Influential Women: Heather Phelps, Founder & vCISO, as She Turns Decades of Experience Toward a Long-Held Vision

TX, UNITED STATES, October 14, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- From U.S. Navy aviation to enterprise engineering, architecture, cybersecurity, and strategic leadership, Phelps is renewing the vision behind Nebula Business Solutions, first developed in 2023.
Influential Women has recognized Heather Phelps, MISM, Founder & vCISO, a U.S. Navy combat veteran and technology leader whose career spans more than two decades of technical innovation, executive-level responsibility, and community service. The recognition comes at a defining moment: Phelps is turning renewed attention to Nebula Business Solutions, a venture shaped by years of experience and a conviction that sophisticated technology and leadership should be within reach of more organizations.

Raised in Highland, Kansas, Phelps began her professional journey in U.S. Navy aviation, working as an in-flight avionics technician on mission-critical aircraft systems. The discipline and accountability of that work stayed with her as she moved into civilian technology. It also established a perspective she has carried throughout her career: a system may be technical, but its purpose and consequences are always human.

The path from a small Kansas community to complex international organizations was not mapped out in advance. Each transition demanded a new level of technical understanding and the willingness to be a beginner again. Her years in aviation reinforced that the details matter, that accountability is shared, and that strong teams depend on people who understand both their responsibilities and one another. Those lessons continued to influence how she approached increasingly complicated organizations and technologies.

Her career subsequently took her through telecommunications, manufacturing, retail, and complex global enterprises, including Ericsson, Walgreens Boots Alliance, Fortune Brands Innovations, Grainger, and Ribbon Communications. At Ribbon, she served as Director of Information Security and Security Operations, leading work in risk management, compliance, and security operations. Across those environments, her work has bridged engineering, systems architecture, enterprise technology, cybersecurity, governance, and the strategic decisions made by senior leaders.

The breadth of that work has mattered as much as the individual roles. Telecommunications depends on infrastructure and systems that may remain in service long after their original designs, while manufacturing and retail place different demands on resilience, operations, and the protection of business information. Navigating those environments calls for attention to how decisions made in one discipline affect people and processes elsewhere. Phelps’s experience has helped her look beyond a single control or technology and consider the consequences for the organization as a whole.

That range is central to what she hopes to build next as Founder & vCISO. Phelps has seen how decisions about technology, risk, finance, operations, people, and long-term resilience affect one another. Security may be a recognized specialty, but she does not view it as a stand-alone solution. Effective leadership requires understanding how an entire organization works, including the legacy systems it inherits and the people who must sustain it.

In her view, an engineer must understand what can be built, an architect must understand how the pieces fit, a security leader must know what needs protecting, and an executive must judge which investments and decisions will sustain the organization. These perspectives do not always sit neatly in one job description. Phelps has worked across their boundaries and sees the ability to connect them as an important part of her professional contribution. It is a more complete view of technology leadership than any single specialty can capture.

In 2023, while balancing a demanding professional career with the responsibilities of being a single mother, Phelps began developing Nebula Business Solutions with a practical goal: creating an additional source of income for her family. Yet the venture also offered an opportunity to explore something she had envisioned for more than two decades—the possibility of building an organization that brought together her experience in technology, engineering, architecture, cybersecurity, and business leadership.

Although the venture was later paused, the ambition remained. By 2026, circumstances had changed, and Phelps found herself reconsidering what might be possible if she gave that long-held dream another chance. What began as a modest entrepreneurial effort was becoming an opportunity to build something with a broader purpose.

The timing of Nebula’s development also matters to the story. It began before the current career transition, rather than emerging as an improvised response to it. Pausing the venture did not erase the research, thinking, or lessons gathered in its early development. Returning to the idea brings a different perspective: the freedom to consider not only what services she can offer today, but what kind of multidisciplinary organization she hopes to build over time.

Phelps also recognizes that choosing a new path can be difficult when it means leaving valued colleagues and teams. To her, good leadership is not about keeping talented people indefinitely, but helping them grow, even when their next opportunity takes them elsewhere. She believes leaders must be willing to follow that principle themselves. Moving forward need not diminish the people or work that came before; it can honor those experiences by putting what was learned to greater use.

With renewed focus in 2026 and ambitions extending into 2027 and beyond, Phelps is taking steps toward a multidisciplinary business that connects technology architecture, engineering, cybersecurity, governance, and executive-level strategy. Serving as a virtual Chief Information Security Officer (vCISO) and consultant is an entry point, not the limit of the vision. She is also interested in research, innovation, and future product development, while recognizing that those ambitions must be built and demonstrated over time.

For smaller organizations, a useful adviser must be able to translate between the board’s strategic priorities and the realities faced by those responsible for the work. Phelps wants to bring that translation into the design of Nebula’s approach, with an emphasis on understanding inherited systems, organizational obligations, resource constraints, and long-term ambitions before prescribing solutions. Her plans include room for experimentation and learning as the business develops, rather than assuming that a model suited to a global enterprise should be reproduced unchanged elsewhere.

Learn more about Heather Phelps

https://influentialwomen.com/connect/heather-phelps-1
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