Michael Ramer has been in information and cybersecurity since 2005, working across the financial sector, government, telecommunications, managed professional services, and aerospace. But that summary doesn't actually explain who he is or why these ventures exist.
In the early 1990s, I was introduced to my first computers (PC 386 DX2 with TURBO BUTTON). I spent countless hours drying out my eyeballs editing config.sys files to squeeze a couple more megs of RAM so I could run X-COM: UFO Defense, and endlessly clicking through Yahoo! groups to check out the latest band names. I taught myself to build custom PCs (before that was a thing) and then I watched the movie Hackers. That was it — I became obsessed with understanding how systems actually work, how they break, and how to defend them.
That obsession has been with me ever since. Here I am, 30 years later.
While still at university, I cut my teeth as a LAN admin for a college subnet, and let me tell you, there's no learning experience quite like rebuilding OpenLDAP on a Slackware box after a kernel panic, Thursday night before the faculty comes back in the morning to grade papers. A short time later in 2005, I fully entered the cybersecurity industry, and my work has spanned policy development, risk management, auditing and compliance, incident response, cloud security, offensive security, IT architecture, and SDLC governance — just to name a few. In all actuality, I've spent most of that time learning how organizations get their security posture wrong, and what it looks like when things fail — sometimes epically.
The Slackware moment was probably one of the more formative, as it taught me that you can't advise on infrastructure if you don't actually know what's happening "in the shell" — PowerPoints don't provide the nuance or wonderful pressure from something breaking, needing to fix it, for some reason it breaking again, and fixing it once more. Those early lessons created the foundation upon which Ramer Enterprise is built: curiosity, tenacity, integrity, and joy.
These days, in my spare time I maintain a homelab complete with managed switches, VLANs, traffic shaping, network intrusion detection, etc., partly because it's useful (better half might disagree) and partly to stay sharp on the infrastructure side. Call it professional discipline or controlled obsession — probably both. We need to keep those IoTs in check, or they'll take over.
I'm 43, living in Oregon with my amazing wife and our two astounding daughters. When I'm not completely geeked out on the latest tech, I'm most often hiking, practicing karate, traveling, SCUBA diving, watching F1, or in the middle of some "home-improvement" project that may or may not have been a good idea.
Send me a note at contact@ramerenterprise.com and tell me what you're working on.