About the author

This site is written and maintained by Paul Masterson.

Paul has spent over 30 years in IT Operations Management across infrastructure and information systems, with a sustained emphasis on security and compliance. He has worked with several of Ireland’s largest organisations.

The content here is a distillation of that working practice — what actually holds up under audit, what breaks first when ignored, and the operational shape of NIS2, ISO 27001, and GDPR controls at the infrastructure level.

Certifications

Cybersecurity & compliance

  • NIST Risk Management Framework — DoD (InfoSec)
  • NIST Cybersecurity Framework
  • Cybersecurity Compliance Framework, Standards & Regulations — IBM
  • Information Systems Auditing, Controls and Assurance — University of Hong Kong

Data privacy & architecture

  • IBM Data Privacy for Information Architecture — IBM
  • IBM Data Topology — IBM

AI governance & strategy

  • AI Strategy and Governance — Wharton School of Business
  • Trustworthy AI for Healthcare Management — Politecnico di Milano
  • Professional Certification in Applied AI — IBM
  • The AI Ladder: A Framework for Deploying AI in your Enterprise — IBM

Systems & DevOps

  • Red Hat Systems Architecture — Global Knowledge
  • DevOps Engineer

About this site

StackHarden is a practical reference for hardening the infrastructure that small agencies, sysadmins, and lean SaaS teams actually run: VPS baselines, Nginx, PostgreSQL, Redis, WordPress stacks, and email servers.

Every guide is written with two things in mind:

  1. The why. Hardening advice without rationale is just superstition. Each recommendation explains the threat it mitigates.
  2. Compliance context. Where a control maps to NIS2, ISO 27001, or GDPR, that linkage is called out — so the same work that improves your security also demonstrably supports your compliance posture.

Companion tools live at tools.stackharden.com.

NIS2, ISO 27001, and GDPR references on this site are written to be accurate and useful, but they are not legal or audit advice. If you need a formal assessment, talk to a qualified advisor — datavision.ie is one starting point.

Affiliate disclosure

Some links on this site (notably VPS providers and privacy-first analytics tools) are affiliate links. We only recommend services we would use ourselves, and a recommendation is never made solely because a programme exists.