Articles by 'Ken Phelan'

By Ken Phelan, Posted in Security

You've sat at this dinner. Eight security leaders around a table, good wine, better steak, and a conversational register I've come to think of as the auditor voice. Everyone has a mature program. Everyone's board is engaged. Everyone is "well positioned" on AI. By dessert you start to wonder whether your dinner companions are interviewing for their next role or rehearsing for their next examination — because nobody talks like that to people they trust. Here's the thing: I don't blame them. The perfo... read more.

• August 03, 2026

By Ken Phelan, Posted in Infrastructure

Everyone wants to talk about AI. Nobody wants to talk about the thing that's going to determine whether AI pays off: your data. Here's the uncomfortable truth I keep running into with clients. The models are fine. The models are, frankly, astonishing. If your AI initiative fails, it almost certainly won't be because the model wasn't smart enough. It will be because the model couldn't get to your data, or because getting it there cost more than the value it created. The Access Problem We spent the last fi... read more.

• July 22, 2026

By Ken Phelan, Posted in Security

Last night I had the privilege of introducing Check Point's Dan Taney to a room full of New York CISOs. Preparing that introduction sent me down a memory lane that turned out to be less about nostalgia and more about strategy. I want to share some of it here, because the story of our oldest partnership says a lot about how Gotham thinks about technology — and about what's coming next. The Original Partnership Myself and the rest of the Gotham leadership were Check Point partners from the beginning.... read more.

• July 16, 2026

By Ken Phelan, Posted in Infrastructure

So anyway, let me tell you about the robots. In 1950, Detroit employed over 220,000 auto workers. Good union jobs. Good wages. By 1970, half of them were gone. Not to Mexico. Not to China. To robots and assembly line automation that simply didn’t need much human labor. By 1982, another 400,000 jobs disappeared in just four years. Cities hollowed out. Communities devastated. Here’s the part that surprised me. Cars didn’t get cheaper. All that productivity. All that automation. A robot-ho... read more.

• May 21, 2026

By Ken Phelan, Posted in Security

Fort Pulaski was completed in 1847. Built as a response to the War of 1812, it was a state-of-the-art fort built to protect the port of Savannah. Its walls were 11 feet thick and the moat was eight feet wide. But the real genius lay in its location. On an island in the middle of the Savannah River, it was a full mile from the nearest land on Tybee Island. It could not be approached by land. The smoothbore cannons of the time had a range of about half a mile, therefore land-based cannons could not be brought... read more.

• May 15, 2025

By Ken Phelan, Posted in Security

I spent some time with the CrowdStrike team last month going through their annual Global Threat Report. If you haven’t seen it, please do. This should be required reading for every cyber operator - https://go.crowdstrike.com/2025-global-threat-report.html 79 is the percentage of breaches that occurred without malware. Hence the much-used quote, “hackers don’t break in, they log in.” For years a quick explanation of cyber-attacks read as follows: Software has vulnerabilities. Ha... read more.

• April 10, 2025

By Ken Phelan, Posted in Uncategorized

As many of us return to work and the world feels like it’s returning to normal, it can be easy to forget that the COVID-19 pandemic isn’t completely behind us. Cases are surging in parts of the country, and for a growing number of people, their initial case of COVID was just the beginning of an ongoing ordeal known as long COVID, post-COVID, or long-haul COVID. This terrible affliction has stricken one of the Gotham family and we are rallying around Jason. Jason is Fara Smith’s twin broth... read more.

• July 26, 2021

By Ken Phelan, Posted in Security

In response to a growing number of serious cyber threats and incidents, President Biden has issued an Executive Order (EO) regarding improving the nation’s cybersecurity. I don’t personally read a lot of EOs, but I read this one, and if you’re part of the cyber industry, you probably should too. Given that you probably won’t, I’ll do some summarizing for you. There’s stuff about cooperation and standards, but I’d like to draw your attention to the EO’s requir... read more.

• May 24, 2021

By Ken Phelan, Posted in Infrastructure, Security, Staffing, Support

In the early days of the COVID-19 crisis we saw many very large organizations quickly sending employees to work from home. At Gotham we weren’t surprised. We had helped many of these organizations set up the technologies behind this capability. It cost them nothing in productivity to send their employees home. If your organization found itself challenged in that effort, this article is for you. In the midst of this storm, it’s hard to guess what the “new normal” might look like on t... read more.

• April 02, 2020

By Ken Phelan, Posted in Uncategorized

Game theorists like to look at game play as a way of modeling human behavior. One of their favorite games is called the prisoner’s dilemma. You’ve probably heard of it. In summary, it goes like this: You and a partner commit a crime. You’re not caught in the act, but the police bring you both downtown for questioning. The police put you in separate rooms and question you. At this point, the following outcomes are possible: Option 1 - You both keep quiet and each spend one year in jail... read more.

• February 12, 2020