Press & Media Kit
Bio, headshots, brand assets, and topics Ryan speaks about. For media inquiries, see the contact details below.
Three lengths.
Ryan Rawas is a senior technology consultant and the principal of Barrier Consulting. He works on AI strategy, cloud architecture, and application modernization for regulated enterprises. He embeds with engineering teams that own the work, not delivery teams that don't.
40 wordsRyan Rawas is a senior technology consultant and the principal of Barrier Consulting. He has spent two decades shipping production systems in regulated industries, financial services, healthcare, insurance, and the public sector, covering AI strategy, cloud architecture, application modernization, data platforms, and IT operating-model design.
He runs Barrier as a principal-led practice. Engagements are scoped tight, staffed senior, and handed off when the work is done. When depth beyond one consultant is required, he assembles a vetted subcontractor network of practitioners who have built and operated what they advise on.
Why this model: technology leaders accountable to production outcomes do not need another firm staffed mostly with associates. They need senior practitioners who can be embedded with the team, trusted with the call, and counted on to hand off what they built. That is the seat Barrier sits in.
141 wordsThe full long-form bio (career history, project list, education, professional affiliations) is available as a PDF.
What Ryan speaks about.
Five areas drawn from active engagements and the firm's whitepaper history.
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AI red teaming for regulated industries: why most programs fail the regulatory exam
AI red teaming is mandatory under EU AI Act high-risk and increasingly expected under U.S. federal AI executive order regimes. Most programs fail the audit on the same three categories: documentation rigor, scope of attack vectors tested, and the gap between red-team finding and remediation evidence. Specific, demonstrable, fixable.
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Strangler-fig migration economics: the parallel-run window most teams misjudge
Strangler-fig modernization is the right pattern for most legacy systems but is consistently mis-budgeted on parallel-run cost. The window is longer than the spreadsheet says, and the carry cost is what kills the program. There is a defensible model for it, with worked numbers and the points where teams should pull the cord and rewrite instead.
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Carve-out IT separation: Day 1 to Day 90 mechanics for tech-heavy divestitures
Tech-heavy carve-outs live and die on the IT separation playbook. Day 1 is identity, network egress, and email. Day 30 is application disentanglement. Day 90 is data residency and audit closure. The mistakes are predictable. So is the path through them, with templates that survive contact with the lawyers.
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Building IT operating models that survive contact with production: beyond ITIL theater
Most enterprise IT operating models are written to satisfy a maturity assessment and then quietly ignored. A model that survives is one the engineering org actually operates from: capability map grounded in real workflows, written escalation paths, runbooks owned not authored. The shape of one that works is concrete, not abstract.
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Composable commerce migration: the replatform tax and how to avoid it
Composable commerce is the right destination for most enterprise commerce stacks but is often executed as a parallel monolith rebuild dressed in microservices clothing. The replatform tax (six to nine figures, depending on scale) is avoidable when the migration is sequenced correctly. The order of operations matters more than the vendor selection.
Past engagements.
Past speaking engagements will populate here as they happen. If you'd like to book Ryan, see the contact details below.
Sound bites, on the record.
Ready-to-quote statements consistent with the firm's published positions.
Most enterprise AI policies collapse the moment a model leaves the lab.
RAG architecture isn't simple. The failures are predictable, they appear in the same order, and most teams discover them well after they've committed to a production rollout.
Boutique consulting cannot rank for "AI consulting" against IBM. It can rank for the specific problem you actually have.
Fine-tuning is the wrong default for most enterprise teams. Prompt engineering, used properly, ships faster, costs less, and is debuggable.
Auto-publish on gate pass is what should happen. Drafts queueing for owner review is policy theater.
Logo, palette, favicon.
The full Barrier Consulting wordmark. PNG and inverse PNG available; use on light or dark backgrounds.
IBM Carbon Design System palette. IBM Blue 60 accent, Carbon Black text, Carbon Gray 10 page background.
Media inquiries
Email press@barrierconsulting.tech
Response time: typically 24 business hours.