Louisiana’s public-sector cybersecurity posture depends on leaders capable of operating at the intersection of policy, operations, and institutional resilience. Protecting critical systems in government, higher education, and emergency services requires more than technical fluency — it demands the ability to translate complex requirements into sustainable programmes, earn trust across agencies, and keep interconnected systems operational under pressure. The leaders in this feature represent that discipline across some of the state’s most consequential roles.
John Borne — Chief IT Security and Policy Officer, Louisiana State University
John Borne’s trajectory at LSU is worth examining closely, not just for its depth but for its range. His tenure has encompassed information security leadership, enterprise risk management, infrastructure strategy, and dual stints in executive IT roles, including periods as deputy CIO and interim CIO. In most institutions, those tracks are siloed. Borne has navigated across all of them inside a single major public research university, building a profile that is unusual in combining hands-on security operations with institution-wide governance and policy authority. For organisations evaluating what mature security leadership looks like in higher education, his career at LSU offers a meaningful reference point.
Dustin Glover — Cybersecurity Governance and Compliance Officer, Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness
Dustin Glover has worked at virtually every layer of Louisiana’s cybersecurity ecosystem: as a practitioner inside individual agencies, as the state’s chief cyber officer and CISO operating across all of them, and now in a governance and compliance capacity at GOHSEP, where the stakes include emergency preparedness and critical infrastructure protection. That vertical range matters. Leaders who have operated at both agency and statewide levels understand, in practical terms, why policies that look sensible from the top often falter on the ground and how to close that gap. His engagement with the Louisiana National Guard and State Police’s Cyber Crime Unit adds a dimension not common in traditional security leadership profiles: direct coordination with law enforcement and defence-adjacent partners.
Barry Faulk — Deputy Director of Information Security, Statewide Operations and Architecture, State of Louisiana
As a founding member of Louisiana’s centralised information security team, Barry Faulk occupies a genuinely rare position: more than two decades of continuity with the state’s security infrastructure, from its foundational policy development through to current oversight of engineering, network security, and identity management. That kind of institutional tenure tends to be undervalued in an industry that prizes the novel. In practice, long-term continuity in statewide operations translates directly into institutional memory that is difficult to replicate, including knowledge of why systems were designed the way they were, where past efforts fell short, and which operational constraints actually matter. His background across the Division of Administration, Department of Natural Resources, and Office of Group Benefits reinforces a profile built on durable operational credibility rather than cyclical reinvention.
Michael Crawford — Director of Information Security Compliance, Louisiana Office of Technology Services
Michael Crawford’s domain is one of the most technically demanding in public-sector security: translating overlapping federal and state compliance mandates, including NIST 800-53, CJIS, FTI, CMS, and SSA, into coherent, operationally sustainable security programmes for a centralised state technology organisation. That challenge is often underestimated by those who view compliance as a documentation exercise. In practice, it requires deep familiarity with both the letter and operational intent of multiple frameworks, the ability to navigate conflicting requirements, and the credibility to drive implementation across agencies with competing priorities. Crawford’s long public-sector career, spanning civil service, public safety, telecommunications, and broader state IT, gives him the institutional standing to do that work effectively.
Securing the institutions behind public trust
What distinguishes public-sector cybersecurity leadership from its private-sector counterpart is not the technical complexity, though that is often significant, but the accountability structure. These leaders are not ultimately answerable to a board or shareholders. Their stakeholders are residents, agencies, and the continuity of essential services that citizens rely on without thinking about them. In Louisiana, that accountability extends from university systems handling research and student data to statewide infrastructure supporting emergency preparedness and law enforcement. The leaders profiled here have built careers at that pressure point, and their work reflects what it takes to operate there.
Explore more profiles of the leaders shaping cybersecurity across numerous industries in our CISOs to Watch collection.