Biosketch for Joel M. Snyder, PhD.

Joel Snyder is a senior partner with Opus One, a consulting firm in Tucson, Arizona. He spends most of his time on the road helping people build larger, faster, safer, and more reliable networks. His professional travels have taken him to San Francisco, St. Petersburg, Singapore, Sydney, Santiago, Slough and other cities with names not starting with S.

Joel has been working with networks and information security since 1981, when he started consulting on X.25 and public key cryptography, and he's been very busy ever since. He has been a member of the ISO and ITU committees which write network standards, has authored several books and hundreds of articles. He was the conference director for VPNCON, and has advised and trained thousands of people privately and at conferences around the world on networking, security, messaging, and VPNs. His home network has run almost every protocol you can think of, and he regularly changes his WEP keys.

He's helped over 200 private and public organizations with their networking, email, and security problems. Snyder's clients include organizations throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia, including Apple, AT&T, Cisco, Citibank, Deutsche Bank, Daimler-Benz, Fidelity Investments, Hoffman-La Roche, Juniper, Honeywell, MCI, Motorola, Nokia, Schlumberger, State of California, the Swiss Stock Exchange, Thomson Financial, the UN, Visa, Xerox, the White House, and World Bank.

As an author and speaker, he's received numerous awards, recognizing his work to improve enterprise IT. His articles have been published in over a dozen different journals and industry magazines around the world. His product testing work in the email, networking, and security space is well known and respected as some of the most comprehensive in the field. He is a fierce believer in the value of empowering people, and knows that you can serve a red wine with fish.

Snyder's baccaulureate degree is in Latin, and his PhD is in Management Information Systems. His dissertation is on computer networks in the former Soviet Union. Almost everything he wrote in graduate school is now classified and he's not allowed to read it anymore, which is good because it wasn't very interesting to begin with. His favorite color Crayola crayon is Burnt Sienna.

Joel lives and works in Tucson with Jan Trumbo and their cats, Wanda Rutkiewicz and Oliver Mellors.