Tammy L. Clark (Georgia State University)

Tammy Clark serves as the Chief Information Security Officer at Georgia State University, a sprawling urban campus serving over 40,000 students, staff and faculty in downtown Atlanta, Georgia. She joined Georgia State in 2000 with the initial charge to start from "ground zero" in creating an information security program.

Tammy frame-worked her strategic plans and practices around the guidance in ISO 27002, which advocates a risk based approach to integrating controls within business processes, and developing road-maps (people, process, and technology) that foster continuous improvements in data protection, security awareness, compliance and policy/process development. She successfully completed initiatives in 2007-2009 to build an ISO 27001/2 compliant Information Security Management System that incrementally incorporates University organizations and departments. The Information Security organization, Office of Disbursements, and Data Center Operations have been formally certified by an ISO 27001 accredited registrar.

Taking this approach has re-defined information security as a core element of the business of higher education. Technology plays an important role in the scheme of things, but working with people to help them understand how to protect the information they work with through integrating controls, best practices, and well defined procedures, results in the greatest rewards across the board.

Tammy is a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP), a certified Project Management Professional (PMP), a Holistic Information Security Practitioner (HISP), a Certified Information Security Manager (CISM), a Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA), a certified Information Security Management Systems Auditor (ISO 27001), a PCI certified ISA, Certified in Risk and Information Systems Control (CRISC), Information Technology infrastructure Library (ITIL) Foundations certified, and has dual Bachelor's degrees in MIS and Accounting from Cal State University, San Bernardino, California.