National Gas CTO Darren Curley on IT/OT Security Integration
National Gas CTO Darren Curley on IT/OT Security Integration
https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/interviews/national-gas-cto-darren-curley-it/
Publish Date: 2026-02-18 08:00:00
Source Domain: www.infosecurity-magazine.com
As chief technology officer (CTO) of National Gas, Darren Curley oversee the technology strategy of one of the most critical entities in the UK, maintaining Britain’s high-pressure gas transmission system, transporting gas to homes, businesses and power stations through 5000 miles of pipeline.
After a 30-plus-year career in IT architecture, Curley joined the company in 2022. He now works alongside National Gas’s CISO, Polly Cameron, to align the cybersecurity strategy across three domains: enterprise IT systems, industrial systems and critical national infrastructure (CNI) systems.
Source: Palo Alto Networks
Infosecurity Magazine: As a CTO, to what extent are you involved in the cybersecurity strategy of National Gas?
Darren Curley: I’ve been working in IT for 34 years. During those years, my involvement in setting up the security architecture for the organizations I worked for has increased quite a lot.
Today, at National Gas, my role as CTO consists of defining the IT and security strategy from a solution perspective: choosing the tech stack, the vendors and overseeing the implementation, then handing it over to our security team.
Everybody gets quite excited about security, but it’s just another capability that you deploy through technology. At National Gas, we knew we didn’t have time to select the best of breed for each solution we needed and integrate each of them one by one. The approach we have taken has served us well so far.
It’s quite nice, really, to be able to oversee a holistic tech stack implementation in an organization.
IM: How do you interact with other the security roles, like the CISO or the SOC team?
DC: The definition of the security components falls under my area and the implementation and every day running of the security functions falls under the CISO’s.
Of course, there will always be tensions in that relationship, because everybody has a different perspective. These are usually technology…
