Rising Tide Cybersecurity Managment
Hello. I’m Michael Smith and I am an independent consultant who helps smart teams solve the impossible problems needed for remarkable business growth.
For Startups and Small/Medium Businesses
You’re working hard to build a team, build a product, get funding, and become cashflow-positive. I help you as a cybersecurity advisor to build the right size of security program for what you need at every stage of your growth.
Some examples of how I’ve helped companies:
- Compliance and regulation reviews for both cybersecurity and privacy frameworks.
- Long-term planning aligned with company growth, funding, and revenue.
- Secure cloud deployment and technical controls
- Contract negotiations with customers.
- Web security, reliability, scalability, and delivery.
- Security architecture and engineering for Internet of Things and other embedded devices.
For Cybersecurity Startups
I bring 25+ years of experience in web, DNS, and Internet security to help you build better products that match with what your customers need.
Some examples of how I’ve helped companies:
- Innovation and product design from high-level design down to Proof of Concept implementation.
- Technical pre-sales, pitch, and messaging help.
- Business development and introductions to companies with related technologies.
- Mentoring through a variety of startup incubators.
Cybersecurity Advisory
I’ve advised numerous large websites and countries to make their internet properties safer.
Some of the ways that I’ve helped my customers:
- Building a security operations and threat intelligence capability.
- Defense of countries against DDoS and web attacks.
- DNS-based malware filtering on a national scale.
- Digital government and modernization of services.
- Solutions for Content Delivery Networks, Web Application Firewalls, and Bot Management.
About Me
I spent 10 years inside Akamai working to protect some of the largest websites and Internet properties against a wide variety of attacks: account takeover, data breaches, defacements, outages, and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS). I spent 5 years of this time as a Security CTO, tackling some of the projects that didn’t fit nicely into an existing product menu. I also served as the Director for the Customer Security Incident Response Team (CSIRT) and as a customer-facing representative for the Chief Security Officer.
Before Akamai, I spent 10 years in the Washington, DC, area working as a security officer on many different US Government contracts, mostly in support of technical project teams as a security engineer and Information System Security Officer (ISSO). For over 7 years, I taught the NIST Risk Management Framework.
If you go far enough back, I have a background in Linux server administration and web application development and was trained as a Russian-language translator.
