After starting his career as a roustabout on an offshore drilling rig, Brent went on to a position at Noble Drilling where he helped secure rigs from cyberattacks. Today, as a cybersecurity specialist at SecurityGate.io, Brent does a little bit of everything, including sales engineering, client consultation, and assessment, along with maintaining and monitoring our platform’s hosting infrastructure.
While at Noble Drilling, Brent was part of a team that traveled the globe to perform risk assessments on offshore rigs and even identified and eradicated malware-infected SCADA systems on offshore drilling units. Working with SecurityGate.io cofounder Cherise Esparza, he was part of the team that brought the entire offshore fleet up to Achilles Practices Certification (APC), the first cybersecurity standard for an offshore rig.
Using SecurityGate.io to Eliminate Travel, Assess Third-Party Vendors
In his previous job, Brent filled his passport with stamps from faraway locales like Brazil, Singapore, and South Korea, where he traveled to conduct assessments. He realizes that if he’d had access to SecurityGate.io in his previous position, he could have immediately become more efficient by dramatically reducing his travel. Rather than having to physically be on-site every quarter to reassess a situation and validate risk remediation, Brent could have sent out a digital assessment through our platform for professionals to complete on-site. From there, the information would have been collected in a central repository that reduced the number of documents going back and forth between teams, resulting in tighter version control.
At Noble Drilling, Brent also saw how difficult it was to manage third-party vendors and hold them accountable for securing their systems. Lacking a tool that could easily perform vendor assessments and provide rapid insights into their risk posture, it was easy for vendors to backslide on some of their compliance requirements. While this component of the SecurityGate.io platform is sometimes overlooked, Brent feels that it will soon become a popular feature for his clients in the wake of the devastating Solar Winds’ Orion platform hack. After all, businesses need assurances that their vendors are in compliance with cybersecurity practices—especially when the vendor’s profile seems too good to be true.
Leaning on a Team with Deep GRC Experience
But the biggest benefit of SecurityGate.io is that it provides teams managing ICS and OT with a platform built by a team that lives and breathes global risk and compliance. Rather than having to employ a team of developers to build, maintain, and update an assessment workflow, SecurityGate.io is maintained by a dedicated team that has its finger on the pulse of the latest compliance standards. The SecurityGate.io team does all the work of combing through the technical requirements and interpreting what you actually need to assess. This gives your organization time back to focus on actually mitigating your exposure and tracking your progress.
After beginning his career as a roustabout on an offshore drilling rig, Brent is now a cybersecurity specialist at SecurityGate.io who performs client consultation and assessments while maintaining and monitoring the platform’s hosting infrastructure.
