Renee Forney is a C-suite Executive, strategist and trusted advisor to and Fortune 500 business leaders and senior government officials known for turning critical inflection points into opportunities. As public and private sector environments fluctuate, she appreciates the range of enterprise risk management issues requiring board level attention. She prioritizes a robust approach to digital transformation, multi-cloud strategy, AI, Cybersecurity, and strategic IT investment to achieve corporate goals. Mrs. Forney’s ability to address complexity, identify core issues and determine the actions able to yield the most value
within the elements of time, space, money, and reputation are hallmarks of her career.

Currently, Mrs. Forney is Meta’s Deputy Chief Information Security Officer for Governance, Risk & Compliance where she is building a FinTech integrated security program that aligns to current regulatory compliance while helping to shape the future of a digitized financial market. Previously, she served as Microsoft’s Senior Director of Cognitive AI Services leading a product AI Engineering team’s Global Medical Certification efforts. While also at Microsoft she led Azure’s Hardware Systems & Infrastructure Security driving the progression of the global security risk and ESG baseline for its Data Centers. She established
a global governance and risk program to protect the Microsoft Cloud Infrastructure and global supply chain upon which the Microsoft Intelligent Cloud business operates. Earlier, Ms. Forney’s ability to engage a wide range of technical and business stakeholders proved essential to her success as Capital One’s Senior Director of Cyber Assurance leading Governance and Risk, Supply Chain Risk Management, Customer Authentication, Payment Card Industry Standard (PCI), and Mergers and Acquisition Cyber Due Diligence. Her comprehensive crisis management response to a 3rd party supplier cyber incident was rigorous. She drove implementation of critical risk mitigation and resolution actions to protect Capital One’s infrastructure. Provided critical information to the Board informing real time risk posture and investment priorities.

She had a distinguished federal service career; Mrs. Forney was the DOE’s Deputy CIO for Cyber Security and Enterprise Operations and served as Executive Director for the Cyber Skills Management Support Initiative at the DHS, during which she held a high-level security clearance. At DHS, she oversaw budgets of up to $645M and reduced redundancy in human capital system expenditures by gaining economies of scale of existing contracts across the enterprise. As well, she was the cyber workforce subject matter expert to senior leadership at the Office of Personnel Management in developing of the Federal Cyber Workforce Strategy, and briefed members of Congress and staff on critical infrastructure and digital transformation issues. Her career began with increasingly more responsible roles in technology administration at the Navy Mutual Aid Association, SAIC, Telos, and Unisys.

In recognition of her professional accomplishments, she was named to Agenda’s Top Diversity 100 Board Ready Candidates, honored with the SC Magazine’s Women of Influence Award, and ACT-IAC’s Igniting Innovation Award. She has been a featured guest speaker at events nationally and internationally including Black Hat, RSA, Carnegie Mellon’s West Africa Conference on Digital Public Goods and Black Enterprise TechConneXt Tech Summit. She also served on the (ISC)2 North American Advisory Council.

Mrs. Forney received an Honorary Doctorate Degree of Science and Technology from Champlain College, earned a M.S. in Engineering Management from George Washington University and a B.S. in Computer Information Systems from DeVry University. She holds a certification in Mergers and Acquisitions from Columbia School of Business. She and her husband have two adult children and live in greater Washington, DC.