Dave Coles
Managing Partner - Technical Services, Castle Rock Sky • Creator of Zero Trust for Humans™
Denver, Colorado, United States
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Dave Coles brings more than 20 years of hands-on experience in IT, security, and managed services, working everywhere from small nonprofits to heavily regulated financial firms. As the Managing Partner in charge of Technical Services at Castle Rock Sky and creator of Zero Trust for Humans™, he focuses on the real front line of modern security: the people who move money, approve changes, and answer “just one quick question” in the middle of a busy day.
His work sits at the intersection of identity, fraud, and human behavior. Dave helps organizations—especially RIAs, financial services firms, and MSPs—design verification workflows that assume every request is fake until it proves itself real, without turning staff into robots or killing productivity. He takes concepts like Zero Trust, SEC/HIPAA/industry compliance, and wire-fraud risk and translates them into clear language, simple rules, and repeatable processes that real people can follow.
Dave also cares deeply about the humans doing the work. Through talks like Zen and the Art of IT Support, he addresses burnout, emotional load, and how support and security teams can stay grounded while living in always-on, high-stakes environments. His sessions are candid, practical, and built from real incidents and real tickets—not theory.
Whether he’s speaking to financial executives, compliance teams, or front-line MSP techs, Dave’s goal is the same: help humans stay human while making it brutally hard for attackers to win.
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“Assume Compromised”: Zero Trust for Humans in the MSP Trenches
When attackers go after your clients, they don’t start with a firewall rule – they start with people.
The real last line of defense is the MSP tech staring at a ticket, email, Teams chat, or phone call that looks “mostly legit” and has just enough urgency to short-circuit their brain. That’s where things either get stopped… or six figures walk out the door.
In this session, we’ll take “zero trust” out of the buzzword cloud and drop it right into the day-to-day of service desk and project engineers. We’ll walk through real-world attack patterns that land in MSP queues (wire fraud, payroll changes, domain transfers, inbox rules, vendor banking changes) and break down exactly what “verify, then trust” looks like when you’re under time pressure and juggling a full queue.
You’ll leave with concrete verification playbooks, ticket templates, and workflow patterns you can plug into your PSA, RMM, and M365 stack so your humans are harder to socially-engineer — without turning every request into a miserable interrogation.
Zen and the Art of IT Support
This engaging talk delves into the transformative power of mindfulness for IT service support agents. It focuses on how incorporating mindfulness practices into the daily routines of these professionals can significantly reduce stress, improve mental clarity, and foster a more positive working environment. By doing so, not only is the well-being of the agents enhanced, but there is also a noticeable improvement in the quality of customer service they provide. The talk will cover practical mindfulness strategies, supported by real-world examples, demonstrating their effectiveness in similar professional settings. Attendees will leave with actionable insights on implementing these techniques to create a more mindful, efficient, and customer-centric IT support team.
Presented 4/21/2024 at MSPGeekCON in Orlando
Profit from Automation: Selling Business Solutions
In today’s fast-paced business environment, managed service providers (MSPs) must go beyond traditional IT support to offer innovative solutions that drive client success. This session will explore how MSPs can transform their automation teams into profit centers by developing and selling comprehensive business solutions.
Presented 6/19/2024 at the MSP FLOW conference in Tampa
Dave Coles
Managing Partner - Technical Services, Castle Rock Sky • Creator of Zero Trust for Humans™
Denver, Colorado, United States
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