All work
North Highland

Building the secure digital core

A global security foundation spanning cloud, network, data, and platform that cut mean time to detect by 75%, mean time to respond by 60%, and average vulnerability age from 45 days to 12.

CISO2014 to 2026
75%
Reduction in mean time to detect
60%
Reduction in mean time to respond
45 to 12
Days of average vulnerability age
99%
Critical patch compliance

Context

A consultancy with people in five countries, client data on their laptops, and a growing cloud estate needed detection and response that worked at the speed of a distributed workforce.

Approach

We consolidated telemetry into a single detection platform and automated the enrichment and triage steps analysts were doing by hand, which is where most of the MTTD improvement came from. [verify: tooling and whether the SOC was in-house, hybrid, or MDR]

Vulnerability management moved from quarterly scans to continuous discovery with owner-level SLAs, and patch compliance became a reported metric at the leadership level.

Every metric was published monthly, so the security team and the business shared one view of risk.

Related writing

More work

Cinch: a production collaboration platform built on evidence, not demos

Independent · 2025 to present

A multi-tenant Slack alternative in production at cinchme.app, with tenant isolation proven in the database, a browser suite run against the production image, and a release gate that refuses to promote traffic without evidence.

2,566
Unit and integration tests
92
Browser scenarios against the production image

Five certifications, first audit, zero critical findings

North Highland · 2014 to 2026

A risk and compliance program aligned to ISO 27001, HITRUST, HIPAA, GDPR, and UK Cyber Essentials that certified on the first pass and opened more than a billion dollars of revenue.

5
Standards certified on the first audit
0
Critical findings