Mr. Kent started learning BASIC programming in 1981 and has over 30 years of diverse work experience that includes supporting, managing, and continual professional development in information technology, specifically in cyber security. He has worked as a Senior Security Consultant at NST since August 2019. In this role, he leads compliance consulting engagements for clients that range from the performance of mock audits and audit preparation, gap analysis and remediation tasks, NERC Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) Vulnerability Assessments for both medium and high impact BES facilities, RSAW development and staff augmentation for long-term program maintenance and development.
Prior to starting with Network + Security Technologies, Mr. Kent worked at NAES Corporation as a Senior NERC CIP Specialist. In that role, he supported Responsible Entities, primarily Generator Owners and Operators, in their NERC Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) compliance including monitoring development of related Reliability and CIP standards, conducting procedure and documentation reviews, auditing/reviewing cyber security implementations against the standard requirements, completing gap analysis or mock audits and writing reports of findings and providing other cyber and/or physical security recommendations in accordance with industry best practices.
Before working at NAES, Mr. Kent worked for Montana’s largest electricity producer as a Senior Compliance Professional and Manager of NERC Compliance from 2011-2017. In that role, he maintained compliance oversight on all applicable NERC Reliability and CIP Cyber Security Standards. Prior to that, he worked in the banking industry as a Technical Support Manager and Senior Security Analyst for five years, taught information technology courses at the college-level for seven years and served four years as an Infantry Officer in the U.S. Army.
He has earned several IT certifications including: CISSP, CISA, MCSE: Security, VCP and others. Mr. Kent has a B.S. in Accounting and M.S. in Human Resource Management.
