January 18, 2023, Salt Lake City – Guard Dog Solutions Inc., announced today that their VMware Architect,
Russell Hamker, received “Top 15 Rising Star” honors as a community contributor by the VMware Tanzu
Vanguard Unit for 2022. GuardDog provides cyber resilience by autonomously protecting networks and
attached Internet of Things (IOT) devices through continual analytics on threats attempted and thwarted.
As the award-winning leader in real-time cyber security protection in the SMB marketplace, GuardDog is using
VMware’s Tanzu containerization technology to support hardware-free and entirely remote deployment and
management of cyber security protection for any size partner, MSSP (Managed Security Service Providers) or
organization. GuardDog will be educating organizations of all sizes on how to increase their cybersecurity
resilience by training and deploying existing IT staff members to become Attack Surface Monitors in less than
one hour.
Russell Hamker explained, “By utilizing VMware’s Tanzu technology to offer the vFido in any cloud or
virtualized environment, simplified analytics and the ability to bring cyber resilience to any network.”
Russell joined GuardDog in February of 2022 and has been instrumental in the company’s commercialization
of the “vFido” product, offering and converting it to run using Kubernetes and soon to run on VMware Tanzu.
Thanks to the VMware partnership combined with the virtualized alternative for GuardDog’s FiDo v3 product,
it is now possible to cover all areas of the potential Attack Surface with far greater economy and ease than
before.
Russell belongs to an elite technology group with 300-member internationally, in the VMware Tanzu and
Kubernetes spaces. Russell has helped publicly educate partners on Kubernetes and VMware Tanzu adoption.
In August of 2022, Russell was a featured speaker at the VMware Explore US conference in San Francisco. He
spoke alongside VMware employee DaShaun Carter, about VMware Tanzu and how to create your own test
environment to learn the product. Russell also spoke at many VMware User Group (VMUG) conferences
around the United States.
GuardDog continues to help foster community growth and learning in the Kubernetes and VMware spaces.
GuardDog has also helped supply the trainees with an OVA (Open Virtualization Appliance) to deploy in their
home/lab to help train them on Kubernetes and many tools that are used in daily operations of the combined
solution.
GuardDog’s simplified analytics platform combines a simply implemented Fido or vFido (virtual) device
deployable on any network in minutes that immediately delivers intelligence to the Protective Cloud Service
(PCS). Within an hour the PCS offers cybersecurity analytics on what it sees from a Fido or any number of
combined Fidos across as many networks as desired. The Fido or vFido additionally offers interference using
the network to stop attempted exploits from being successful on networks which are being watched and
analyzed.
