Senior Federal Cybersecurity Manager, United States Department of Agriculture (USDA)

Angela Cole serves as a senior federal cybersecurity manager within the Marketing and Regulatory Programs (MRP) Mission Area at the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). She leads a team that is responsible for providing both proactive and reactive cyber risk identification and reduction services to ensure the security of MRP’s mission. During her time at USDA, she has also held various leadership roles from Incident Response Team Lead to Assistant Chief Information Security Officer (ACISO) at the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) and Rural Development (RD), respectively.  Her various roles have focused on risk management, privacy, incident response and financial reporting.

Prior to joining USDA, Angela supported the armed forces as an accountant for the Department of Defense (DoD). She also received her Lean6 Sigma Black Belt certification and has led multiple process improvement projects for the DoD.

Angela is passionate about Cybersecurity education, especially in the realm of Privacy. She has created and provided virtual training sessions to educate users on the proper identification and handling of PII. She strives to make data protection a shared responsibility and ensuring that users are educated is a primary foundation she looks to build upon.

She holds an MS Cybersecurity: Intelligence, MBA Economic Crime and Fraud Management and a BS Business Administration: Marketing. She is also a Certified Data Privacy Solutions Engineer (CDPSE).