Prepare, Protect, Respond
Tom Fanning is the CEO of Southern Company.
PUF: As an industry leader on reliability and resilience, what motivated you to focus on this area among your many important responsibilities?
Tom Fanning: I think I’m the only CEO in our industry that had been in a past life, a CIO. Even though it stands for Chief Information Officer, so many days I thought that might stand for, career is over. But I had a leaning that way, anyway.
I have three big spheres of life. It’s energy policy. It’s my time with the Federal Reserve Bank. For three years I was chair of the Atlanta Fed and chair of what they call the Conference of Chairs, the big advisory board to the big Fed and then this.
It’s just evolved. Originally, being chair, or at least co-chair of the ESCC, the Electricity Sub-Sector Coordinating Council, started out with just cyber, and we quickly understand that in an existential sense, the threat against big broad America infrastructure, we’ve got to consider not only cyber threats but physical threats to our national security.