Oklahoma’s cybersecurity leadership community spans banking, energy, defense contracting, healthcare technology, higher education, and state government, and the leaders in this feature reflect that range. Several built their careers inside Oklahoma organizations before taking their expertise to national and global stages. Others arrived from outside and brought enterprise-scale experience to institutions the state depends on. What connects them is a grounded, operationally focused approach to security leadership that reflects the industries and institutions that define the Sooner State.
Patrick Benoit — Executive Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer, Vast Bank
Patrick Benoit joined Vast Bank as EVP and CISO in October 2025, bringing a background in financial services security leadership and risk advisory work to one of Tulsa’s notable digital banking institutions. In parallel, he runs Cyber Risk Insights, an Oklahoma-based risk advisory firm he founded in early 2024 serving businesses across industries on risk posture, regulatory compliance, and board-level oversight. He serves on the CIO and CISO advisory board at HMG Strategy, as an advisory board member at CISO XC, and as an advisory council member at InnoTech. His approach to security is framed around enabling business growth rather than constraining it, a philosophy that shapes how he advises both the bank’s executive leadership and the clients of his advisory practice.
Mark Gabel — Chief Information Officer and Chief Security Officer, Cherokee Federal
Mark Gabel brings more than thirty years of security leadership at Fortune 50, Fortune 100, and Global 100 organizations to his current CIO and CSO role at Cherokee Federal in Tulsa. His career includes four years as VP and CISO at Berry Global, a $24 billion Fortune 260 global manufacturing corporation with more than 70,000 employees across 456 facilities in 140 countries, where he oversaw cybersecurity, privacy, physical security, and incident response globally. Before Berry Global, he spent four years as a senior cybersecurity cloud solution architect at Microsoft and served as CISO at the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, the largest grid operator in the United States managing more than $40 billion in annual energy market transactions. Earlier, he was CISO and chief privacy officer at Mead Johnson Nutrition, a global pediatric nutrition company operating in more than 50 countries. That consecutive run through critical infrastructure, global manufacturing, cloud security, and pediatric healthcare gives him one of the more varied CISO profiles in the state.
Don Kleoppel — Chief Information Security Officer, Vantive
Based in Grove, Oklahoma, Don Kleoppel serves as CISO at Vantive in a remote capacity, leading security for a kidney care company that spun out of Baxter International, where he previously served as VP and CISO for Baxter’s Kidney Care Enterprise serving more than one million patients annually. Before Baxter, he was CISO at Greenway Health and spent six years as chief security officer at Cerner Corporation. The deepest tenure in his career, however, is twenty-six years at DST Systems in Kansas City, where he started as a mainframe COBOL programmer and worked his way through internet architecture management, director of information security, and ultimately CISO. That progression from programmer to security executive inside a single organization over more than two and a half decades reflects a rare combination of technical depth and institutional loyalty that shapes how he leads security programs today from Oklahoma.
Tim Crowder — Chief Information Security Officer, SIB Fixed Cost Reduction
Tim Crowder built the core of his security career in Tulsa, spending twelve years at SemGroup Corporation where he progressed from senior desktop analyst and system administrator through senior network administrator, senior information security analyst, information security supervisor, and ultimately led the company’s global information security department. He created SemGroup’s information security department from the ground up, reduced simulated phishing failure rates from 25 percent to 3.6 percent through a comprehensive awareness program, and formed a Security Advisory Committee of executive management to elevate information security to a cultural priority. He then served as CISO at Verinovum in Tulsa, where he reduced mean time to remediate vulnerabilities by 200 percent and led the company’s HITRUST and SOC 2 compliance programs. He now serves as CISO at SIB Fixed Cost Reduction in a remote capacity, carrying that Oklahoma-built security expertise into a national consulting and cost reduction firm.
Joni Richardson — Chief Information Security Officer, Continental Resources
Joni Richardson has spent more than twelve years at Continental Resources, Oklahoma’s largest oil producer, progressing from IT advisor and data security advisor through information security manager and senior information security manager before stepping into the CISO role in October 2024. Her background is notably forensics-heavy: she holds GIAC certifications in Windows forensics, advanced smartphone forensics, security leadership, and information security, and has served as the primary point of contact for legal holds, electronic discovery, and digital forensics investigations involving external counsel and law enforcement. That forensic depth, combined with a decade-plus of building Continental’s security program from within, gives her a profile shaped by direct operational experience inside one of Oklahoma’s most strategically significant energy companies.
Daniel Langley — Chief Information Security Officer, State of Oklahoma
Daniel Langley became the State of Oklahoma’s CISO in October 2025, bringing a background that spans nearly a decade of US Army Signal Corps service as a captain, four years as CISO at Washington’s Lottery, five months as deputy CISO at CoinFlip, and two years as network security architect and interim deputy CISO for security operations at Washington Technology Solutions. His military foundation in communications and network security, followed by successive security leadership roles in regulated and government environments, informs how he now approaches statewide cybersecurity governance for Oklahoma’s government agencies and technology infrastructure.
Jeffery Pearce — Chief Information Officer and Chief Information Security Officer, Redlands Community College
Jeffery Pearce arrived at the combined CIO and CISO role at Redlands Community College in El Reno with a background that moves across higher education, casino gaming, and hospitality in ways that most community college technology leaders cannot claim. He spent more than fourteen years at Santa Fe University of Art and Design, progressing from assistant director to director of information technology, then led technology operations through the rebranding of Camel Rock Casino to Tesuque Casino in New Mexico, including the ground-up technology implementation of a new 50,000 square foot, 800-plus slot machine facility built in nine months. He then returned to higher education at Redlands, where he has spent more than five years building out the institution’s IT and security capabilities. Holding CISO accountability at a community college after designing casino technology infrastructure from scratch is an unusual combination, and it reflects a leader who has operated across genuinely different high-stakes environments.
Terry Kennedy — Senior Director of Cybersecurity, Seagate Technology
Terry Kennedy has spent thirty years at Seagate Technology in Oklahoma City, building one of the longer single-company security tenures in the state. He progressed from Unix administration through data center operations, global business data center security, senior director of information security operations, senior director of global reliability and stability management, and stepped into the CISO role in November 2023. Along the way, he built Seagate’s first cybersecurity data center team, reorganized global security operations to reduce costs while advancing security posture, led the incident response capability to identify issues within zero to twelve hours and contain them within fifteen to thirty minutes of identification, and led the IT integration for Seagate’s acquisition of LSI, bringing in 700-plus employees, eight data centers, and 2,000-plus servers within a ninety-day window with no post-go-live issues. Three decades of continuous growth inside a single global technology company is a career defined by institutional commitment and sustained operational impact.
Benjamin Hiller — Chief Information Security Officer, Long Wave
Benjamin Hiller came to the CISO seat at Long Wave through a path shaped by military service and defense-sector security work. He served eight years as an IT specialist in the US Navy, including a tour as information systems watch officer aboard the USS San Antonio managing cybersecurity and network operations for the ship’s entire wide area network. After his military career, he served as information systems security officer at Strategic Communications Wing ONE at Tinker AFB, managing cybersecurity and information assurance for high-risk classified systems supporting nuclear command and control aircraft and mission systems. He then joined Long Wave as a cybersecurity engineer, progressed to IT services and cybersecurity manager, and stepped into the CISO role in February 2025. His current responsibilities include RMF ATO sustainment across multiple classified and unclassified environments, CMMC Level 2 implementation, NIST SP 800-171 and DFARS compliance, and cybersecurity leadership across a hybrid workforce of 200-plus users. He holds CISM, CASP+, Security+, and A+ certifications and maintains a Top Secret SCI clearance. The transition from shipboard network operations to classified defense system security to CISO of a government contracting firm is a straight line built on the same discipline throughout.
Oklahoma’s Security Leaders Are Built for the Long Term
The pattern that runs through this group is staying power. Several of these leaders have spent a decade or more inside the same organization, building programs that reflect deep knowledge of the institution rather than frameworks applied from the outside. Others have carried expertise developed in Oklahoma across state lines and into national roles. In both cases, the work reflects a security community shaped by the energy sector, defense contracting, and public institutions that define Oklahoma’s economy, and the leaders who have chosen to build their careers here.
Discover more cybersecurity leaders protecting various industries and government institutions across America:
