GDIT is special because they invest in their employees. While supporting one customer. I’ve moved from the infrastructure side to cyber to an information assurance role. I now have a full understanding of the different sides of the house, and that has made me a better cybersecurity person for the company.
After spending the first part of his career in information technology, Ryan took advantage of GDIT’s professional development opportunities to explore, and master, a career in cybersecurity.
Earning certifications to grow my cyber skills.
GDIT makes it very easy for you to enhance your career through education. Cyber's a pretty broad field, so having access to different certifications and trainings helps me learn all areas of my craft.
The most impactful training I’ve taken so far is CISM. This course helped me grow as a cybersecurity manager by helping me understand how to come at a challenge not as an analyst or operations contributor but as a cyber manager. It was extremely useful and is something I apply all the time in my role today.
Creating immediate impact for our customers. My team owns it.
My team directly supports our cyber customers by providing them with tools and data that they need to protect their networks. On a typical day, we do a lot of hunt-type exercises, pen-tests, and red-team efforts. We attack ourselves to ensure we can hold up against benign attacks versus waiting for someone else to do it first.
Recently, we had a cyber audit at a customer's site. None of our government representatives thought it was going to go well. My team stepped forward and took the reins on the project, and we ended up passing with flying colors. We were really able to guide our customer to the right direction for that audit and build their trust in us to steer them right in the future. I was very proud of my team that day.
Staying on the cutting edge of cybersecurity.
At GDIT, we are the innovators in cyber. We don’t rely on other vendors to do analyses for us. We are going out and creating custom products and custom code and custom data analytics to be able to solve those hard problems on our own.
We created an entire tool suite that ensures our customers are in compliance. This software combines data from our customers’ different cyber tools and maps them to their respective data sources. Then it delivers live, actionable reporting in a dashboard that our customers can view and act on immediately.
It’s an incredible, really innovative tool that our customers love. They love it so much, in fact, that they just awarded us a large contract for it! That is the type of innovative work that we are doing at GDIT.