For most of corporate history, the chief information security officer (CISO) was someone who showed up after something went wrong. Alex Levy is trying to make sure nothing does — and increasingly, he’s succeeding at redefining the job itself.

This year, Levy, CISO of BNSF Railway, was named the inaugural TIME + Commvault CISO of the Year, selected from a field of more than 200 nominees by Commvault and a panel of industry experts.

It’s a new award, but the timing isn’t random: as AI reshapes how fast businesses move — and how fast things can break — the industry has been searching for a new template for security leadership.

From Gatekeeper to Resilience Architect

What sets Levy apart, according to the judges, isn’t a single breach he prevented or a single system he hardened. It’s a philosophy.

He’s built his security program around what’s known internally as ResOps — resilience operations — a framework that fuses cybersecurity, technology risk, business continuity, and disaster recovery into one continuously tested discipline, rather than four departments that only talk to each other during a crisis.

In practice, that means Levy’s team isn’t waiting for an incident to find out if BNSF can survive one. They are stress-testing readiness on an ongoing basis and pushing accountability out across the business, not just keeping it locked inside the security function — a shift that mirrors how the CISO role itself is evolving, from technical gatekeeper to enterprise-wide resilience leader.

The Stakes: A Railroad Is Not a website

“Resilience” is easy to talk about in the abstract. It’s harder when your infrastructure spans roughly 32,500 route miles across 28 US states and three Canadian provinces, moving the goods that stock American grocery stores and factories.

As North America’s leading freight transportation company, BNSF sits at the backbone of the U.S. economy — and Levy has been explicit that he sees the job in those terms: less “protect the servers,” more “keep the supply chain breathing.”

In accepting the award, Levy pointed to that stake directly, framing the recognition as validation of a team mission: keeping the railroad, its customers, and the country’s supply chains moving safely and reliably, at a moment when critical infrastructure has become inseparable from national security.

The Bigger Signal

Levy runs his security, AI, and software engineering teams through bnsf | tech, the technology division working to position BNSF as North America’s leading freight and mobility company — which is itself telling. Security, at BNSF, isn’t a bolted-on compliance function; it’s built into the same organization pushing the company’s AI and engineering ambitions forward. That’s arguably the real headline buried in this award: the best CISOs of the AI era won’t be the ones with the most firewalls. They’ll be the ones fluent enough in the business to move at its speed — and disciplined enough to make sure that speed doesn’t break it.