The Air-gap Network That Saved Us How a 2014 Compliance Requirement Became Our 2018 Ransomware Recovery Plan In cybersecurity, you don’t always build systems for the problems you expect.Sometimes, the thing that saves you was never meant to exist for that reason at all.That’s exactly what happened to us. 2014 — A Contract, a Quake, […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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