Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:06
Welcome, everybody to web and beyond live for this October 26 2020. I’m Marie Sidney-Smith, President of W three consulting and managing director of WCC web services, which provides affordable web hosting and managed WordPress hosting and domain registration services and all that fun stuff for small business. And so I’m so excited to have you all here for this edition. As you all know, it is National Cybersecurity Awareness Month. And these past few weeks, I have been going through and talking to folks and explaining things all around cybersecurity, so that you can all stay more cyber resilient. And today, I am just really excited. We’re gonna we’re gonna cover all kinds of fun things about how to really use cybersecurity as a function for being more cyber resilient, but really using it as a business competitive advantage. Many of us don’t think about cybersecurity from that perspective. It’s all fear based, response based, reactionary stuff. And what I really want to do today is really talk about this from a more proactive perspective, and really thinking about this as a pro, as opposed to how to mitigate risk and reaction. And to do that today, I have with me, Vince Crisler, he is the CEO of dark cubed. It is a SaaS tool, and he’s going to explain it more, I cannot possibly do it justice. But Vince himself is a cybersecurity expert with more than 20 years of information technology and cybersecurity leadership in government and private sector roles. And so with that, I’m going to bring Vince on ivens How’s it going?

Vince Crisler 1:41
Great. Ray, how are you?

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:42
Good, good. So I cannot possibly do your CV justice. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and, and and what brought you to this point of being the proprietor but also the the brain genius behind dark cubed? Well, thank you for that. You know, I like this, this focus of this overlap of small business and cybersecurity, and I’ve always been very entrepreneurial, started my first company in high school doing some web design. And I remember getting hired to do this web design for this company in New Jersey. And so as a high schooler driving to New Jersey to talk with a customer is pretty cool.

Vince Crisler 2:21
I got into kind of security in it pretty early. A woman in my town, who was also very entrepreneurial, decided to start the first internet service provider in southeastern Ohio. And she hired me as her system, admin, tech support, web design everything else. And so I’ve been hooked ever since. I’ve been very fortunate my career to have some really cool opportunities. The first part of my career was active duty Air Force, I was a communications officer got to go to Germany for three years work on some pretty cool missions there. Following Germany, I was sent to the Pentagon where I got to work in the National Military Command Center in the White House, National Military Command Center and Pentagon. Following the Pentagon, I went to the White House communications agency where I got to travel as a presidential communications officer on the road with the President. And then from there, I was loaned as an active duty officer to the White House to be the chief information security officer for the unclassified networks, which was a great eye opening experience a chance to secure one of the most heavily targeted networks in the world, in lock things down and protect things. Following the White House time, I had an opportunity to go over to the Department of Homeland Security and work on some of their National Cybersecurity missions. How do you protect the federal government and critical infrastructure from nation state threats, it was just just a really cool mission, amazing people there. And it was actually during that experience that I kind of started to come up with the foundational ideas for dark cube that kind of had these themes of cybersecurity is too expensive, too complex, there’s got to be a better way. Most small businesses are left out, you know, if you look at, it’s a very crowded, noisy cybersecurity market, a lot of marketing a lot of advertising. But I like to say 99% of the companies out there can’t afford cybersecurity the way it’s being delivered today. I kinda had a passion to change that. And so I started my own company focused on small and mid sized companies, and how do you rethink the way you deliver cybersecurity? How do you make it accessible to small and mid sized companies? And you know, one of the things that I really enjoy is talking to folks education, talking, you know, how do you take this complex topic that everybody likes to fearmonger around and make it accessible to small business owners?

Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:26
Fantastic. Thank you. And this is, as you were all noting why I have Vince here today, I think this is just such a prescient and important aspect of all of our world. And so what I’ve done is I’ve broken this down for you all, and we’re getting lots of chats in the messages with people with wild faces for you.

So thank you to everybody who’s engaging and if you have questions, feel free to throw them into the you know, we have multiple tools where people are watching so those who are watching from the webinar chat, you have your q&a panel, you can feel free to throw questions in there. For Vince as we make our way through our time together, but just to start out here, I thought we would kind of bucket this into three different areas where competitive advantage can be utilized. First up is productivity. And in that space where business productivity can be conditioned, and then we can talk about public relations and marketing. And then we can close out with kind of employee issues, which which can be attraction, retention and engagement. And so just like starting right