October 30, 2019

Contact: 

Emily Shimkus
651-485-1354

St. Paul, MN: Minnesota IT Services (MNIT) is pleased to announce that Security Operations Manager, John Israel, was presented with the Visionary Security Operations Leader Award at the Cyber Security Summit. On October 29, 2019, Israel received the award which recognizes those who have shown exemplary leadership to develop and foster strategies that protect critical systems and data.

“We are grateful for John’s expertise both at MNIT and in the broader cybersecurity community,” said Aaron Call, Chief Information Security Officer at MNIT. “With his leadership, Minnesota is better prepared to identify and defend against cyber-attacks, a critical task for securing state systems and information.”

In his role, John Israel also supervises the Security Operations Center (SOC), and coordinates responses to cyber incidents that occur across state systems. The SOC is responsible for evaluating, remediating, and investigating incidents such as compromised networks and user accounts, misconfigured systems, malware infections, and much more.

The Cyber Security Summit, held in Minnesota each year, brings industry, government, and academic cybersecurity interests together to improve the state of cybersecurity. In its ninth year, the Summit gathers more than 1,000 national and international leaders from critical infrastructure sectors.

Minnesota IT Services works to protect citizen’s personal information and keep state systems running. Minnesota students and families can visit the MNIT website to get tips and learn more about how the state aims to keep its systems secure.

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About Minnesota IT Services

Minnesota IT Services, led by the state’s Chief Information Officer, is the Information Technology agency for Minnesota’s executive branch, providing enterprise and local IT services to over 70 agencies, boards and commissions. MNIT employs more than 2,000 people across 90 physical locations. Together, we build, maintain, and secure the State’s IT infrastructure, applications, projects and services. MNIT sets IT strategy, direction, policies and standards for enterprise IT leadership and planning. We also serve Minnesotans by connecting all 87 counties, 300 cities, and 200 public higher education campuses across the state on the MNET network. Through public-private partnerships, our team proactively protects the state’s information systems and the private data of 5.5 million Minnesotans.