People Over Policies, Pt. 2 — From Compliance to Culture After my last post, two brilliant leaders — @Darius Jasiulionis and @Gurpreet Singh — reminded me why frameworks matter only if people live them. Darius said it best: “ISO 27001 was never meant to be just documentation, but a culture of accountability and continuous improvement.”And […]

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💥 That One Time I Ran an AI/ML GPU Farm in My House April 2022.We were in the middle of a massive network latency and SQL optimization phase at Select Data. Our Data Science MicroK8s cluster (2 x Dell PowerEdge R740s with 2TB of RAM and 4 x Nvidia Tesla V100s) was acting up — […]

Read more "The Time I Turned My Ethereum Rig Into an AI Cluster (And Legal Paid the Bill)"

That One Time I Was a One-Person Cybersecurity Department I saw this post from Kaaviya Balaji saying: “If you’re looking for someone who knows SIEM, SOAR, EDR, XDR, IAM, MFA, SSO, Cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP), Firewalls, Compliance (ISO, NIST, GDPR, PCI-DSS), Incident Response, Threat Intel, and more…That’s not a Cybersecurity Analyst.That’s an entire Cybersecurity Department.” […]

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Literally the day after we migrated our Production workloads into Azure, I woke up in a panic. We hadn’t even been 24 hours in the cloud when I opened my email to find what every Cybersecurity engineer dreads: 2,181,699 brute-force attempts. Luckily, we survived. But it lit a fire under us to accelerate our Zero […]

Read more "That One Time Stark Industries Came After Us"

Cybersecurity & Operations Excellence. In cybersecurity, numbers tell stories — but not the whole story.The summer we dropped our Arctic Wolf Managed Risk Score from 7.9 to 5.7 and raised our Coverage Score from 70% to 100% wasn’t just about metrics. It was about culture, consistency, and the quiet discipline of doing the hard things […]

Read more "Closing the Gaps: How We Reduced Our Managed Risk Score from 7.9 to 5.7 and Reached 100% Coverage"

Cybersecurity isn’t just a framework—it’s a mindset. For over 16 years, I’ve led enterprise IT and security operations at Select Data, helping transform a legacy infrastructure into a resilient hybrid-cloud environment. Along the way, I’ve learned that real security doesn’t start with a policy—it starts with people. As Director of IT Infrastructure and Cybersecurity, I’ve […]

Read more "People Over Policies: The Director’s Guide to Building a Culture-Driven Security Program"

It was February 2022.We had just finished installing and configuring our Dell PowerStore 500T SAN — the next step in modernizing our infrastructure. I started migrating workloads from the old Dell Compellent SAN to the new PowerStore. What used to take minutes suddenly took hours. The system crawled. Something wasn’t right. At first, I assumed […]

Read more "Resolving SQL Server Performance Issues: A Case Study"

I still remember the exact moment I found out we’d been hit with Ransomware.It was May 2018. I was at the breakfast table when my phone buzzed—a text from Eddie, our Chief Product Officer. It was a photo of his computer screen: “If you want the encryption key to your data, transfer 0.8 Bitcoin per […]

Read more "The Morning Everything Froze"

It was February 2022. We had just installed and configured our new Dell PowerStore 500T SAN — a big step forward in our modernization journey. I started migrating workloads off our outgoing Dell Compellent array. What used to take minutes suddenly took hours. Migrations crawled. Systems lagged. Something wasn’t right. At first, I assumed it […]

Read more "The Latency That Wouldn’t Die"