Stacey Halota is the Vice President for Information Security and Privacy at Graham Holdings Company. Ms. Halota has more than 20 years of experience in the IT, security and privacy fields. Before joining The Washington Post Company in 2003, she served as the federal government and southeast region leader of Guardent Consulting Services (now part of Verisign), where she helped transform Guardent from a regional decentralized model into a national information security consulting organization recognized by Computerworld as a top 100 company to watch among IT companies. Prior to Guardent, she worked at PricewaterhouseCoopers in the Technology Risk Services consulting practice where she helped grow the team serving the mid-Atlantic market and federal government from two consultants with no client base or revenue to 46 consultants and $9.3M in annual revenue in three years. She talks to the Young Professionals about her volunteer work and staying positive in the face of change.

Ms. Halota describes herself as a very optimistic and positive person, saying, “there is so much to be grateful here.” She cites an incident recently when she was in a taxi and the driver was from Afghanistan. He said, when you live in the U.S., you’ve hit the lottery. The sentiment rung true for Ms. Halota, as it does for us here on the Young Professionals committee.