In Fresno, cybersecurity leadership often sits inside broader technology roles. Only one of the six leaders below holds a standalone CISO title. The rest carry security alongside CIO, IT director, or infrastructure responsibilities, which is typical of a region where county and city government, community health systems, agricultural lenders, and tribal gaming anchor the economy. Their backgrounds are as practical as the region: biometric identification systems for law enforcement, dBase phone support in the 1980s, dairy technology engineering, and a decade designing haunted attractions on the side.
Eric Matthews – CISO, County of Fresno
Eric Matthews spent eight years at 3M supporting automated biometric identification systems for law enforcement and government agencies across the West Coast, rising from support engineer to a newly created solutions engineer role and managing major accounts including the City and County of San Francisco. He joined the County of Fresno in 2018 as an IT department manager and led its rapid shift to mobile operations during COVID-19, deploying about 7,000 devices and enabling an 8,000-person workforce to work remotely within three months. As Deputy CIO he directed a 90-person organization and a $120 million technology portfolio, implemented an ITIL service framework that cut resolution times by 20%, and served as acting CIO. Matthews became the county’s CISO in January 2025. He reports to the Chief Operating Officer and leads cybersecurity, governance, risk, incident response, and compliance across 19 departments and 12,000 endpoints, protecting environments that handle criminal justice data, federal tax information, and protected health information. He is a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt.
Eric Saff – SVP & CIO, Community Health System
Eric Saff started as a systems analyst supervisor at what is now Tenet Healthcare, writing COBOL and supporting hospitals across the country, including Stanford, Johns Hopkins, and Cook County. He directed information systems at Alexian Brothers Medical Center in San Jose, then spent nearly 18 years as SVP, CIO, and CISO of John Muir Health, a regional nonprofit health system with two acute-care hospitals and a behavioral health hospital. After serving as CTO of HealthSpot, a telemedicine kiosk company, and leading population health work at IT Optimizers, he joined Community Health System in Fresno in 2016 as Senior Vice President and CIO. He also carries CISO responsibilities there, covering risk identification, access management, hardening, and intrusion prevention, and established the system’s cybersecurity framework. His team supports 2,400 servers and 12,000 endpoints across 28 sites, and led the migration of the Epic database infrastructure. He holds a master’s degree in cyber and computer forensics and counterterrorism.
Eric Poole – Director, IT Security, United Health Centers of the San Joaquin Valley
Eric Poole started in phone support at Community Medical Centers in 1996, triaging computing needs for 6,000 employees. Over 13 years there he moved through workstation support and programming to information security analyst and senior information security analyst, building IDS and IPS policy, responding to incidents, and developing a workstation and server lockdown policy deployed across the organization. At Madera Community Hospital he worked as a senior security analyst, IT supervisor, and director of IT, training more than 1,000 staff on privacy and security each year. Poole became Director of Information Technology Security at United Health Centers of the San Joaquin Valley in January 2023. Outside his day job, he spent a decade designing sets, managing actors, and running the websites for Valley haunted attractions Hobb’s Grove and The Raven’s Gate, and owned an online Halloween prop shop. He holds a CISSP.
Daniel Daccarett – Director of IT, Fresno Madera Farm Credit
Daniel Daccarett began as a developer engineer at Dairy Technologies, spending nearly six years there. He went on to direct Survalarm Technologies and served as director of IT and cybersecurity at Central Valley IT Solutions, with work spanning fraud investigations, alarm systems, and IoT. He has served as Director of Information Technology at Fresno Madera Farm Credit since July 2016, leading IT strategy, operations, and security for the agricultural lender. He also worked as an IT product manager at Sebastian for four years. He holds a computer engineering degree from California State University, Fresno, and CISSP, CCSP, and PenTest+ certifications.
Bryon Horn – CIO, City of Fresno
Bryon Horn started in IT operations at AIS Market Research in 1986 and provided phone support for dBase and Framework at Ashton-Tate. After years as a systems engineer and network team lead around Fresno, he became MIS director at Kerman Telephone Company, where he built the IT department and helped bring DSL service to Kerman. He joined the City of Fresno in 2003 managing computer services, including security and infrastructure, and the city earned Government Computing’s award for security infrastructure during that period. He also led fiber work completing the Fresno, Clovis, and Fresno County loop. Horn became CIO and Director of Information Services in 2016, responsible for strategic direction, cybersecurity, networking, cloud services, GIS, and facility security. He has served on the board of the Municipal Information Systems Association of California and is a past president.
Kevin Johnson – Director of IT, Table Mountain Casino Resort
Kevin Johnson spent nearly ten years as a solutions specialist at C.A. Reding before joining Kotman Technology, a Fresno managed services provider. There he moved from network support specialist to help desk team lead to service manager, leading 11 support specialists. He joined Table Mountain Casino Resort in Friant in 2024 as IT services manager, became IT operations manager, and was named Director of Information Technology in June 2026. He leads strategy, operations, cybersecurity, infrastructure, applications, and support for the resort, and has brought Entrepreneurial Operating System principles into the department to improve accountability and service.
Security Built Into the Job
Fresno’s security leadership looks different from larger metros, and that is part of its strength. Matthews came to the county’s CISO role after running its infrastructure and steering it through the pandemic. Saff has combined CIO and CISO responsibilities at two health systems across more than two decades. Horn has protected the City of Fresno’s systems for over 20 years as part of a broader technology mandate. Poole and Daccarett built deep security skills inside community healthcare and agricultural finance, and Johnson grew from managed services into running technology for a resort. In a region where security often belongs to the people who also keep the lights on, these leaders know their systems from the ground up.
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John Kevin Hao is a news and feature writer covering cybersecurity, technology, and business targeted for professional audiences.