CSO Compass Team

Mike Jordan

Mike Jordan has spent decades working with the latest cutting-edge technology in a number of fields. He most recently managed educational software product development at seven sites for Cengage Learning, introducing the Scrum framework and agile development practices as well as structured security methods. These Cengage SaaS products included homework, assessment, outcomes management and reference material applications for higher education. Mike has managed software development, documentation, QA, testing, SaaS operations and security at a number of companies in such diverse fields as SaaS (Cengage Learning and PlaceWare), game systems (3DO), high-performance systems (Ridge Computers) and embedded systems (Network Computing Devices).

Mike has provided security expertise for companies ranging from large financial services companies to online game startups. These reviews have dealt with topics including security architecture, risk analysis, code review and third-party suppliers. Mike has held the position of CISO for a major SaaS company. His SaaS and Security experience has included Forensics, Incident Response and Security Planning.

Mike is a Certified Information Security Manager (CSIM) and a Certified Scrum Master (CSM). Mike is a current member of the Scrum Alliance, IEEE Computer Society, ISACA (Silicon Valley Chapter), OWASP, ISSA and Cloud Security Alliance (CSA). You can find out more about Mike at LinkedIn or on the Multicians web site. He graduated from Arizona State University with a BSEE degree.

Jeff Rudy

Jeff Rudy has held a number of Executive positions in software development and product management for SaaS based collaborative applications and software development tools. His SaaS based experience includes leading the IT effort for large scale deployments of HR based applications to a broad range of Fortune 500 clients in Financial Services, Consulting, and consumer products. In development tools Jeff has led the development and release of industry leading award winning SOA based security tools used by major financial service customers. He also led the efforts for the first versions of Borland's leading Java Development environment Jbuilder and enterprise tools including Delphi Enterprise.

Jeff has developed Security policies and procedures to meet the requirements of both startup organizations as well as major public companies. These policies cover all levels of security including network, data, and physical security as well as disaster recovery planning.

Jeff is a member of InfraGard which is an FBI and private sector alliance to promote protection of critical information systems and provides channels for the exchange of information about threats and vulnerabilities.

Jeff holds the CISM certification (Certified Information Security Manager) and is a member of the ISACA (Silicon Valley Chapter,) and the IEEE Computer Society. He is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University with a B.S. in Math and Computer Science and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School Of Management.

George Cowsar

George Cowsar has spent his career on the cutting edge of systems and development technology. Most recently he has developed Windows Mobile and iPhone multimedia applications, and lead an effort to use Amazon EC2 resources to measure and improve the scalability of J2EE-based web applications. In other recent projects George served as Software Architect while developing an extensive dynamic Ruby on Rails application with support for Flash, Quicktime, and MPEG video for animated text and graphics for web presentations.

George has extensive experience in computer vision and digital image processing for surveillance and industrial monitoring, including object recognition and tracking, from his architectural and managerial work at Detigo Systems. At Cisco Systems, he served as architect and team lead for the IP/TV streaming video product line, with technical contributions in RTP/RTCP, RTSP and RSVP protocols and applications.

Prior to Cisco he worked on web browser technology for Network Computing Devices, and did extensive development on networking and host connectivity protocols and operating system internals such as dynamic linking, IPC, and real time messaging infrastructure for Apple Computer.

Other commercial software that George has developed includes WinTerm (shipped with Microsoft Windows) and the Visible Computer 8086 and 6502 assembly language teaching systems.

George studied Electrical Engineering at Texas A & M University.