About
Joel Snyder is a senior partner with Opus One, a consulting firm
in Tucson, Arizona. He spends most of his time on the road
helping people build larger, faster, safer, and more reliable
networks. His professional travels have taken him to San
Francisco, St. Petersburg, Singapore, Sydney, Santiago, Slough
and other cities with names not starting with S.
Joel has been working with networks and information security
since 1981, when he started consulting on X.25 and public key
cryptography, and he’s been very busy ever since. He has been a
member of the ISO and ITU committees which write network
standards, has authored several books and hundreds of articles.
He was the conference director for VPNCON, and has advised and
trained thousands of people privately and at conferences around
the world on networking, security, messaging, and VPNs. His
home network has run almost every protocol you can think of, and
he regularly changes his WEP keys.
As an author and speaker, he’s received numerous awards,
recognizing his work to improve enterprise IT. He’s helped over
200 private and public organizations (many of which you’ve heard
of) with their networking, email, and security problems. He is a
fierce believer in the value of empowering people, and knows that
you can serve a red wine with fish.
Snyder’s baccaulureate degree is in Latin, and his PhD is in
Management Information Systems. His dissertation is on computer
networks in the former Soviet Union. Almost everything he wrote
in graduate school is now classified and he’s not allowed to read
it anymore, which is good because it wasn’t very interesting to
begin with. His favorite color Crayola crayon is Burnt Sienna.
Joel lives and works in Tucson with Jan Trumbo and their cats,
Wanda Rutkiewicz and Oliver Mellors. He has a web page that has
not been significantly changed since it was written, last century.