About Herzog Enclave
Thirty years of making sure sensitive data ends up where it belongs — and nowhere else.
That sentence is the whole career. Everything else is detail.
The throughline
It started in the U.S. Air Force, on tactical satellite and microwave communications — keeping critical information moving reliably and securely in conditions where failure wasn’t an option. That set the pattern I’ve followed ever since: not technology for its own sake, but protecting and moving information that actually matters.
From there came the decades of hands-on engineering that don’t make it onto conference slides — UNIX and Linux systems, enterprise networks, security operations. The infrastructure layer where things genuinely run and genuinely break. I’ve spent my career as an operator, not a spectator, and it shows in how I work.
Eventually that led into enterprise cybersecurity, and then to a deep specialization in its least glamorous, most consequential corner: data protection. Encryption. Key management. Hardware security modules. The unforgiving mechanics of making data useless to anyone who isn’t supposed to have it — and making sure the people who are supposed to have it never notice the difference. This is the core of what I do, and it’s where I’ve gone deepest.
On private AI, I’ve done the work — not just the talking
The newest frontier is running AI privately, and it’s crowded with people promising transformation who have never deployed anything.
I’m not one of them. I run production-grade infrastructure of my own, including large language models on local hardware, with sensitive data that never leaves the premises. So when I tell you that private, on-your-own-terms AI is achievable — that your people can have powerful tools without handing your data to a third party — it isn’t a theory I read about. It’s something I built, and something I use in my own work every day.
The breadth is the reassurance
Along the way I’ve done most of what surrounds all of this: server and network administration across UNIX and Windows, physical security and surveillance systems, application development, inside- and outside-plant infrastructure.
I don’t lead with that range, because you’re not looking to hire a generalist — you’re looking for someone who’s genuinely deep where it counts. But it does mean one thing worth saying plainly: when we sit down and look at your environment, very little of it will be unfamiliar to me. Whatever’s actually in your stack, I’ve probably worked on it before. Nothing there is likely to surprise me.
Credentials, briefly
CISSP-certified. A master’s in Business Information Systems, finished at the top of my graduating class, with doctoral work in leadership now underway. Decades of enterprise security experience behind all of it.
The letters matter less than the years — but you should know both are there.
How I work
No hype, in either direction. The AI world sells transformation; the security world sells fear by the pound. I’d rather tell you plainly what your real risk is, what’s worth doing about it, and what isn’t — then scope the work so you always know exactly what you’re getting and what it costs.
If the honest answer is that you need less than you feared, that’s the answer you’ll get. That’s rarer than it should be, and it’s the whole reason to work with one seasoned person instead of a machine that bills by the hour.
Based in North Dakota. I work with clients wherever they are.