Started career at Southwest Airlines in 1988 as a Cobol Programmer when there was only one HP MPE server, one IBM Mainframe and 20 Employees in the Systems Department.  At that time there was no such thing as Security since the only way to access systems was through a hard wired connection. Southwest had not even begun to think of LAN much less WANs and Internet connectivity.  Continued to advance technical career by bringing in the first client server system (buzz word of the early 90’s) into the environment.  The system was built with PowerBuilder (then state of the art 4GL) with an HP-UX backend and Sybase as the DBMS. 

After several years it was time to get into the web world so went to work on the Team developing Java/Websphere applications.  In between learning Java/Wesphere I dabbled in the messaging space by working on recommendations for the strategic use and placement of our messaging infrastructure.  Finally I was asked to participate in an RFP process to select a product to handle the growing need around Web Access Management.  I followed the RFP process through vendor selection and product implementation.  As challenges were encountered I put my Engineering hat on and proceeded to assist in the stabilization of the product.  As a result I was asked to join the Security Team to further my knowledge in the Identity and Access Management  (IAM) space.  After a few years was asked to lead the Security Team. 

In the early years I focused mostly in the IAM space letting the true security concerns (firewalls, IDS/IPS, encryption, etc.) fall by the way side.  In the past few years I have more than made up for that and am now a seasoned security professional able to quote compliance directives and hob nob with the best in the business..