Neal brings a unique perspective to the intersection of data security and the small business. When he left college in Dublin Ireland in 1982, the first thing he did was start his own business, and he's been a small business owner ever since. His business of choice? Data security. And his specialty? You guessed it - encryption.

Neal was always interested in codes and code making, and soon after leaving college, he started selling encryption "dongles" to help the first generation of software entrepreneurs protect their intellectual property from piracy.

As he gained greater knowledge and expertise in the area of encryption, he also gained the attention of the major Irish banks, who would later award him the first ever contract to encrypt the entire Irish Joint Banks National ATM Network.

This led to an assignment from the Irish government to design a replacement for the government's aging secure telephone system, used to protect the telephone conversations of government officials and diplomats around the world. He was also asked to design an encryption system to protect one of the early generation of cell phones from Nokia.

In the late 1980's Neal was presented with his biggest encryption challenge. The Irish Department of defense was considering investing in the new generation of digital secure telephone system, and approached Neal and his team of code makers to come up with a design.

That meeting led to a project called Intrepid, and a goal to create a European rival for the STU-III (Secure Telephone Unit #3) a highly classified secure telephone developed for the US Government by NASA and a consortium that included ATT, RCA, and Motorola.

The STU-III took more than seven years to develop and the development cost was estimated at more than $200 million. Read more about the STU-III here.

It took Neal and his Intrepid team of engineers, code makers, and speech processing experts less than 18 months to develop a superior phone system, and at a cost of around $500,000.

The Intrepid product was called MilCode, widely regarded as the most secure phone system ever developed and able to encrypt voice, data and fax communications in real time over a conventional analog telephone line.

Milcode was a first in every sense, including the first commercial implementation of a CELP (Code Excited Linear Prediction) coder that offered human sounding speech, that had been digitized, compressed, and encrypted, and in real time.

The project attracted investment from the Irish government, LM Ericsson, and a number of Irish entrepreneurs. The cryptosystem that Intrepid developed also attracted some of the world's leading encryption experts to visit the team and learn what they were doing.

Visitors to the project included Whitfield "Whit" Diffie, co-author of the Diffie-Hellman public key system and best known for his 1975 discovery of the concept of public key cryptography; Carl Meyer, co-author of the Data Encryption Standard (DES), and Professor Henry Beker, later to become Chairman of Baltimore Technologies.

In 1987 Neal demonstrated his first "rolling code" military telephone scrambler at the Enigma Variations encryption conference and exhibition in London.

In 1989 he developed Cypherfax, the first fully encrypting fax machine. And in the following year he demonstrated Etherphone, a digital telephone system that provided secure speech over Ethernet networks, on the networks of British Telecom (BT). It was the first known implementation of what later become secure voice-over-IP, or VOIP.

And as a result of his work in encryption, Neal was twice selected as the entrepreneur to represent Ireland in the "Export To Japan" program sponsored by the Government of Japan.

Neal later went on to install the first two-factor authentication system in an Irish bank, hosted Europe's first network security conference (in partnership with IBM), and developed a voice verification biometric access system for Britain's largest bank.