Who am I?

I am a long time I.T. generalist. I have worked with technology for over 25 years. From Help Desk to Programming to Infrastructure.

Although my passion has always been technology and engineering, I am one of the many people out there who did not start in I.T. In fact, my first jobs of my adult life were based in accounting. I was working at the North East Payroll coordinator for Laidlaw Transit when I got my first opportunity to work in I.T. I never looked back.

While my skills are technology based, I also have a skill that most technology people lack. The ability to discuss technology with non-technical people. This has helped me in many of my roles within technology. Talking to Non-Technical C-Level and Senior Management to answer the question “Why” has always been a strong skill. Whether or not the choose that route or not is a different story, but at least they understood the concepts. This also opened doors when sales people came in. Management knew too include me so that I could explain the technology later to make a better decision could be made.

Over the last decade, I have seen more and more emphasis put on securing environments. This is due, in primary part, to the rise of ransomware. While Ransomware is not new (the first ransomware virus was the AIDS Trojan in 1989), it was difficult to receive and hide payments. Bitcoin in 2010 helped resolve that issue. Now, you could hide currency payments from prying eyes by using a monitory system that was outside of any government control and not monitored. This is what made me first interested in, what is now called, “Cybersecurity”. Organizations now realized that they needed some way to protect themselves from these different forms of attack.

However, this field is still in its infancy. There are still too many people out there who do not believe that they need to be protected or that the Return-on-investment (ROI) is not worth the cost. This is why I moved into this field. I completed my bachelors in Information Technology Management and my Master’s in Cybersecurity and have now taken a position within the Information Security world. I hope to use my skills talking to non-technical people about the risks of not taking security of data seriously.

Favorite Quotes

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