Grounded Security

Cybersecurity advice for small organizations.

Sam AydletteFairfax County, Virginia

Why this matters

Your customers trust you with sensitive information. You want to honor that trust, but many small organizations cannot staff a dedicated security role. You need solid advice that you can act on.

Besides your customers, insurance providers, regulators and lawyers are also asking how you are protecting sensitive information. And of course, hackers are not asking. A well reasoned, achievable security plan could be the difference between a bad day and a bad year.

Who I work with

Small law firms. Small medical, dental and optometry practices. Counties, cities, towns and nonprofits.

Whether it is your bar's confidentiality rules, the HIPAA Security Rule, a cyber insurance questionnaire, or a public records request, the question you are being asked is the same: can you show how you protect what you hold?

What I do

Advisory only. I never log into, install, or manage anything you own.

Discovery sessionI dig into how your systems, processes and people actually work, then write up what you can realistically fix first, and how$1,000
Baseline assessmentI assess your organization against a tailored NIST SP 800-53 control set, mapped to the rules you answer to: bar confidentiality obligations, the HIPAA Security Rule, or your insurer's questionnaire$7,500
Full assessmentI run the same method across a larger or more complex organization. Tell me roughly how many staff and how many sitesQuoted

Follow-ups are $500 an hour, flat rate.

Most of my recommendations are cheap. The incidents they prevent are not.

Why me

Sam Aydlette. I bring over a decade in cybersecurity, in both federal government and private sector roles. I have led continuous monitoring and vulnerability management programs covering dozens of major cloud services, written federal policy on vulnerability scanning, and run the scans myself. Before any of this, I was a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne. It is also where the "grounded" in Grounded Security comes from: advice that works on the ground, for the people who have to carry it out.

Most of my time has been spent where strategy, regulation, engineering and security meet. That is an unusual place to stand, and it is the reason this practice exists. I can sit down with you, understand what the business does and what it is on the hook for, and say what to do about security in terms that connect to both.

Get started

sam@groundedsecurity.io

  1. Email me what kind of organization you are and what prompted you to reach out.
  2. I reply within two business days with a few questions about your setup, then what is worth doing and what it costs. If the answer is nothing, I will say so.
  3. We book the hour. Evenings and weekends, video or phone.