Telecommunications runs on trust, resilience, and always-on infrastructure, which is exactly why Women’s Month is a fitting time to spotlight the leaders helping protect the sector behind the scenes. The women in this feature bring experience across global telecom operators, national infrastructure, security strategy, compliance, product privacy, and threat operations. Together, they show how cybersecurity leadership in telecommunications now stretches far beyond network defense into governance, privacy, resilience, and long-term digital trust.
Emma Smith — Global Cybersecurity Director & Cyber Security, Data & Analytics, IT Architecture & Technology Strategy Director, Vodafone
Emma Smith has built a long and influential cybersecurity leadership career at Vodafone, where she now holds a broad remit spanning cyber security, data and analytics, IT architecture, and technology strategy. Her decade at one of the world’s largest telecom groups is backed by earlier senior security and resilience leadership at NatWest and RBS, including time as chief information security officer. She also brings wider industry influence through roles with the UK Cabinet Office, the European Round Table for Industry, and major advisory boards, reflecting both executive depth and policy-level relevance.
Noopur Davis — Executive Vice President, Chief Information Security and Product Privacy Officer, Comcast
Noopur Davis serves as Global CISO, Chief Product Privacy Officer, and Corporate EVP at Comcast, where she oversees the full range of cybersecurity and product privacy functions across services delivered to residential and business customers of Comcast and Sky. Her scope includes product security, privacy engineering, data protection, incident response, threat intelligence, identity management, and fraud, placing her at the center of security for one of the most important communications and media ecosystems in the world. Her background also includes leadership at Intel and Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute, giving her profile a rare mix of enterprise scale, technical credibility, and product security depth.
Narelle Devine — Global Chief Information Security Officer, Telstra
Narelle Devine is Global Chief Information Security Officer at Telstra, where she helps protect one of Australia’s most critical telecommunications and infrastructure environments. Before Telstra, she served as CISO at Services Australia, overseeing cyber security for a major government agency responsible for essential services and payments, and earlier spent more than two decades in the Royal Australian Navy. That combination of military, government, and corporate leadership gives her a particularly strong foundation in resilience, mission-critical operations, and security leadership at national scale.
Celine Henck — Head of Enterprise Information Security and Compliance, Proximus Luxembourg
Celine Henck leads enterprise information security and compliance at Proximus Luxembourg, where her career shows a steady progression through security, governance, risk, audit, and operations leadership. Her background includes roles at Telindus Luxembourg, Broadcasting Center Europe, and CLT-UFA, giving her more than two decades of experience tied to communications, media, and enterprise technology environments. Her trajectory stands out for its consistency, with a long record of growing responsibility in security and compliance across Luxembourg’s telecom and connected-services ecosystem.
Emily Rait — Executive Manager, Cyber Security, Detection & Threat Hunt Engineering, nbn Australia
Emily Rait is Executive Manager for Cyber Security, Detection and Threat Hunt Engineering at nbn Australia, where she now leads work tied to threat detection and cyber defense inside one of the country’s most important network environments. Her path into senior cyber leadership includes delivery, engineering, and network roles at nbn, along with earlier experience at IBM and in project leadership across other sectors. That progression gives her profile a practical, operator-oriented quality, rooted in execution, large-scale delivery, and the realities of securing critical communications infrastructure.
Securing the Networks Behind Modern Life
What ties these leaders together is not just title or seniority, but the importance of the systems they help protect. Telecommunications sits underneath commerce, government, media, and everyday communication, and these women represent the kind of leadership needed to keep that foundation resilient, secure, and trusted as the threat landscape keeps evolving.
Explore more profiles of the amazing women shaping cybersecurity across numerous industries in our Women’s Month collection.
John Kevin Hao is a news and feature writer covering cybersecurity, technology, and business targeted for professional audiences.