Announcements
Ostrich Cyber-Risk Welcomes Cybersecurity Industry Veteran Charlie Barker as Senior Vice President of Sales
Charlie Barker, Award-Winning Cybersecurity Sales and Marketing Leader, joins Ostrich Cyber-Risk as the Senior Vice President of Sales to lead client acquisition and expand the national sales team.
Award-Winning Cybersecurity Sales and Marketing Leader and Former National Sales Manager
at Verizon Enterprise Solutions, Brings Risk Expertise to Ostrich Cyber-Risk.
Ostrich Cyber-Risk™, the unified cyber risk management company, today announced that Charlie Barker has joined the Executive Leadership Team as Senior Vice President of Sales. Barker joins Ostrich Cyber-Risk most recently from Verizon Enterprise Solutions, with prior positions held at Fortinet and AT&T.
Barker is a cybersecurity sales veteran, having spent the past four years at Verizon Enterprise Solutions, where he led a national sales team selling Verizon’s managed security solutions and their portfolio of cyber security professional services. As the National Cyber Security Sales Manager, Barker achieved over 200 percent of quota, and was named the top sales leader in all of the Verizon Advanced Solutions organization.
Prior to Verizon, Barker held sales roles at Fortinet, a provider of enterprise-level next-generation firewalls and network security solutions, and at AT&T telecommunications company.
While at AT&T, Barker was first appointed sales manager, where he was named ‘Sales Manager of the Year’, and was selected as one of 50 out of 50,000 applicants to participate in the exclusive Accelerated Development Program.
During the Accelerated Development Program, he was promoted to Director of Cybersecurity Marketing, a position he held for five years. During this role, Barker won multiple awards and created the AT&T Cybersecurity Insights™ Report, where he was a recognized as a valued thought leadership contributor.
“Charlie is an outstanding addition to our Ostrich Cyber-Risk team, as he brings a deep understanding of risk methodologies, and what it takes to deliver client success,” said Greg Spicer, Co-Founder, and CRO of Ostrich Cyber-Risk. “As we continue our rapid growth and continue to offer more cyber risk management services, Charlie’s cybersecurity expertise and his strong background in building top performing sales teams will accelerate Ostrich Cyber-Risk’s growth quickly. We are thrilled to have him onboard!”
At Ostrich Cyber-Risk, Barker will be responsible for client acquisition, expanding the national sales team, enhancing the lead generation and prospect engagement approach, and collaborating with the Executive Leadership Team to develop and execute short- and long-term business strategy.
Charlie Baker, Senior Vice President of Sales
“Having been in Cybersecurity Sales and Marketing the past decade, I have learned from security leaders and customers that the number one priority is helping leadership understand risk in dollars and cents,” said Barker. “Everyone knows they are at risk, but quantifying that risk is crucial, particularly to obtain budget to build out the security posture, and then minimize the expense due to a breach. Quantifying the risk will help prevent them from making massive investments after it’s too late.”
When not working, Barker is an avid sports fan who enjoys spending time with family, and their two family dogs, Lilly & Bentley.
To learn more about the Birdseye™ cyber risk management SaaS solution, visit our Product Section.
Ostrich Cyber-Risk Welcomes Risk Management Expert Jack Whitsitt as Director of Risk Quantification
Jack Whitsitt, former InfoSec Risk Quantification Program Architect at Freddie Mac, joins Ostrich Cyber-Risk as the Director of Risk Quantification to inform product direction and lead the Professional Services division.
Former InfoSec Risk Quantification Program Architect at Freddie Mac Brings Risk Management Expertise to Lead Ostrich Cyber-Risk's Professional Services Division.
Ostrich Cyber-Risk™, the unified cyber risk management company, today announced that Jack Whitsitt has joined the Executive Leadership Team as Director of Risk Quantification. Whitsitt joins Ostrich Cyber-Risk most recently from Freddie Mac, with prior positions held at Bank of America and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Whitsitt is a leader in the Cyber Risk Quantification (CRQ) community with more than two decades of Information Security specific experience. He spent the past six years advancing the state of the art by expanding and refining existing CRQ, including FAIR™, into targeted best practices. In his role as Director of Risk Quantification, Whitsitt will help inform product direction and will lead the new Ostrich Cyber-Risk Professional Services division tasked with getting customers off the ground with risk quantification while avoiding or mitigating common pitfalls.
“I am thrilled to have Jack Whitsitt join our team at Ostrich Cyber-Risk as Director of Risk Quantification,” said Yiannis Vassiliades, Chief Product Officer. “Whitsitt’s deep expertise as an innovator and practitioner in information security risk quantification will be applied to lead our new Professional Services division, enabling customers to get better outcomes by implementing best practices to define and scope cyber risk scenarios.”
Informed by a background that has ranged from working with the bits and bytes of security to assisting with national and international multi-stakeholder coordination, Whitsitt 's 20 years of experience converges the disciplines of technical information security, decision science, and program building into a focused way of looking at risk measurement. His tested history of applying this converged knowledge has helped organizations–large and small, public and private–break down difficult risk-related questions into solvable problems. This assistance has been used to untangle seemingly intractable individual decisions as well as to architect standing risk quantification programs.
Jack Whitsitt, Director of Risk Quantification
“After many years of providing CRQ support to individual organizations and working through advocacy and educational groups such as the FAIR™ Institute and the Society of Information Risk Analysis (SIRA) in Board and Advisory capacities, I’m excited to be able to stand on the shoulders of the community at such a dynamic organization and make my own contributions to expanding the technological options available to decision-makers,” said Jack Whitsitt. “In particular, I’m excited to help teams, through a combination of technology and facilitation, apply subjective context (such as NIST CSF) more effectively to CRQ and to further connect the dots between classic GRC and ‘risk measurement’.”
To learn more about the Birdseye™ cyber risk management SaaS solution, visit our Product Section.
Ostrich Cyber-Risk Welcomes Chip Whitmer as Vice President of Software Development
Ostrich Cyber-Risk Appoints Chip Whitmer as Vice President of Software Development. Former VP of Platform Architecture at Mastercard Open Banking, and API Developer, Brings Extensive Software Development and Leadership Expertise to Ostrich Cyber-Risk.
Former VP of Platform Architecture at Mastercard Open Banking, and API Developer, Brings Extensive Software Development and Leadership Expertise to Ostrich Cyber-Risk.
Ostrich Cyber-Risk™, the unified cyber risk management company, today announced that Chip Whitmer has joined the Executive Leadership Team as Vice President of Software Development. Whitmer joins Ostrich Cyber-Risk most recently from Finicity, a Mastercard Company, a leading provider of financial services.
Whitmer is an accomplished and respected industry veteran in both FinTech and Cybersecurity, with more than 30 years of development and international team-building experience, and more than 15 years of experience in management and architecture, building SaaS platforms using Agile methodologies for financial and data services companies globally.
Most notably, Whitmer led the release of a public API in just four months for Finicity’s internal aggregation engine, which was the engine for Mvelopes, Finicity’s award-winning online envelope budgeting system. The aggregation engine collected personal financial information and transactions from thousands of distinct banks and other financial institutions; the new API made this functionality available to other software developers. In 2016, this API was named ‘API World’s 2016 Finance API of the Year.’ When Finicity was acquired by Mastercard, Whitmer’s aggregation platform became Mastercard Open Banking.
As the VP of Software Development at Finicity, Whitmer helped build a new Data Services division, that included supervising all development on the Finicity aggregation platform and managing the migration of the platform to AWS and the production data from Oracle to Amazon Aurora. Whitmer also represented Finicity and later Mastercard in the industry standards group FDX (Financial Data Exchange).
As the VP of Platform Architecture at Mastercard Open Banking, Whitmer defined standards for development and deployment of microservices, features, and products inside the Open Banking platform. He designed solutions to bring Finicity’s codebase and processes into conformance with Mastercard gold standards, and designed solutions for integrating Finicity clients with Mastercard’s Developer Portal.
“I am thrilled to have Chip Whitmer join our team at Ostrich Cyber-Risk as Vice President of Software Development,” said Yiannis Vassiliades, Chief Product Officer. “Whitmer’s wealth of experience with building and growing impactful engineering teams and developing large scale platforms will be crucial as we continue to expand and roll out new features in our Birdseye™ cyber risk management platform.” ”
In his role as VP of Software Development at Ostrich Cyber-Risk, Whitmer will be responsible for expanding the Birdseye cyber risk management platform and growing the development team.
Chip Whitmer, VP of Software Development
“It's exciting for me to be joining the Ostrich team,” said Chip Whitmer. “This is an energetic startup with a solid product, great people, and big plans. Together we will enable our clients to understand their current cyber risk exposure and the options available for improvements. We will help them prioritize those options for maximum effectiveness and provide feedback as they work their plan to increase their overall security. This is going to be fun!”.
Whitmer is also a member of the world-famous Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square, in Salt Lake City.
To learn more about the Birdseye™ solution, visit our Product Section.
Ostrich Cyber-Risk Launches Proprietary Cyber-Risk Quantification (CRQ) Simulator with Unlimited Threat Scenarios to Communicate Risk Impact in Financial Values
Birdseye™ CRQ Simulator helps security and risk leaders prioritize and communicate cyber and operational risk to improve business decisions and enable risk-reduction ROI calculations.
Birdseye™ CRQ Simulator helps security and risk leaders prioritize and communicate cyber and operational risk to improve business decisions and enable risk-reduction ROI calculations.
Ostrich Cyber-Risk, the unified qualitative and quantitative cyber risk management company that enables security and risk leaders to identify, prioritize and quantify cyber and operational risks, today debuted the Ostrich Cyber-Risk Birdseye™ CRQ Simulator designed to define cyber risk in financial values to aid informed business decisions for reducing risk.
Security and risk leaders have unprecedented pressures to protect their organization against ongoing threats including ransomware, data breaches and insider threats. Quantifying these risks is necessary to understand, evaluate, prioritize and communicate the risks in financial terms. This lends to improving decision-making, optimizing spending and addressing growing regulatory requirements by identifying and managing the most impactful risks first.
“We use Birdseye to both assess and quantify risk. The CRQ Simulator helps us plan risk-reduction scenarios to determine Annual Loss Expectancy results in dollars per year, and communicate that risk impact in financial terms,” said Arlan McMillan, Chief Security Officer, International Law Firm.
The CRQ Simulator is a new module in the SaaS Birdseye™ solution. It works based on Monte Carlo random number generation, probabilistic models, similar to the Open FAIR™ model, with the option to leverage granular Resistance Strength variables for improved Annual Loss Expectancy (ALE) probability outcomes.
“Our new CRQ Simulator module comes with an intuitive editor to build unlimited threat scenario simulations and the ability to run them thousands of times to gain better confidence in the Annual Loss Expectancy outcomes,” said Yiannis Vassiliades, Chief Product Officer, Ostrich Cyber-Risk. “This enables security and risk teams to compare options for addressing the risk, measure the acceptability of each outcome, and find the solution with the highest ROI to mitigate the simulated threat. This is essential to make cybersecurity program improvements not in a vacuum, but as a business decision.”
By using the full Birdseye™ solution with the CRQ Simulator module organizations can better understand their cybersecurity program effectiveness and gaps, justify strategic decisions by measuring the ROI of security projects and budget, and communicate risk via shareable reports with the board, non-technical stakeholders and third parties, like insurers.
To learn more, visit our product section.