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WITI Women | Laura Taylor

Laura TaylorLaura Taylor
President and CEO
Relevant Technologies, Inc

Laura Taylor is the chief technology officer and founder of Relevant Technologies, Inc., an information security and IT professional services firm headquartered north of Boston. Her research has been sought out by the FDIC, the FBI, the Whitehouse, and numerous private sector organizations, and publicly held Fortune 500 companies. She is currently a contracted ZDNet bi-weekly columnist.

Previously Taylor was director of security research at TechnologyEvaluation.Com, where she managed the research of security technologies and their vendors, identifying and qualifying key criteria necessary to assist IT decision makers in making best-choice infrastructure investments.

Taylor has also been employed as CIO of Schafer Corporation, where she was responsible for all corporate network security for highly sophisticated weapons development, reconnaissance, and bio-technology initiatives. While CIO of Schafer, Taylor managed the network engineering and development of all corporate networks and applications. Within a six month time-frame, Taylor redesigned Schafer's DNS tables, installed a new firewall, identified and resolved serious messaging bottlenecks, and deployed secure encrypted mobile computing for remote users.

While director of information security at Navisite, Taylor put in place a world-class security team, who later built a secure eCommerce site for the biggest financial holding company in the world, NatWest. This site has withstood on-going security attacks, and scrupulous audits by security technologists and financial auditors, and is subject to all FDIC and Federal Reserve Bank on-line banking regulations.

Taylor draws upon 17 years of real-life industry experience when writing and speaking about emerging security technologies and trends. She has been consulted by a number of publications including the Boston Business Journal, Byte Magazine, Computer World, and PC Magazine. Her research is currently syndicated to numerous online publications including Internet.com, eSecurityOnline.com, and SecurityFocus.com.

In 1998, she received Giga Information Group's ExperNet status. In 1993-94, she received three awards while working at Sun Microsystems - two Outstanding Performance Awards, and a CIS Security Award. Upon graduation from Skidmore College in 1983, Taylor was elected into Periclean Academic Honor Society.

Laura Taylor answers these questions:
1. What was your first job in technology?
2. Who has been your most significant mentor? Why?
3. What has been your greatest challenge and what strategies did you use to overcome obstacles?
4. Who has been the most influential person in your life? Why?
5. What lessons have you learned that would be valuable to women beginning their careers in technology?
6. What new technology do you believe will have the most positive impact on the world in the next 20 years? The most negative impact?

On the lighter side:
1. If you could have dinner with any 2 people (living or not), who would they be?
2. What was the last book you read? What books do you love to recommend?
3. If you couldn't do what you are doing now, what profession would you choose?
4. What is your definition of success?

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