Ben Cotton leads the technology services practice at Ridge, providing services for clients of Ridge Global Solutions, Ridge-Schmidt Cyber, and Ridge Insurance Solutions Company. Ben founded Cyber Technology Services (CyTech), a Service Disabled Veteran Owned Small Business, in which Ridge acquired a financial stake. CyTech is a leading supplier of services to the public sector, supporting critical requirements of the US Government in the Global War on Terrorism by turning data into actionable information and intelligence.
Bens specialties are Security Assessments of Information Systems, Computer Forensics, and Electronic Discovery. In delivering these services Ben leverages the many applicable skills he gained from his extensive military service experience in special operations.
In conjunction with Ridge leadership, Ben expanded CyTechs focus to meeting the needs of both government and commercial clients, in particular to provide cyber security assessments to support governance, compliance and risk advisory and insurance initiatives. Ben also leads incident response and litigation support engagements that include: in-depth computer forensics to recover deleted or destroyed data; host large volumes of electronic data to ensure ready access to that information; or integrating reporting systems into the Intelligence Community (IC) national level databases.
Ben holds a Bachelors of Science in Computers from the University of New York Regents a Masters of Science, Information Systems Management from University of Maryland University College and is a Veteran of the United States Army Special Forces.