Stephen ‘Zak’ Zakowicz
Senior Vice-President, CGI Federal
As cyberthreats grow more sophisticated and their impact on everyday Americans more acute, Stephen “Zak” Zakowicz’s work safeguarding federal agencies has never mattered more.
Over the past year, Zakowicz played a pivotal leadership role in advancing CGI Federal’s cybersecurity capabilities and strategic positioning. His most impactful work centers on expanding CGI’s delivery of the largest cybersecurity shared services platform in the federal civilian market — the Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation program run by CISA.
The platform gives agencies, especially those with limited internal cyber capacity, access to scalable, specialized defensive capabilities while driving down costs and making better use of scarce expert resources. By broadening its availability, Zakowicz strengthened governmentwide resilience while delivering operational efficiency and mission-aligned value.
He also played a key role in a Strategic Collaboration Agreement with Amazon Web Services to accelerate AI innovation, advance secure cloud adoption and streamline digital transformation across the federal government.
“The partnership vastly expands what we can offer to federal clients and how quickly we can bring it to market,” Zakowicz said. “Within the past few months alone, zero trust, tactical forensics and data sovereignty capabilities have gone from concept to reality by blending the strengths of our two companies.”
Those efforts position CGI Federal at the forefront of secure cloud modernization and data protection —foundational requirements for keeping pace with AI-fueled advances.
Why Watch
Zakowicz and his team are building on those partnerships to bring advanced capabilities to the broader federal government and critical infrastructure community, which faces growing pressure from bad actors. Capabilities including AI-enabled security information and event management as a service, Advanced Network Protection and Advanced Cloud Protection are rolling out now within the Shared Services platform.
Through the AWS SCA, data sovereignty, tactical forensics and zero trust deployment are gaining traction as AI places greater emphasis on data protection and management. The pace of change has never been higher, and Zakowicz is determined to keep CGI ahead of it.
Fun fact: In 2001, Zakowicz accompanied his father Ed on a cross-country bicycle ride from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, to Anacortes, Washington — over 4,100 miles through the northern U.S. and parts of Canada, completed in nearly two months. Today his rides are more modest, and he brings his kids, ages 10 and 15.