Career profile
Bill O’Hern
Senior Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer, Travelers
- Role as of 8 December 2023, the date of the latest source
- Not stated in the sources
As of December 2023, Bill O’Hern was the Senior Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer of Travelers, having been appointed after serving as chief security officer at AT&T.
Career path
O’Hern spent more than twenty years in security-related roles at AT&T, building a career that culminated in his position as the company’s chief security officer. An earlier SecurityWeek profile, published while he held that position, identified him as AT&T’s Executive Vice President and Global CSO. Before moving into security leadership, O’Hern worked outside the technology sector as general manager for the Midwest US region at Handex Environmental. He was later appointed senior vice president and CISO of insurance firm Travelers, moving directly from his long tenure at AT&T into the role. Reporting on the appointment noted that O’Hern brought more than two decades of security-related experience from AT&T into his new position at the insurer.
Public remarks
In 2020, while still at AT&T, O’Hern took part in SecurityWeek’s CISO Conversations series alongside Verizon CISO Chandra McMahon, in a discussion billed as examining security leadership within the communications sector. The series was framed by SecurityWeek as an effort to talk to CISOs from major organizations within critical industries about what the role requires and what makes a CISO successful. The accompanying discussion described how cybersecurity had moved from being a desk within the IT department to a distinct unit with its own leader, carrying titles such as head of security, chief security officer, or chief information security officer. It also set out how digitization, described as the Fourth Industrial Revolution, had made technology the foundation of business rather than merely a support function connecting data centers, cloud applications, supply chains, and remote customers. The piece further noted that attackers had grown more sophisticated and threats more severe, with security expected to ensure business continuity rather than simply protect data.
