Treyler Ray began his career in law enforcement with the Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics as an undercover narcotics agent. He soon moved into the special operations division where he conducted surveillance and Title III wiretaps on major drug traffickers. For eight years, he worked as a special agent with the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Diplomatic Security. He then worked for Raytheon before finding a home at Bellflight in May 2017, as Director of Security.

Ray is the Chief Security Officer at Bell, an American aerospace manufacturer for military and commercial applications. It is headquartered in Fort Worth, Texas, with manufacturing facilities in Fort Worth and Amarillo, Texas, as well as Mirabel, Quebec, Canada. He calls his team “world class in industrial, SAP, counterintelligence and insider threats.” Ray’s team is comprised of eight personnel under his charge.

As a manufacturer of highly engineered helicopters, “air taxis,” drones and other products, the risk and security challenges are diverse. “The challenges every security element faces are the threats posed to their personnel, their property and their technology,” Ray says. “The unique risk we face at Bell is safeguarding our sensitive information and material, which consists of classified, controlled unclassified information, export-controlled, and our company’s own proprietary data/intellectual property. Bell alone has managed to produce aircraft using tiltrotor technology, a technology that represents a portfolio of incredible capabilities in the hands of U.S. and allied warfighters, and [is a] competitive advantage in the Intelligent Air Mobility arena. We see strong management of our Insider Threat and Security Education, Training and Awareness programs as imperative to our success in safeguarding the sensitive information and material resident at Bell in both our military and commercial programs.”

Mitigating the risk to the company’s sensitive technologies from foreign intelligence entities and business competitors, in order to safeguard national security capabilities and the company’s competitive advantage in the marketplace, is a difficult part of his team’s job, he says.

Ray and his team have worked hard to grow the global security function to be one of the most effective and respected functions in the company. “With the direct support of the CEO and executive team, the global security function has grown in headcount and budget and taken on new roles such as tracking employee international travel, planning for safety and security of employees traveling to hotspots around the globe, as well as significantly increasing physical security and fire protection capabilities across the company’s global facilities,” he says. “All of this against the backdrop of national security industrial and cyber programs where the security team has made even more significant gains resulting in increased confidence among our customers and government security partners.”

To ensure that position within the company, Bell Global Security measures success by constant evaluated performance by government customers and its ability to operate unencumbered, regarding physical safety concerns and administrative issues related to compliance for internal customers. “More important, due to the stringent security requirements as a defense contractor, we see ourselves as a business enabler, specializing in the ability to protect Bell, its technologies, intellectual property, employees and technical resources,” he notes. “We are focused on remaining compliant and exceeding the requirements set forth by our U.S. customers, which ultimately impacts Bell’s ability to keep and secure future contracts.”

Ray is proud of his work to align the company’s classified collateral information systems to the DoD Risk Management Framework (RMF). Bell’s Global Security team dedicated more than 400 hours to creating an accreditation package for classified systems that met both the National Industrial Security Program Operating Manual (NISPOM) and new RMF requirements, from scratch. “We accomplished this by creating, categorizing, selecting and implementing more than 1,600 test security controls,” he says.

This year, the team has focused efforts on winning the Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA) and Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA) programs. To help, the security team has been working hard to safeguard sensitive information. He says, “We are working diligently with our internal and government customers to ensure we understand the personnel, facility, information access and storage, and training requirements so that we may seamlessly support the programs over the next few years of massive anticipated growth. Specifically, we are working to ensure we have the right people in the right places at the right time, with the pertinent skillsets, trained and ready to support the company’s ramp-up to full rate production on both programs. This requires on-boarding of additional security personnel, physical security survey of new and existing facilities, accreditation of additional classified information systems and bolstering our Security Education, Training and Awareness program (regarding the handling of Controlled Unclassified Information, Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation requirements regarding unclassified networks, and the Insider Threat program), all of which are on pace to meet demand.”

In his free time, Ray says he spends all of his time with his family and his young daughter. He says, “I believe it’s the most important thing that a father can do, as they are the priority in my life.”