North Waltham, England, United Kingdom
Senior Cyber Security leader with end-to-end accountability for cyber risk, security operations, and incident response and crisis management within a regulated UK legal environment. I specialise in building and maturing cyber security capabilities that align to business objectives—bridging technical delivery, risk management, and governance. My experience spans Security Operations, incident response, and enterprise security strategy, with a focus on enabling secure business growth rather than acting as a blocker. In my current role as Head of Cyber Security, I lead a Security Operations function and oversee GRC alignment, with responsibility for protecting approximately 650 users and over 100 critical business systems. I have built a SecOps capability from the ground up, embedding detection, response, and monitoring processes while introducing Zero Trust principles across identity, endpoint, and access control. I operate as a trusted advisor to senior leadership, translating cyber risk into business impact and providing clear, actionable insight to governance forums. My work has included delivering Cyber Essentials Plus certification, strengthening ISO 27001 alignment, and establishing formal incident response and crisis management frameworks. Prior to this, I worked within a global organisation aligned to a corporate CISO structure, where I was responsible for IT and cyber security delivery across UK operations, including budget ownership, compliance with UK Government / MOD requirements, and multi-site transformation programmes. My core focus is on building resilient, scalable security capabilities that balance protection, usability, and commercial priorities—ensuring security supports the organisation rather than constrains it.
To follow
After 2 years I was promoted into the role of IT Lead / Head of IT as well as taking on the additional roles of ITSO and deputy Security controller. I pride myself on my ability to keep the business need at the forefront in all of my decisions and use this when assessing the direction to take while maintaining our systems, data and staff security, and have always managed to justify changes to the senior leadership, and end users keeping all levels of staff in support of our requirements. In my current role as IT Lead and ITSO, I have complete management and control of the IT infrastructure, how it is used, its lifecycles and its compliance and staff training. This also covers the security of our business, from the insider threat to perimeter protections, from Monitoring to utilizing the Least Privilege model with a degree of zero trust. On top of this I am a leading member of our European and UK IT leadership teams also for the Cyber side by sitting on the UK ITSO team reporting into the corporate CISO office directly. I have managed a multitude of projects in this role covering everything from site migrations to complete policy a security overhauls, I have guided the business through our certifications and our compliance of both corporate as well as UK Government / MOD compliance and most recently I have compelted a project that has maximised the business functionality while design a new solution that will ultimately work for all of the UK companies. As part of all of these projects they have covered multiple sites and staff of varying experience from trainees to experienced professionals. Utilising the experience, I have gained I am able to implement this into all elements of my work from the management of people, technology, budgets and apply this all to our Policy and procedure sets to ensure the compliance to all our governance needs while keeping the business running as optimally as possible.
After few years with L3Harris ASA I was promoted to the role of Technical Lead, within this role I took on greater responsibility with the running of the IT within the organisation, from reviewing and updating the policies to ensure the IT team was always working to the best it could. I became an escalation point for the IT department and the liaison between the technical level and the senior management team. I thrived at having the responsibility and authority and soon took on taking control of our annual budgeting and allocation, including the split between CAPEX and OPEX. With the insight to the current and upcoming directives and compliance issues I managed to re design the over all architecture of our networks and ensured that the support team had all the required knowledge and documentation to maintain the networks. My colleagues trusted my decisions and always felt they could come to me with questions, concerns or even if they thought there was a better way of doing something.
Upon joining L3ASA as their Senior SYS Admin, I had to adjust to the change of pace from working in a School. I did soon find my feet and start to offer improvements to their current network and way of working. I offered improvements to the networks to ensure that they were running optimally and as efficiently as possible, this was achieved by changing views of other members of staff as well as the technology used and how it was used. Within these 3 years I received a business delivery award and 3 separate recognition awards, as well as gaining the trust and support of management team.
Identification and development of internal business and corporate network improvements, reviewing and updating all of our SyOPS, Processes and work instructions to align technology and capabilities with best working practices and UK Government and MOD controls, keeping the company’s best interest and security in the forefront. IT Lead & Cyber Officer for all of the L3Harris ICI EMEA business with a team of 7 multi-disciplined IT professionals. Provide practical, working and technical oversight and allocation of resource to the wider group of L3Harris companies, focusing upon IT infrastructure with both perimeter and Insider threat mitigations. Answerable to senior leadership of the ICI EMEA Segment within L3Harris. All work is adhered to L3Harris corporate directives but mainly the UK Government Security controls, while always pushing the L3Harris ways of working forward to ensure optimal network access and availability.
Network management on site of all internal infrastructure. Management of windows based system’s , Windows XP to Windows 7, Windows Server 2003 - 2008 including Active Directory, Group Policy and Exchange. Management of Sophos and Smoothwall for protection. Daily VMWare management of virtual suites for both students and staff remote access. Running of the 30+ strong MAC learning suite. Full management of DR recovery, supporting role in redesign and architecture on site. Management of one other apprentice team member, actively involved in people management, learning and mentorship.
Responsible for the daily management and running of all IT systems within a large Secondary school, as well as management of long-standing members of IT staff and the training of junior members of staff. Upgrading the networks and classroom hardware to best assist the teaching and learning. Reporting directly to the Head and the governors. Helping the IT teachers by giving tours of the server room to the students and giving them a chance to see infrastructure first hand.
Began building PC’s and Servers for customers ranging from small business to large such as BAE systems. Moving up to the support desk and began supporting and installing infrastructure to our wide range of customers around the South East. Became account manager for some of the customers and trained a junior in the workshop to complete our builds and testing.