Although Kelly had never worked in the private sector before, he was very familiar with large, multinational security problems from the time he spent in charge of planning and strategy development for the FBI's counterterrorism division.

"They had nothing as far as security was concerned: No central monitoring, no metrics, nothing," says Kelly, who is now CSO at Ingersoll Rand. "There were so many things that needed doing [that] it was like drinking water from a fire hose."

Harsco may have never needed a security operation more than it did when it hired Kelly. The global financial crisis hit it hard. The company lost almost $1 billion in revenue and had to shed about 5,000 employees. This forced it to shift the focus of its operations from Europe to emerging markets such as China, Brazil and India. While these new markets have huge opportunity for growth, they also have great security risks.

Kelly's first step was to put in a global security policy that included procedures so the company could know where people in risky areas were at all times. "I made it clear that our number one priority was protecting our people," he says. The company's global traveler locator program gathers information from its partners to provide real-time intelligence to all employees on the move internationally.

The 2012 CSO Compass Award Honorees