Security

Deidre Marais, Western Cape government’s CISO

Deidre Marais is the Western Cape government’s CISO, a position, according to LinkedIn, she’s held since 2010. She won the ITWeb Brainstorm Public Sector CISO of the Year award in June. Speaking via Teams, she said she started her career in IT as a COBOL programmer and then became a network analyst at Transnet.

As CISO, she's responsible for cybersecurity of the 14 departments in the Western Cape, including, among others, agriculture, education, environmental affairs, social development, health, and mobility, some of which are custodians of citizen data. And while it has a centralised IT hub, it’s a challenge to manage these disparate entities in a unified way. The Western Cape government allocates around R70mn annually to cybersecurity. Marais says the Centre for E-Innovation, as the hub is known, is responsible for IT, cybersecurity and governance. It’s also responsible for procuring cyber toolsets, and enterprise- wide licences. It uses Microsoft E5 for endpoint security, which also manages the identities of provincial staff members.