The Envelope, Please! The CIS 2024 President’s Award Goes to…
Penny Davis, Senior Leadership Development Manager, Earns Top Honor
EAST GREENBUSH, N.Y., January 3, 2025 — The Center for Internet Security, Inc. (CIS®) has named Penny Davis the winner of the 2024 President’s Award for demonstrating outstanding performance and leadership in her role on the Learning and Development team.
Established in 2021, the President’s Award recognizes one CIS staff member each year who exhibits exemplary leadership not only in their role but also across the organization. The recipient must also have made outstanding contributions and shown a commitment to the CIS mission and 12 leadership principles, including actively engaging and enabling others to realize their full leadership potential.
In her year and a half at CIS, Penny has become a regular fixture in Webex meetings, often displaying festive backgrounds and music, deploying engaging content, and showing great enthusiasm for the topics and speakers. It is through these events that Penny sees the results of her work come to fruition. “The most rewarding part of my job is getting to see people learn and apply new skills,” she said. “There is nothing better than helping a leader process through an ‘ah-ha’ moment that ultimately transforms the way they work.”
Winning the 2024 President’s Award has been an affirming experience for Penny, who came to CIS to pursue her professional passion of specializing in leadership development. “I am doing what I am meant to do, where I am meant to do it,” she said. “Being honored in this manner is the ultimate validation that when you unapologetically pursue your professional passions, backed with the curiosity of continuous learning, the results are phenomenal.”
Penny lives outside of Denver, Colorado, where she enjoys the natural beauty of the plains and mountains, and is the proud winner of the 2023 Colorado Unicorn Best Hair Award, for her handmade, pink, sparkly mane.
In addition to the President’s Award, Director of Administrative Services and Board Relations, Amanda Flynn, and Lead Analyst on the Cyber Threat Intelligence Team, Tim Davis, have been named 2024 Star Performers for their contributions and dedication to the CIS Leadership Principles.
About CIS
The Center for Internet Security, Inc. (CIS®) makes the connected world a safer place for people, businesses, and governments through our core competencies of collaboration and innovation. We are a community-driven nonprofit, responsible for the CIS Critical Security Controls® and CIS Benchmarks™, globally recognized best practices for securing IT systems and data. We lead a global community of IT professionals to continuously evolve these standards and provide products and services to proactively safeguard against emerging threats. Our CIS Hardened Images® provide secure, on-demand, scalable computing environments in the cloud. CIS is home to the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center® (MS-ISAC®), the trusted resource for cyber threat prevention, protection, response, and recovery for U.S. State, Local, Tribal, and Territorial government entities, and the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center® (EI-ISAC®), which supports the rapidly changing cybersecurity needs of U.S. election offices. To learn more, visit cisecurity.org or follow us on X: @CISecurity.