Mrs. Southard has over 25 years’ experience in Information Technology and Security. She is a strategic executive with success in physical and logical governance, risk management, acquisitions and incident response. She has presented significant reductions in costs, while building strong teams in tandem. Stephenie has championed several initiatives around cybersecurity, physical controls, compliance, business resiliency, system consolidation and secure datacenter site expansions/relocations.
Mrs. Southard has worked in the Government, Educational, Not-for-Profit and Financial sectors. Stephenie headed the initiative of building, managing and motivating several teams in IT, security, audit, enterprise risk management and remediation/compliance with regulators and auditing bodies. She also administered the operations of multiple 24/7 security control centers and staff. Mrs. Southard has extensive knowledge in SOC, GSMA,-SAS, PCI, ISO, NCUA and Homeland Security certifications and assessments.
Some highlights include putting processes in place to achieve a 98% overall SLA for security/IT related issues, identified cost savings of < $1M and led the company of successfully passing over 300 PCI, ISO and SOC audits.