About

My Story & Experience

Welcome to my little corner of the internet! Let me tell you a little about me. Whilst in college, I found myself intrigued by how technology can both improve our lives and our productivity but also how certain technologies can be abused. Having then started my career working in technology in 2014, I began gaining experience in tech support and network support. In 2017, I took a gap year to travel solo to Canada and test my independence as well as take some time to learn about myself, my true interests and primarily grow as an individual. Returning home in 2018, I was welcomed back to my former role with open arms and I was supported by my employer to pursue my security studies in the hopes of transferring to the in-house InfoSec tribe.

In 2020, like most of us reflecting on our career paths during the pandemic, I decided to take the leap and turn my interest in cybersecurity into a career by becoming a cybersecurity analyst. Interviewing and leveraging what I'd learned to obtain a role specialising in data security, privacy and data loss prevention. I immediately set a date to sit my exam and spent any extra hours I had asking my new colleagues questions and studying. Within a few weeks I sat and passed the exam first time and received my CompTIA Security+ certification.

I began looking for ways to maximise the value of this knowledge which enabled me to progress to my current (and far more challenging!) role as a business information security officer. What I love about this role the most is how it relates to me as a person in the sense that I first like to learn a little about a lot and then dive deeper into the specific areas that interest me. The role is a mile wide and an inch deep!

My main areas of focus are secure design, data security for employee and customer data, stakeholder relationship management, project threat modelling, risk management, third party security assurance, policy compliance, penetration testing and multi-cloud security. To protect the interests of my current employer I'm limited in what technologies I can list as having experience with but some commonly known technologies would be Office 365 and Sharepoint, AWS, Azure, GCP, Jira, Service-Now, Crowdstrike various DLP and endpoint protection solutions like MimeCast and ForcePoint. I'm also familiar with CloudFlare a service that this very site sits behind. (Feel free to check this via the following command: dig barrykavanagh.ie NS +short )

I'm a firm believer that nothing is 100% truly secure, bad things happen and my role as a security professional is to enable business processes and projects through realistic security risk assessments. Scare-mongering does not enable business growth but what does is applying adequate security controls and aligning with policies where possible, valuing customer privacy, documenting risks and prioritising them accordingly.

Clients

At the moment, my "clients" are internal stakeholders with my current employer.

Outside of that, my clients include close family (as the designated family IT guy) and strangers on social media who occasionally seek my help in a panic when they think they have been compromised or want me to assess a suspicious link or ask about how certain companies process their personal data.

I also provide free household IT support for local OAPs for various computer, printer, phone or WiFi issues they have:

Work experience

My CV/Résumé is available on request. Alternatively my LinkedIn can provide more details on past roles and education.

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