About
Rules read closely.
Networks built
by hand.
Compliance work bores most technologists. Documentation, control mapping, and evidence management are the parts security engineers quit. We come from a field where reading rules closely is the job.
The company
Guardian Knights Inc. is an Ohio S-Corporation delivering cybersecurity and compliance consulting. Not a product company. Not an IT support company. A professional services firm whose inventory is knowledge.
We are an SBA-certified service-disabled veteran-owned small business, registered in SAM.gov under fifteen NAICS codes and eleven Product Service Codes across security and compliance support, IT management, network support, professional services, and training. Our work is delivered remotely nationwide from Hamilton, Ohio.
We publish what we can deliver and what we cannot. Our service roadmap carries honest status labels rather than a catalog of everything a client might want to hear.
A consultant caught overstating capability loses the client and the referral network behind them. We would rather tell you to wait a quarter.
The team
Chief Executive Officer
Michael Vaughan
Fifteen years across federal and enterprise environments, including endpoint security administration for the Defense Logistics Agency in support of CERT-CND operations, server and workstation administration on EPA and Department of Homeland Security contracts, and security operations work at Cincinnati Bell using ArcSight and Symantec tooling. Led vulnerability analysis and penetration testing across 2,500 international web servers for a Fortune 100 pharmaceutical client, including privileged access review and identity control validation.
More recently, system and network administration on a federal health IT program, and enterprise desktop engineering supporting 4,700 workstations across three countries, including a ten-day priority response during the 2024 CrowdStrike remediation effort.
Army Combat Engineer officer and Operation Enduring Freedom veteran.
He also holds a paralegal certificate and an advanced civil litigation paralegal certificate. That training is the reason our compliance work reads differently: requirements get analyzed the way a paralegal analyzes a statute, then mapped to controls by someone who has configured the hardware.
Chief Operating Officer
Brandie Othersen
Fifteen years of multi-site operations management, standard operating procedure authoring, corporate filings, and audit preparation across regulated industries including dental and behavioral health.
She runs administrative operations across three behavioral health locations with roughly ten direct reports, covering KPI tracking, billing reconciliation, payroll, and quality assurance review against legal and operational requirements.
At Guardian Knights she owns contract administration, the compliance calendar, invoicing, and documentation quality. In compliance work the deliverable is the documentation, and it is produced by someone who has been audited on hers.
Credentials
Education
- Doctoral student, Information Technology, University of the Cumberlands
- Master of Science, Cybersecurity, Northern Kentucky University
- Bachelor of Arts, Philosophy, Northern Kentucky University
- Paralegal certificate and advanced civil litigation paralegal certificate
Certifications
- ISC2 Systems Security Certified Practitioner
- EC-Council Certified Ethical Hacker
- CompTIA Security+, CySA+, Network+, Server+, A+
- CompTIA Certified IT Operations Specialist and Network Infrastructure Professional
- Cisco Certified Network Associate
- Microsoft Certified Professional and Certified Systems Engineer
- Sair Linux Certified Professional
The lab
We maintain physical infrastructure rather than renting cloud time for demonstrations. Enterprise routing and switching, a hardware firewall, enterprise wireless, and a virtualization host with sufficient memory to stand up multi-domain Active Directory environments with segmented networks and real firewall rules.
This matters for one practical reason. When we describe a control, we have implemented it on equipment rather than read about it.