With a strong background in compliance & risk at one of the world’s largest oil companies, coupled with an entrepreneurial streak in leading and founding businesses to reduce risk in critical infrastructure environments, Ted has a wealth of experience in the risk management space.
From his unique vantage point, Ted saw the need for automation in the risk management space, specifically within critical infrastructure. He saw firsthand that there weren’t enough qualified professionals to perform these evaluations on-site. However, due to the ongoing technological revolution across critical infrastructure sectors—energy, chemical, and water to name a few—where industrial critical systems (ICS) and operational technologies (OT) are increasingly connected, Ted knew that the demand for assessments to determine security gaps would only increase. His passion for securing these systems and protecting the societies that depended on them led Ted to co-found SecurityGate.io.
Extensive Field Experience and Foresight into the Growing Demand for Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity Assessments
After completing five years in various US Army reconnaissance units, Ted began supporting deepwater drilling operations in the form of a Root Cause Failure Analysis (RCFA) project manager, where he learned to translate codified compliance and maturity standards into business & field operations. Shortly thereafter, he became a compliance and risk auditor for a top 5 global energy operator, traveling across the globe to complete facilities assessments on 4 continents averaging almost 200 days/year. It was during one of his secondary audits that he identified the same non-conformances almost a year later, leading him to believe companies were limited in their capacity to improve because they were stuck in the risk management lifecycle with manual processes.
His next venture was investing in and joining a successful chemical containment company helping critical infrastructure companies improve their risk management processes for their land facilities. As COO and co-owner, he helped the company streamline product development and scale globally, steering this company through incredible growth over the course of two years.
While in this role, he saw the impacts of foreign interference in the 2016 elections and realized that free and fair elections were just one of several critical infrastructures that could be targeted through cyberattacks.
Examining what was happening in the macro geopolitical environment, Ted saw that organizations across critical infrastructure sectors would have to begin doubling down on cybersecurity efforts and assessments. However, the availability of professionals to perform these assessments in an efficient, timely, and cost-effective manner would not scale to meet the forthcoming demands of those industries. Solving this challenge was his impetus for cofounding SecurityGate.io.
Securing Critical Infrastructure with SecurityGate.io
Having performed countless risk assessments himself, Ted recognized that the critical infrastructure sector needed a risk management platform that was lightweight and specific to them.
As opposed to other solutions that require expensive implementation and cumbersome configuration, the SecurityGate.io platform was designed to be used quickly, right out of the box in ICS and OT sectors.
Furthermore, the platform makes it easy for auditors to enter information into the system and drive instantaneous insights. Executives can quickly see risk scores across multiple entities and facilities in a single pane of glass, allowing them to make quick decisions that can minimize the risk posture for their company.
No workflow solution in the market understands the culture of critical infrastructure like SecurityGate.io. Because the platform provides assessment workflow and predefined questions around ICS and OT that are commonly used in the field, the modules speak the language of the professionals who are performing the assessments. The platform’s ease of use and capacity to immediately synthesize auditor input place it far ahead of the competition.
SecurityGate.io is the Platform Ted Wished He Had
Ted feels that SecurityGate.io could have made him a more effective auditor in the following ways:
- Minimizing travel while increasing throughput. Ted notes that SecurityGate.io could have let him exponentially scale the number of assessments and remediation programs he could have facilitated simply by making travel unnecessary. He could have sent on-site personnel a link to the assessment and asked them to perform it themselves; from there he could have examined the results and challenged his team to address the most important items, bringing speed and focus to his work.
- Solving problems instead of just documenting issues. As an auditor, Ted’s number-one passion was resolving the issues that he knew presented risk. However, he was caught in a cycle of spending all of his time performing the assessment and collating the data—the incentive was on documentation rather than remediation. SecurityGate.io changes the incentive structure. With an assessment completed in hours instead of days and insights delivered instantly, the auditor can then focus on improving the team and systems rather than simply pointing out what’s wrong.
- Repeatable, standardized assessments. One of the challenges when implementing an assessment program is to achieve conformity among the analyses of various auditors. Individuals have different styles and opinions on what’s most important, so assessments may often vary depending on the auditor who was on the ground. Because SecurityGate.io removes the bias of a particular auditor by providing standardized workflows that can be identically replicated, companies can feel confident in the results.
As the CEO of SecurityGate.io, Ted knows that this platform is able to best evaluate and align a critical infrastructure company’s cybersecurity controls to a known standard regardless of which technologies they’re using. This functionality has been missing from the market for too long. SecurityGate.io solves the problem of translating discrete manual assessment processes into a more holistic lifecycle approach.
Ted is the co-founder and CEO of SecurityGate.io. With an extensive background as a compliance and risk auditor who traveled the globe and led a number of risk mitigation startups, Ted has created the product that he wished he had in the field.
