against the increased attack surface, in support of the swift digital migration initiatives and hybrid mode of working, including artificial intelligence and machine learning.