Ryland Deakin

Ryland has spent over 20 years in information security and IT infrastructure, regularly combining both disciplines in roles that most organisations split across two or more people. Across roughly 50 permanent and contract engagements, he has worked with major technology companies including Microsoft and IPsoft, financial institutions including ING, HSBC, and Van der Moolen, hospitality groups including Park Plaza, Radisson, Art'otel, Imperial London Hotels, and Marriott, healthcare organisations including the NHS, and other sectors including ReBound, Forbo and Rainforest Alliance.

He has certified multiple organisations to ISO 27001 from scratch, delivered compliance programmes spanning GDPR, LGPD, NIS2, DORA, PCI DSS, and the EU AI Act, and built security frameworks aligned with NIST CSF, CIS Benchmarks, and UK DPA. He has managed the full vendor risk lifecycle, from due diligence and data processing agreements through to supplier negotiation, and guided organisations through internal and external audits from preparation to first-time certification. Those engagements cut high and critical risk findings by over 50% through targeted remediation, system hardening, and strengthened security controls, and delivered infrastructure and supplier savings of up to €1 million per year.

His technical delivery spans security architecture design, SIEM, MDM, MFA, NAC, encryption, firewall, and disaster-recovery rollouts across multi-site, multi-cloud estates covering Azure, AWS, and GCP. He has deployed security tooling across Microsoft Sentinel, Microsoft Defender XDR, CrowdStrike, Qualys, Tenable, Proofpoint, and McAfee, built business continuity and DR programmes covering business impact analysis, RTO/RPO, immutable backups, and tabletop exercises, and led Microsoft Copilot adoption across multiple organisations covering AI governance, AI best practices, data classification, and DLP. He automated up to 75% of operational tasks across client environments and led global teams of up to 15 engineers across EMEA, the US, and Asia following ITIL, Scrum, and Agile.

Working across sectors that rarely share consultants built a perspective that deep specialists don't develop. Trading floors, hotel chains, healthcare providers, NGOs, and financial regulators operate differently, but the same structural vulnerabilities keep appearing underneath. Ryland understands how IT functions as core infrastructure in each of those sectors rather than a support layer. The security strategies and multi-year roadmaps he builds reflect that — aligned to how the business operates, not imposed from a generic framework.

Most of the compliance and risk work he delivers happens before the client has named the problem. He guided clients through GDPR, NIS2, DORA, and LGPD in most cases before those frameworks reached the board agenda. He thinks in systems rather than individual controls: not which control is missing, but what that gap reveals about how the organisation is actually exposed.