Founder, Promethos Cyber Services
Chay Butler founded Promethos Cyber Services after thirty years in technology and cybersecurity. His career took him from front-line customer service at ALLTEL to Principal Security Engineer at Verizon, a Forbes Top 15 global enterprise. He now works with small and mid-market businesses on the same problems he spent decades solving at scale: who has access to what, what is automated, what is documented, and what happens when something goes wrong.
Professional background
Principal Security Engineer, Verizon
An individual contributor role in identity and access management, security automation and security governance.
- Managed Digital Worker accounts company-wide: the Active Directory identities the company's robotic workforce ran under, with credentials vaulted in CyberArk.
- Separately owned the proprietary utility that managed local service accounts across more than 80,000 UNIX and Linux hosts, running more than 750,000 executions a week. That utility is what made an enterprise-wide vulnerability management rollout possible.
- Co-wrote the corporate security standard governing non-human identity, and co-authored its non-person account language across three annual revisions.
- Built and maintained robotic process automation inside the Cybersecurity organization, the output of which included 47 bots, 2.29 million transactions and roughly 37,000 people-hours avoided. Developed a templated dispatcher/performer paradigm that cut new bot build time from five months to six weeks.
- Rebuilt the enterprise access revocation process, decreasing SLA from 76 hours to 2 hours across more than 140,000 revocations a year, and automated the cleanup of more than 300,000 orphaned UNIX accounts.
- Moved 16 core bots from screen-driven automation to SQL and API interfaces, and built a monitoring dashboard tracking 1,576 API endpoints across four environments.
- Mentored a partner team to build and maintain their own automations, doubling their RPA activity in a year.
- Administered privileged access for the UNIX and Linux estate on a custom-built platform.
Founder & Consultant, Blessed Life LLC
Built responsive web applications, many of them for the medical field, which brought day-to-day familiarity with HIPAA. Engineered a mobile packet capture appliance and data review service for small businesses. Alongside the client work, he developed an open-source intrusion detection capability, built the supporting network tap infrastructure in a home lab, and completed the training that led to the GIAC Certified Intrusion Analyst certification.
Called in by an organization hit by ransomware on a day its only on-site technical person was unavailable, Chay directed the recovery and handled all coordination with the Secret Service, the FBI and the sheriff's office. The organization was fully back in about sixty days without paying the ransom.
Application Developer, Zenovia Digital Exchange
Built responsive web applications for online marketing and advertising.
IT Manager, New Leaf Distributing Company
Managed a team of five and the company's technology end to end.
- Added bar codes to every product and bin location, tightening inventory and improving pick accuracy.
- Automated EDI between the company's vendors and Amazon, and built an ONIX database for product bibliographic data.
- Automated the collection of product images and dimensions, and rebuilt the website to support advertising.
- Produced video advertising for the trade show booth, creating a new promotional revenue stream.
- Added redundant power and HVAC to the server room, replaced all network wiring with fiber for long runs, and moved most users to thin clients.
System Administrator, Web.com
- Administered the company's mail platform serving more than 600,000 users.
- Automated handling of the abuse mailbox, raising analyst productivity and saving more than $35,000 a year.
- Built a signature-based intrusion detection and alerting system at a time when the technology wasn't widely known.
- Cut spam complaints against Web.com's customers by more than 90 percent in under a year.
Operation Support Specialist, ALLTEL Communications
Helped develop ALLRef, a custom reference portal used by more than 15,000 employees nationwide, and wrote its business requirements, initial content, training material and test scripts. As the team's first member, he trained every manager and team member who followed. He started at ALLTEL in customer service, where he built a database-driven replacement for the paper reference binders. Between ALLTEL and Verizon, roughly twelve years of his career were spent in telecommunications.
On-Air Talent and Producer, Noalmark Broadcasting (KLAZ/KXOW)
Before technology, Chay achieved the dream he'd chased since early childhood: working in radio. He did character voices on the morning show, produced commercials, produced the local simulcast of St. Louis Cardinals games, and produced the weekly doctor call-in show House Calls. Off the air, he worked live remotes and DJ'd weddings and parties.
Areas of expertise
- Identity and access management, including non-human and machine identity at enterprise scale
- Security automation and robotic process automation
- Security governance, policy and standards writing
- NIST Cybersecurity Framework, NIST SP 800-171, DFARS and CMMC
- Incident response planning and ransomware recovery
- Intrusion detection and network security monitoring
- Fractional and virtual CISO work for small and mid-market businesses
Credentials
- CISSP (ISC2): the field's broad benchmark for experienced security professionals, covering security architecture, risk and program management
- GISP (GIAC Information Security Professional): broad information security knowledge across the same domains
- GCIA (GIAC Certified Intrusion Analyst): network traffic analysis and intrusion detection
- B.S. in Organizational Leadership, University of West Georgia, cum laude, institutional GPA 3.94
Current certification status can be verified on Credly.
Outside the office
Chay moved to West Georgia from Arkansas, and Carrollton has been his adopted hometown ever since. He and his wife live on a few acres in Douglas County and have four children and six grandchildren. A lifelong musician, he plays guitar and piano, sings, and hosts WaldenJam, a day of live music with friends at his home. His family has deep ties to the University of West Georgia, and he volunteers time speaking to local students about careers in cybersecurity.