Paul Raines is the Chief Information Security Officer for the United Nations Development Programme. In that capacity he is responsible for managing the cyber-security and disaster recovery planning for the Organisation’s 170+ locations around the world. His unit is the first and only United Nations unit to be both ISO 9001, ISO 20000 and ISO 27001 certified. His information security unit has won international awards for outstanding performance including an Honors Laureate award from Computer World magazine in 2013 and CSO50 awards from CSO magazine for 5 of the past 7 years. The CSO50 award honors the top 50 cybersecurity organisations in the world for business value and thought leadership and UNDP is the first and only organisation to have won the award 5 times. In 2020 his unit won the Future Edge 50 award from CIO magazine for technological innovation for an in-house development of an incident response and threat hunting platform. Finally, Computer World magazine selected Mr. Raines for its Premier 100 award for being among the 100 most influential IT leaders for 2016—the second time Mr. Raines has won this award in his career, the other time being in 2002.

Prior to UNDP, Mr. Raines worked for a different UN-affiliated organisation, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) where he, as well as other members of the organisation, was a joint recipient the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize. Prior to working for the United Nations he was the Chief Information Security Officer for Bloomberg LP, Barclays Capital and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He is a graduate of the United States Air Force Academy and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. For relaxation he enjoys opera, Shakespeare plays, French wine and sometimes just sitting in a cafe with an espresso and a French pastry and reading a good book on Roman history.