One leader below spent eight years as an Air Force security police fire team leader before writing his first line of enterprise code. Another engineered voice and data networks and ran IT for a credit union before security became his full-time job. Albany’s cybersecurity community is built around health insurers, credit unions, and state agencies clustered within a few miles of each other, and its leaders tend to arrive from operations, engineering, and the military rather than from security tracks that did not exist when they started.
Carl Harrison – VP IT Operations & CISO, Empire State Development
Carl Harrison served eight years in the United States Air Force as a security police fire team leader before starting a technology career. He joined Empire State Development in January 2000 as a senior application developer and has been there nearly 27 years, working through manager of application development, director of application development and business continuity, and assistant vice president of information technology. He has carried an information security officer or CISO title alongside those roles since 2010. Harrison became Vice President of IT Operations and CISO in April 2024. He has also run Toftwood Consulting as principal since 1999.
John Rich – Sr Director, Cyber Security and Cyber GRC, MVP Health Care
John Rich built his career across three Capital District institutions. He started as a data and voice engineer at Carousel Industries in Albany, then spent more than five years as IT manager at First New York Federal Credit Union. He joined CDPHP in 2012 as a systems engineer and rose to manager of operations engineering and then IT operations and automation services. Rich moved to Albany Medical Center in 2016 as Manager of Information Systems for IT Security, then to MVP Health Care in December 2019. He became Director of Cyber Ops and Cyber GRC in 2023 and Senior Director of Cyber Security and Cyber GRC in April 2024, working from MVP’s Schenectady headquarters. He holds a CISSP.
Matthew Wendel – VP, Information Security Operations, Broadview Federal Credit Union
Matthew Wendel spent 16 years at MVP Health Care, arriving in 2003 as an information security administrator and working through IT security manager, associate director of IT controls and planning, director of IT controls and assurance, and senior leader for security and continuity services. He left in 2019 for SEFCU, where he directed information security operations and was promoted to vice president months before the credit union’s merger into Broadview Federal Credit Union. Wendel has held the VP of Information Security Operations title at Broadview since August 2022. His career began in consulting, with security roles at Winstar Communications and Icons, Inc. starting in 2000.
Built From Networks, Controls, and the Air Force
None of these leaders took a straight path into security. Harrison came from the Air Force’s security police and spent his first decade at Empire State Development writing applications. Rich engineered voice and data networks, then ran IT for a credit union, before security became the whole job. Wendel started in consulting and spent 16 years at one health insurer moving between controls, assurance, and continuity work. What they share is depth in the institutions the Capital District actually runs on: a health plan, a credit union, and the state’s economic development agency. In a metro this size, that tends to mean the same handful of people have been solving the region’s security problems for a very long time.
Discover more CISOs securing their organizations:
- Providence’s Cybersecurity Leaders to Watch
- Built to Last: Winnipeg’s Cybersecurity Leaders to Watch
- Half a Million Neighbours: Wellington’s Cybersecurity Leaders to Watch
- At the Edge of the Map: Auckland’s Cybersecurity Leaders to Watch
- The Yarra’s Quiet Defenders: Melbourne’s Cybersecurity Leaders to Watch
John Kevin Hao is a news and feature writer covering cybersecurity, technology, and business targeted for professional audiences.