The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has added James Saunders to its CIO Office as Senior Advisor for Cybersecurity, OPM confirmed to MeriTalk.
Prior to joining OPM, Saunders served as CISO and Information Security Director for the Small Business Administration (SBA). He also served in various other roles at SBA over the past three years, including Acting Branch Chief for Security Operations for separate stints of four and six months, and Chief Cyber Security Architect from May 2018 to Feb. 2020.
“I am very excited to add James Saunders to the OPM OCIO team,” OPM Acting CIO Guy Cavallo said in a statement to MeriTalk. “His experience and leadership in leveraging the power of the cloud will be a great asset to OPM.”
Saunders’ move continues a trend of bringing SBA management experience to OPM, following Cavallo who joined OPM last year after serving as Deputy CIO at SBA. Over the last few years, SBA has worked diligently to accelerate cloud adoption.
As part of those efforts, Saunders helped SBA meet requirements for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) program while using cloud services. At a Feb. 2 virtual event, Saunders advocated for agencies doing business in the cloud as long as it was cost effective, done intelligently, and accomplished without opening up security risks.
