Additional Info

Job title of nominated professional (or team name)Chief Information Security Officer
Company (where nominated professional or team is working)Trellix
Websitehttps://trellix.com
Company size (employees)1,000 to 4,999
CountryUnited States
Headquarters RegionNorth America

Overview

Harold Rivas brings over 20 years of cybersecurity experience to Trellix. As CISO, he leads Trellix’s global security and compliance initiatives, enabling the company to best protect against threats, manage compliance needs and third-party risks, and implement industry-wide best practices. Harold is focused not only on Trellix’s security but also on the security of all its customers. He is also passionate and highly focused on the role of a CISO in an organization and how that role is constantly changing and evolving.

Harold was instrumental in launching Trellix’s Mind of the CISO initiative in 2023, creating a community for sharing wisdom, fostering discussions, and addressing the issues CISOs encounter in their roles. The Mind of the CISO initiative includes an inaugural Trellix CISO Council that launched with nine CISO members across various industries, with the goal of working alongside Harold to highlight shared challenges and provide viable solutions for the broader communities to adopt.

Harold’s influential transformational leadership style combines being an evidence-based, results-driven leader who can deliver impressive margins while creating high standards of excellence in his department and positive change management across the organization. He has a unique ability to garner high employee adoption rates for his programs. Harold has accomplished his mission to redefine cybersecurity and power resilience in companies by influencing and empowering the transformation of organizational security landscapes from reactive to proactive.

Harold is active in the cybersecurity community, serving on Evanta’s Dallas CISO Governing Body and providing mentorship and consultation to The Hispanic Alliance for Career Enhancement (HACE), a national non-profit organization dedicated to advancing Latino professionals. He stays at the forefront of his profession to prevent future attacks by anticipating changes in the risk landscape through situational awareness of internal and external factors impacting the business ecosystem and delivering actionable and sustainable solutions.

Accomplishments

Harold built the formal global security program at Trellix within nine months, leading 45+ team members across multiple geographic locations, focused on improving efficiencies and enhancing processes to match security trends and customer needs relating to Zero Trust, Cloud Security, and Data Protection. The team successfully expanded search capabilities to look for threats more efficiently, improved dashboard visibility to track threat trends more effectively, improved dashboard widget capabilities to track and hunt threat actors more effectively, and improved log parsing and cloud connectors to support more of the core Trellix product suite.


Harold developed a crisis management team and safely transitioned over 3000 employees to a new stable and secure communications platform. Harold has made significant changes throughout his layered defense model, improving network monitoring and log correlation capabilities and implementing critical compliance initiatives to increase the company’s overall security posture. At Trellix, he has successfully achieved his innovative architectural vision for revolutionizing technology, processes, and people while creating a market differentiator.


Harold leads Trellix’s Customer Zero Program, focused on helping and serving CISOs worldwide and across industries by testing new technology or service offerings first. Harold and his team are “Customer Zero” for the R&D teams at Trellix, who continuously look for requests and feedback from CISOs worldwide to build out roadmaps and requirements. With the "Customer Zero Program," Harold shares his goals and challenges with those developing the technology and service offerings. R&D builds version one, and Harold and his team are the first to test and provide feedback. Based on the feedback, reiterations are made, and then an even better, more comprehensive offering is built and available for other CISOs in the market to adopt. The number one focus of the program is to create valuable cybersecurity products, services, and research reports for the market.