The Journey to the Center of my Life

Like a lot of IT professionals, I first got my interest in computers and technology from PC gaming as a child. I was always the inquisitive type, and I’m sure I drove a lot of people crazy from just asking ‘why?’ every time I didn’t have the answer. The first time an incident really made me ask that to myself was also my first introduction to cyber-criminal activity. As I am sure many of us did as a child, I ended up getting my machine infected and seeing my desktop wallpaper change to say, ‘You have been hacked.’ I had so many questions at the time. Why would someone do this? How did someone do this? I was introduced to my first system reimage that day, and this was also where I found my love for problem solving. After all, who doesn’t enjoy a good mystery and that sweet endorphin rush you get when you solve it?

From then on and as I got older, every time I encountered an issue or made a mistake, I took it as an opportunity to learn and foster my skills. I eventually became the ‘go-to’ tech guy for the family, and always enjoyed the challenge of a new mystery each time. From this point on, I knew I wanted to work in IT. Technology made me happy and I was certain that the further we get into the future, the more reliant we would be on technology and need people who were skilled in it.

Unfortunately, life got in the way, and I didn’t get to walk a clear-cut path that lead to my destination like I had planned. I was forced to work a lot of jobs in different industries (Retail, Manufacturing, Warehousing, Customer Service, Sales, Project Management in Construction) to make ends meet, and still had a lot to learn about this precious journey called ‘life.’ However, I am grateful for those experiences because these first few jobs taught me to be agile and further reinforced my belief that IT was the profession I wanted to be in. I excelled at virtually every job I had and was praised by my superiors regularly for my extraordinary work ethic. I knew what I wanted to do and was going to stop at nothing to get there.

Fast forward several years and quite a bit of life experiences later, and I finally landed my first ‘IT’ job. I was hired on as a contractor to work for Dell as a Warranty Technician. I fit in right way and was generally eager to get up and go to work the next day. It was a fast-paced environment, and I got exposed to many different technologies and problems regularly. However, I still somehow found myself wanting more of challenge. I knew that I was capable of achieving more and wanted to accelerate my career, so I reached out to an old friend for resume advice. Upon receiving my resume, he was shocked and replied right away with, ‘I think I have just the position for you!’

Now I work at Business Credit Reports, Inc, the largest independent reseller of business credit data from Experian, Equifax, and Dun & Bradstreet, and the only company licensed by all three to combine this data and form powerful multi-bureau reports. Here, I started as a Tech Support Specialist and gradually worked my way up by taking on additional responsibilities and always looking for ways to improve current processes. After having quite the scare at the organization, I became very vocal about our security measures and what I felt we needed to put in place. However, these recommendations weren’t immediately heard. It wasn’t until a year later that I was finally able to forge my path into cybersecurity. I never knew cybersecurity was something I was passionate about, until I worked for an organization that I truly cared about and developed myself to become the best suited candidate to take on the role.

The more I have studied and learned about cybersecurity, the more passionate I have become about preaching the importance of it. It is both a fascinating and terrifying field of study at the same time. I am now the Information Security Officer for BCR and work every day at improving our posture – and myself. The journey doesn’t end here, however.

My goal is to become adept at Cloud Security Architecture. With so many businesses adopting cloud models these days - including my current organization – I have witnessed a glaring need for skilled professionals in this field. Combining my love for technology and cybersecurity, cloud security has my name written all over it! I am working every single day to achieve my goals and become a better version of myself today than I was yesterday. I have a long and rigorous road ahead of me, but I thoroughly enjoy pushing my limits and increasing my knowledge each day. The end of every day is one step closer to the beginning of the next journey.

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