VITAS Healthcare’s Richard La Bella Wins ‘Advocates’ Leadership Award from SC Media

10/16/2019

MIAMI, FL – Richard La Bella, chief information security officer at VITAS Healthcare, the nation’s leading provider of end-of-life-care, has been named a winner in the third-annual SC Media Reboot Leadership Awards, earning the distinction in the Advocates category.

La Bella has more than 25 years of cybersecurity experience. He has delivered cyber defense, compliance, and security awareness programs for companies such as Citrix Systems, BankUnited, Office Depot, Marex.com, City of Miami, Tracfone, AvMed and Assurant.

As chief information security officer for VITAS Healthcare, he is responsible for establishing and maintaining a business risk strategy and cyber defense program that ensures information assets and technology for the company meet appropriate safeguards for protecting the confidentiality, integrity and availability of data, information and the systems that deliver such information to the business.

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“With decades of experience, Richard has become a vocal advocate for cybersecurity across our entire organization and has taken VITAS’ IT security and capabilities to the next level,” said Patrick Hale, CIO at VITAS Healthcare. “We congratulate Richard for earning this award and we’re honored to have his expertise and passion as a core member of our team.”

La Bella is one of 50 honorees to receive this year’s SC Media Reboot Leadership Awards. The awards recognize the best and brightest cybersecurity luminaries and organizations. La Bella was nominated by Endgame, Inc. for making security a priority of the highest level at VITAS by re-architecting the security program and advocating for employee security awareness

“Richard is everything you could ask for in a customer – deep technical knowledge combined with business acumen and a vision that maps the role of security to company goals and objectives,” said Matt Bruening, senior vice president of sales at Endgame. "Customers like Richard, who hold us accountable for continuous innovation, make us a better partner to VITAS and our broad customer base.”