01 / INDEPENDENT ADVISORY
Navigate Complex Decisions
Independent advice for evaluating risk, weighing options, and making confident cybersecurity decisions.
The truth between the dashboard and the boardroom.
Independent cybersecurity advice that works alongside your internal teams and trusted technology partners to help organizations understand cyber risk, make informed decisions, and build practical resilience.
How I Help
Specific help for difficult cybersecurity decisions.
Whether you're facing a cybersecurity challenge or simply looking for an independent perspective, here's how Spaling Advisory can help.
02 / CYBERSECURITY GOVERNANCE
Clarify Accountability
Define clear roles, improve oversight, and ensure cybersecurity supports organizational priorities.
03 / VULNERABILITY MANAGEMENT
Prioritize the Right Risks
Help your organization identify, classify, and mitigate vulnerabilities and exposures before they become organizational risks.
04 / EDUCATION
Speaking, Workshops & Facilitation
Practical, engaging sessions that help leaders and teams build confidence in cybersecurity through keynotes, workshops, tabletops, and facilitated discussions.
05 / INCIDENT LEADERSHIP
Lead Through Uncertainty
Guide organizational leaders through high-consequence cybersecurity events, providing experienced breach coaching, investigation leadership, and coordination with legal counsel, law enforcement, and cyber insurance providers.
06 / SOUNDING BOARD
A Trusted Advisor
Ongoing strategic cybersecurity advice for organizational leaders who value an experienced sounding board for important decisions and emerging risks.
Before You Make Your Next Cybersecurity Decision
Good advice considers more than the technology.
The technology matters. So do the people, incentives, assumptions, governance, and organizational realities surrounding it. These principles inform every recommendation from Spaling Advisory.
Technical Depth. Executive Perspective.
Deep technical expertise combined with experience in security operations, architecture, governance, executive leadership and organizational decision-making brings both technical reality and organizational context to every decision.
Independent Judgment
No software, managed service, or preferred vendor to sell. Recommendations are based on the problem, the risk, and what will create meaningful value for the organization.
Candour Over Comfort
Clear advice about what is working, what is not, and where reporting, assumptions, or organizational dynamics may be obscuring the real risk.
People Before Theatre
Cybersecurity decisions affect people, budgets, operations, accountability, and culture. Advice is grounded in those realities and designed to work within them.
Background
Experience across every level of cybersecurity.
Cybersecurity is a risk management industry built on people, process, and technology. My background spans all three, from deep technical expertise to executive leadership, governance, education, research, public speaking, and community leadership.
Let's start a conversation.
Whether you're looking for advice, a sounding board, a speaker, or simply another perspective, I'd be happy to hear what you're working on.
Michael Spaling · Founder & Principal Consultant