Ms. Ellen McDermott is a Partner in the Technology Practice of RIDGE-LANE LP.
Ms. McDermott began her career at the National Security Agency (NSA), leading an R&D program exploring issues associated with the secure interoperation of heterogeneous networks and designing security related protocols. When she left government service, she joined BBN. In that position, she designed and developed a security architecture for the Defense Research Project Agency’s Survivable Adaptive Network program.
Ms. McDermott worked at the Digital Equipment Corporation as a member of the Distributed Systems Security Architecture Team, focusing on delegation and audit architectures. Following, she held leadership roles in start-up ventures: Open Vision where she performed security analyses and recommended security strategies for financial firms, and Open Market Inc. (OMI) where she analyzed and identified security flaws in the complete suite of OMI’s offerings as well as designed a security infrastructure supporting next generation products, where both companies had successful initial public offering’s (IPO’s).
Following, she joined IBM as a security architect, where she supported the Network and Distributed Systems division, as well as Lotus/Iris. She then moved to Wall Street, taking a position as Corporate Vice President and Chief Information Risk Officer at JPMorgan Chase. In that position, she built and managed the global Information Security and Information Risk teams; represented the company at security related financial industry groups, conferences, standards bodies and regulatory agencies; and provided guidance and technical support on general engineering and security related issues to the Venture Capital Group, Global Information Risk Management Group, and Information Security community.
Ms. McDermott then joined Microsoft, where she served as a member of the Security Technology Unit, as an architect focusing on auditing and security management, to better enable Microsoft products to meet compliance rules and regulations, as well as laying a foundation to combat zero day attacks.
Ms. McDermott’s has co-authored papers on security, including Information Security is Information Risk Management, Jonah: Experience Implementing PKIX Reference Freeware, and Establishing End-to-End Trust. Her educational background includes a B.S. from Boston College with majors in computer science and marketing, and a M.S. in computer science from the University of Massachusetts.
