Sithembile Songo holds a Master of Science in Information Security from the University of London. She has been specializing in information security for more than 20 years now and her experience is augmented by several leadership roles in both public and private sectors, including Financial, Telecom, Public Sector, Consulting firm, Energy sector, and other State-owned entities.
Sithembile currently works as the Chief Information Security Officer, CISO, heading the information security pillar at the state-owned energy entity, which produce 95% of South Africa’s electricity. Her strategic role primarily focuses on protecting the national critical infrastructure from potential cyber-attacks, thus preventing a negative impact on the economy. She also enables secure business operations, including secure generation, transmission, and distribution of electricity, which depend on operational technology (OT) that largely depends on secured computer networks and systems to produce electricity. She was recently nominated by her team and won two highly commended women of the year awards at her workplace.
She has spoken at major local, national, and global conferences, like GITEX AFRICA, GITEX GLOBAL, GISEC Global, Global Conference on Cyber Capacity Building (GC3B), World CyberCon META, Cyber Security for Energy and Utilities, ENLIT Africa, Africa Tech, Digitizing Africa, Solar and Storage, ITWEB, CISO AFRICA, etc.
