Don Smith

Don Smith

A genuine Cybersecurity evanglist

We have a great deal to be thankful to Don Smith (Director CTU-CIC at Secureworks) for:

• He helped focus our spin-outs in the early stages.
• He was always there to focus our programme/modules.
• He’s always told us about the future of Cybersecurity.

Here is someone who has seen it all in Cybersecurity … and still loves his work. In life, you need people who just love what they are doing. So for me and Rich Marfarlane to get to interview him, is a real priviledge:

Don is always the first person on our list to give a keynote talk, as he always puts his heart and soul into it. You never leave a Don Smith presentation, without thinking more deeply about something. He’s helped us continually, and is always there to have a chat, and to be invited down and see cybersecurity operations in action. And so I remember visiting him in his DNS days, and used to love walking along Princes Street, and often had to double back a few times, as their office wasn’t easy to find.

From DNS to something amazing

As a Professor I am privileged to work with some amazing people and companies. I love seeing an SME winning business over companies which are much larger. For the large company it is just another contract, for a small business it is the great opportunity they have always dreamed off, or the contract that will keep the bank off their back. I have thus watched companies like Vacta grow from challenging roots on the back of real innovation and with the guts to take on large companies. Vacta have since merged with ECS, and the company has never looked back, and we have continued to provide them with amazing graduates (and now known as Ardarma).

So let’s go back to dnsm and who were a company who grew from their expertise from around identity and authentication.

They won business against companies that were 100s of times larger than them, because they were true experts in their area. This was before other companies jumped on the cybersecurity bandwagon. For dns they knew there was a growing business in solving identity solutions.

dns grew fast on the back of successful work, and was eventually taken over by SecureWorks, who were then taken over by Dell. I am proud to have observed the company grow, and we benefited greatly from the growth of the company and from their expertise … Don Smith, Richard Lewis, Stuart Fraser, Graeme Cox, and many others.

The “strange” dns logo

They had a strange name and also had one of the strangest logos ever, but where a fantastic company, who led the way for many others. For nearly a decade, we’ve worked with (Dell) SecureWorks in Edinburgh, and we’ve seen them grow and evolve.

I used to love visiting their offices as it was on Princess Street — yes you read that right — and each time they would add more people, with many coming from our courses. As many were our graduates, I was always greeted with a “Hi, Bill”. It was a company that felt like a family:

With people like Don Smith, who is one of the most knowledgeable people I have ever met, the Edinburgh setup was always going thrive and even found itself a new base in one of the nicest areas of Edinburgh:

and the great thing about the company, is that they have struck to their drive to be experts in Cybersecurity:

I remember Don Smith telling me that he had met with his new sales manager, and how the sales manager had pitched PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) as a core area of development, and that Don then spent the next hour or so telling him how bad PKI was. Classic!

A key part of their early grow was inspired by Graeme Cox (left image). I was lucky enough to meet him at our Merchiston Campus, and he drew out their solution for the Glow project in Scotland. This produced a common identity login infrastructure for all the schools in Scotland, and was truly innovative for its time. This type of approach is common now, but not then.

Graeme knew the problem, and produced the solution. While the Glow network was meant to share content across schools, it failed in almost every respect, apart from its amazing dns-designed identity and authentication infrastructure. If the contract had been given to a large company, they would have done the same old things and probably failed to actually deliver much, but dns got it, and produced something that was unmatched at the time. This work became the foundation of their whole business. But people like Graham shared his knowledge, while too many others try to protect it.

Don Smith (left) is now a Technology Director at SecureWorks (and at his happiest when probing bits and bytes), Richard Lewis helped us within our spin-outs (including the mighty Symphonic), and Stuart Fraser is leading on building blockchain based solutions for information sharing (Wallet.Services). The legacy of the company lives on, and continues to feed the local economy (and its place on an international stage). For me Edinburgh has provided me with everything I could ever ask for from a city, and I feel comforted that those who guided dns are still around to help support innovation.

Never have I seen such spirit from a company as it has evolved, and how it has matched its services to the market, but still stay dedicated to its core beliefs. A good part of this is due to the drive of one person — Don Smith, who has been there from the start and who has had as much drive and passion for his business than he had when he first started out. Like it or not, it’s people and not processes that often make the difference. The development of dns into SecureWorks has been a perfect example of how a company can grow within its existing base, but still keep driving forward.

Conclusions

Endless thanks to Don. The programmes we have at Edinburgh Napier, are inspired and built from all the things that Don told us about. He is a person who loves doing what he does. If you can, go and have a coffee with Don, and hear about building cybersecurity companies. I highlight recommend talking to Dr Jamie Graves, too.