Boris Voltchenko
CISO & VP IT Infrastructure
Reynolds Consumer Products
Boris Voltchenko is a global enterprise technology leader with broad industry experience including manufacturing, CPG, telecom, life sciences and IT services sectors. He is successful in setting strategy for resilient digital enterprise. Boris is currently the CISO & VP IT Infrastructure at Reynolds Consumer Products.
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Give us a brief overview of the path that led to your current role.
I grew through the ranks, which enabled me to experience how technology can change business processes at different levels of organization in different industries. I spent time on the IT services provider side as well as on the client side. Today, I take pride in being able to guide top business leaders through proper technology and risk decisions. What truly drives me is the feeling of the positive impact on the organization when a proper digital technology is implemented in a way that it is embraced and loved by its employees.
What is one of your guiding leadership principles?
Own the outcome! People often say “risk informs the business, technology enables the business” – while absolutely true, this does not absolve of the duty to drive the right decisions. Yes, with some amount of force, if required. Fight for what's right!
What is the greatest challenge CISOs face today, and how are you addressing it?
We digitize our enterprises to gain competitive advantages and efficiencies while making them more vulnerable to any kind of a tech glitch. This, in turn, requires us to make additional investments in protection measures that may be perceived as diluting some of the desired outcomes. Keeping focus on "what ifs" (or rather, "whens") and having resilience as a fundamental design principle is both challenging and rewarding in my job.
What is the key to success for someone just starting out as a CISO?
Andy Grove (former Intel CEO) wrote a great book Only Paranoid Survives. It is not about risk or cybersecurity, it is about the need to be prepared for the state of permanent change. This preparedness comes through the awareness of the forces that are impacting you and your company and the changes that these forces are undergoing. A good start would be developing a habit of including these ever changing forces into your thought process.
How do you measure success as a leader?
In my mind, it is your impact on the organization and on its people. If things are spinning today that were not spinning yesterday because of me – I am happy. There are, however, some days when I simply settle for things that continue spinning as they did yesterday.
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