Minnesota’s technology sector does not announce itself the way Silicon Valley does, but it has quietly built a substantial base of software companies, managed service providers, data platforms, and IT services firms that collectively represent a significant share of the state’s economy. The CISOs in this feature are securing that ecosystem, across SaaS platforms, cloud infrastructure, endpoint protection, and the managed services organizations that small and mid-size businesses across the region depend on. Their backgrounds span Target, Wells Fargo, Datacard, and the US Navy, and their current work reflects how varied the IT security mandate looks when the client base is as broad as Minnesota’s technology sector.
Theodore Peterson — Chief Information Security Officer, Datasite
Theodore Peterson has spent nearly seven years at Datasite, progressing from director of information security through VP before stepping into the CISO role in January 2024. His compliance depth is notably broad, spanning ISO 27001, 27017, 27018, 27701, 42001, and SOC 2, reflecting the demands of a due diligence and deal management platform where data confidentiality is the core product promise. Before Datasite, he spent nearly four years at SPS Commerce, serving as interim security director and chair of the executive security steering committee while leading the GRC program and ISO 27001 ISMS. Earlier, he spent four years as a senior process analyst at Target, where he developed the company’s cyber incident response process, reducing response times from inconsistent hours to under three hours within a ten-week timeframe, and designed operational processes for firewall governance, threat and vulnerability management, and data loss prevention. He serves on the MinnesotaCISO advisory board as membership chair.
Chuck Walters — Chief Information Security Officer, RevSpring
Chuck Walters has led security at RevSpring since June 2021, overseeing global security strategy for a healthcare and financial engagement solutions provider serving a workforce of more than 1,000 employees. His background includes seventeen years at Datacard managing government technology programs for access control, border crossing, and biometrics, a domain that sits at the intersection of physical security, identity management, and federal compliance in ways that most enterprise security backgrounds do not. That foundation, combined with later roles in network security engineering, infrastructure management, and IT security management at Apex Revenue Technologies before its acquisition by RevSpring, gives him a career that moves from hardware-level security for government identity programs through managed services into enterprise software security leadership. He holds a CISM certification and describes his approach as transforming security from a cost center into a business enabler.
Todd Thorsen — Chief Information Security Officer, CrashPlan
Todd Thorsen spent eleven years at Target before moving into software company security leadership, covering third-party security and privacy assessments, vendor compliance, and guest data security across some of the most scrutiny-heavy periods in Target’s recent history. He then spent four years at Code42, building and leading the enterprise and federal information security, risk management, and compliance program across FedRAMP, SOC 2, NIST 800-53, NIST 800-171, ITAR, ISO 27001, CMMC, PCI-DSS, and HIPAA frameworks simultaneously, while also serving as the security representative on the product advisory board and supporting sales teams in customer-facing security conversations. He joined CrashPlan as CISO in July 2022. The combination of large retail security experience, federal compliance program ownership, and product security advisory work gives him a cross-functional security profile that is well suited to a data backup and recovery platform where enterprise trust is the entire value proposition.
Jeff Saucier — Chief Information Security Officer, Point North Networks
Jeff Saucier brings more than thirty years of IT experience to his CISO role at Point North Networks, where he has served since June 2024. His career spans 3M, where he spent nearly twelve years in server operations and enterprise IT support, through network consulting, IT operations management at The Dolan Company, and nearly eleven years at Westwood Professional Services progressing from infrastructure manager through director of IT services to VP of information technology. At The Dolan Company, he built and managed the corporate data center, implemented enterprise network standards, and served as chief security officer accountable for all IT security matters across the enterprise. That operational depth, accumulated across manufacturing, media, and professional services environments, informs how he approaches security at a managed IT services provider where the security posture has to hold up across a diverse client portfolio.
Todd Sorg — Chief Operations Officer and Chief Information Security Officer, Computer Integration Technologies
Todd Sorg’s career is one of the more textured in this feature. He spent nearly thirteen years as director of information technology at Fabcon, a precast concrete manufacturer in Savage, Minnesota, where he built enterprise infrastructure and security policies, implemented ERP systems, designed a remote workforce framework that saved $30,000 in monthly overhead and allowed the company to close three offices, and was hand-picked by the CEO to lead a cultural change initiative replacing a culture of fear with one of operational confidence. He then moved into charter school technology leadership in California before returning to Minnesota and joining Computer Integration Technologies in 2016, working through director of cybersecurity, chief of staff and CISO, and now COO and CISO. His combined operations and security mandate at CIT reflects a career that has consistently treated technology and security as inseparable from how organizations actually function, not as a layer applied on top.
Security Leadership Across Minnesota’s Quietly Consequential Tech Sector
Minnesota’s IT and technology companies do not always make national headlines, but the data they handle, the clients they serve, and the infrastructure they operate are consequential. Deal-making platforms, healthcare engagement systems, endpoint backup, and managed IT services all represent environments where a security failure has real downstream consequences for real organizations and real people. The leaders in this feature have built their programs with that accountability in mind, and their careers reflect the kind of sustained, operational commitment that Minnesota’s technology sector has come to depend on.
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