About the President
John E. Phillips has spent his career at the moments where computing changed shape — the arrival of the personal computer, the birth of the commercial Internet, and the rise of network security as a discipline. Rather than reading about those transitions later, he was there helping build the infrastructure behind them.
That experience is the foundation of Information Security and Management Company, LLC. ISMC brings the judgment of an engineer who has designed, secured, and taught the technologies organizations rely on every day — from computers and applications to the networks that connect them and the policies that govern them. For clients, that means guidance grounded in how their whole IT environment actually works, not in generic checklists.
A career that tracks the history of the Internet
Each milestone below maps to a genuine turning point in computing — and John was working at it as it happened.
John began in retail computing just as the PC arrived on the consumer market — the era of the first IBM PCs and home microcomputers — learning the hardware and software of personal computing from the ground up at the moment the industry was being created.
As a volunteer for the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board, John built and installed a dial-up network of computers spanning 21 countries across the Caribbean and southeastern Americas — from Argentina north through the islands. Long before the public Internet, this meant connecting machines across borders, languages, and unreliable phone lines into one working communications system.
After returning to Florida, John relocated to Canada in 1990, settling in Ottawa — then earning its reputation as “Silicon Valley North” and home to a concentration of telecommunications and data-networking firms.
John joined Gandalf — one of Ottawa's pioneering data-communications companies — as Senior Network Administrator, designing and maintaining the company's worldwide engineering network: desktop computers, software tools, licenses, and revision-control systems. He also kept the company's EDGAR filings compliant — the electronic system through which firms file required disclosures to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
As the Internet came online in Canada, John was elected secretary and a member of the founding Board of Directors of ONet Networking Incorporated — the largest and most active branch of CA*net, Canada's national Internet backbone. Through that role he was directly involved in building the Canadian Information Highway, helping govern the infrastructure that brought the country online.
John became Supervisor of Unix support for Newbridge Networks — the global data-networking leader founded in Ottawa by Sir Terry Matthews, later acquired by Alcatel for over $7 billion. He was responsible for more than 700 Unix workstations, workgroup servers, and the company's worldwide accounting servers.
John co-authored Administering Usenet News Servers (Addison-Wesley Developers Press) with James E. McDermott, with a foreword by Rich Salz — the creator of INN, the most widely deployed Usenet server software ever written. The book remains a reference on planning, building, and managing news services on Unix.
John established his own network-consulting firm in Ottawa, specializing in LAN/WAN network design and security — the direct forerunner of the practice that continues today at ISMC.
John installed — or assisted in installing — the initial firewalls and Internet connections for the Canadian government departments of Agriculture, Health, Heritage, Human Resources, Industry, and Justice, including the Supreme Court. Beyond deploying the Raptor Firewall, the leading application-proxy firewall of the era, he designed the secure network topology that made the required Internet and intranet services possible. He was, in effect, the engineer who first secured the connections between Canada's government and the open Internet.
John authored and delivered the training material for the original Raptor Firewall, teaching both basic and advanced courses worldwide in public classes and private on-site sessions. His clients spanned U.S. government and major corporations alike — including NASA (Houston), the Centers for Disease Control (Atlanta), the U.S. Army (Hawaii and South Korea), Oracle, Merck-Medco, Deutsche Telekom, and other public utilities.
As a principal of West Capital Developments, John led the acquisition and development of the Carp Airport in Ottawa's west end into an aviation and computer-technology research center with a residential fly-in community. Alongside the land development, he oversaw IT, emergency response, a formal Safety Management System, and video-surveillance infrastructure — applying his technology and risk-management experience to a large, complex physical project.
Now a returning native Floridian based in Ponce Inlet, John leads Information Security and Management Company, LLC, bringing four decades of experience to individuals and mid-size organizations. Alongside the consulting practice, he devotes himself to community work — co-founding Surfing in the Sixties, Arise Aerial, and UpReelz, and mentoring the next generation of surfers and entrepreneurs.
The book that set the standard
Administering Usenet News Servers
Co-authored with James E. McDermott and published by Addison-Wesley Developers Press in 1997, the book is a comprehensive guide to planning, evaluating, building, and managing Internet and intranet services on Unix — covering INN, DNEWS, security, and acceptable-use policy. In structuring that lifecycle of planning through operation, it captured an early form of what is now called Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) methodology. Its foreword was written by Rich Salz, the creator of INN itself.
Reviewed in Linux Journal (June 1998) · ISBN 0-201-41967-X · View on Amazon
What that experience means for your organization
Security from first principles
Because he has designed the topologies and controls that protect government and enterprise networks, John starts by understanding how your systems actually communicate — not by applying generic templates.
Tested in demanding environments
From national agencies to NASA and the CDC, ISMC's founder has worked in settings where getting security right genuinely mattered.
A teacher, not just an operator
A background in writing training material and teaching courses means you get clear explanations and knowledge you keep — not a black box.
The long view
Four decades of watching technologies rise, mature, and be replaced gives ISMC sound judgment about where to invest and what to skip.
Beyond the network
The “Management” in ISMC is earned. Beyond his security career, John has built and run businesses where technology, operations, and risk meet. As a principal of West Capital Developments in Ottawa, he led the acquisition and development of the Carp Airport into an aviation and computer-technology research center with a residential fly-in community — overseeing not just land development but IT, emergency response, a formal Safety Management System, and video-surveillance infrastructure. Today, a returning native Floridian, he is president and owner of a private consulting practice based in Ponce Inlet, Florida.
His technical foundation runs deep and broad: Sun, Digital, and Hewlett-Packard systems; Cisco, Ascend, and MikroTik networking; and operating systems from SCO Unix and Solaris to HP-UX, AIX, and Linux. He studied accounting and general business at Stetson University in DeLand, Florida — the commercial grounding behind a career spent making technology serve the organizations that depend on it.
Community & giving back
John believes expertise is meant to be passed on — and that conviction extends well beyond the network. He is dedicated to helping the next generation of surfers and entrepreneurs get started on their own journeys, lending his time as a mentor, sponsor, and co-founder of ventures built around that purpose and his interest.
He is a co-founder of Surfing in the Sixties, which organizes surf-and-serve trips to warm-water breaks in El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, and Costa Rica — pairing the camaraderie of surfing with hands-on support for local children's homes and shelters, including the No Greater Love orphanage, the Niños de la Luz home for street boys, and an eco-village for women and children. He is also involved with Arise Aerial, an FAA-certified drone-services company providing aerial photography, mapping, surveys, and inspections — one of the entrepreneurial ventures he has helped get off the ground.
He is also a co-founder of UpReelz, which maps action photography to the location it was taken, the people in it, and the moment it happened — a marketplace where real photography holds real value, connecting surfers and photographers through the breaks they share.
Let's talk it through.
Whether you're designing a network, refining your topology, or making sense of your security posture, ISMC brings decades of hands-on experience to the table.
Contact John E. Phillips