| Job Title: | Director of Security Initiatives |
| Company: | Open Text Corporation (aka OpenText) |
| When: | July 2007 through to January 2009 |
| Location: | Based in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada managing global resources |
| Brief Description: | The Director of Security Initiatives created, coordinated, and managed the various security-related programs. people, and processes within a large, multi-national, multi-disciplined corporation. Though primarily a maker of software, OpenText, like all corporations, has a fiduciary responsibility to assure the physical security of it's workers as well as protect the integrity of it's data, it necessarily has confidential data of various forms and formats, like: trade secrets, financial data, sales forecasts, balance sheets. health records and other private information about employees.This role was specifically developed to assure a centralized department and consistent response to security questions of all kinds. |
In July 2007 OpenText had approximately 2,000 people strong growing to about 3,500 by 2009 with well over 50 offices in 35 countries spread over 6 continents. It's portfolio of products was measured in the hundreds as the corporate growth strategy has been by acquisition ... that is, by purchasing other (most often failed or failing) companies and integrating the products, office, and people into the organization. Each new company provides a new and often unique approach to security that needs to conform to standards (or show how their approach is better and change the standards instead).
It was a corporate mandate that where feasible, the products being made by OpenText were used by OpenText in the performance of daily operations and it was the responsibility of the Director of Security Initiatives to assure that those products met the security requirements of the corporation as well as that of the (often more stringent) security requirements of the customers of OpenText software. This was primarily performed from the Open Text Security Team made up of senior managers from all of Customer Support, Research and Development, Information Technology, Information Systems, Executive Management, Sales, and Administration. It provided guidance for future development and implementation of security solutions, set corporate security policies and procedures, and acted as a coordination point for any and all security incidents (even the physical sort like vandalism and the safety of employees within car parking lots).
It was a challenging job as security related jobs often are as more often then not security measures are thought of as little more than an expense, especially relatively small acquired companies that don't understand that their security profile has significantly changed by becoming part of a large, multinational corporation.
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