Sharmie Atwood - Senior Security Consultant

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Since joining Network & Security Technologies (N&ST), Ms. Atwood has leveraged her twenty-six years of experience in the information security profession to assist several Electrical Utility clients implement their NERC CIP Reliability Standards (CIP-002-CIP-009) compliance program. She has been qualified as an auditor to support Regional audits and selected to support multiple audits conducted by Southwest Power Pool (SPP) Regional Entity. Using this valuable experience, she has conducted “mock audits” for N&ST clients to assist and prepare them for actual Regional audits. In addition, Ms. Atwood has worked with N&ST clients directly on reviewing and improving documentation for NERC CIP compliance. Ms. Atwood has represented N&ST at utility industry conferences to include participation on panel discussions and presentations on most often violated Reliability Standards and recommendations for compliance improvement.

Prior to joining N&ST in late 2008, Ms. Atwood was the Chief Privacy Officer for a multi-national human resource outsourcing company and was responsible for the end-to-end security and data privacy program addressing global data privacy regulations and US breach notification laws affecting the delivery of applications, business processes, and IT.

Other regulatory experience includes assisting Fortune 500 companies outsourcing their IT functions with implementing security solutions addressing US laws such as, HIPAA, SOXA, and GLBA. While working at a US national laboratory, Ms. Atwood was the identified expert in military certification and accreditation standards for classified information systems deployed to military command centers. She was responsible for documenting each system to DoD trusted computing systems with controlled access standards. She also provided training to system administrators for certification testing of these systems in the United States, Central America, and across Europe.

Ms. Atwood received a BS in Computer Science degree from California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks, California. Ms. Atwood is an International Association of Privacy Professionals Certified Information Privacy Professional (CIPP). She is a Lean Six Sigma Practitioner. Ms. Atwood was awarded a Top Secret/SCI Clearance from 1986 to 1998.

NEWS & EVENTS

4/19/2012 - FERC approves Version 4 of the NERC CIP Standards
As many of you are aware, CIP Version 4 was on this morning’s agenda at FERC’s public meeting. This morning, FERC approved agenda item E-6 without comment. For your information, HERE is the item from FERC’s meeting summary.

January 2012 Customer Testimonial
"Anyone can come in and point to where the problem is, but N&ST was part of the team and worked just like we did. They were working consultants which is exactly what a small to medium size utility needs." - Responsible Entity in the SERC region

March 2012 Customer Testimonial
"N&ST never sat around waiting for us to tell them what to do and came to us when they had questions, but never overburdened us. We are looking forward to working with them again in the future!" - Responsible Entity in the ERCOT region

February 2012 Customer Testimonial

"I have never seen our technical staff actually ask for the same consultants again and again!" - Responsible Entity in the SPP region