Thoughts on technology, leadership, security, infrastructure, automation, and the systems between them.
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Cybersecurity
Ask an IT department if they allow shared accounts, and you'll probably hear: "No. Everyone has their own account." Fair enough. But let me ask a different question. Who has access to your root account? What about your local Administrator account? Your emergency break glass account? That service account created five...
Cybersecurity
What if the information we're protecting today becomes readable tomorrow? Not because someone stole a password or bypassed a firewall, but because the mathematics protecting that information is no longer enough. Welcome to Post Quantum Cryptography (PQC). For decades, technologies like RSA and elliptic curve...
Leadership
One of the themes that continues to stand out to me through the NC CGCIO program is how much the role of technology leadership has changed. Being an IT leader today isn’t just about keeping the network up, protecting systems, replacing hardware, or implementing the next piece of technology. Those things still matter...
Cybersecurity
I heard this phrase today, and my cybersecurity brain immediately went somewhere else with it. In cybersecurity, the diggers are almost always ahead of the fillers. Someone discovers a vulnerability before there is a patch. Someone develops a new attack technique before there is a detection rule. Someone finds a way...
Cybersecurity
I have a fun cybersecurity thought experiment: Could Zero Trust survive the Borg? Think about the Borg from Star Trek, or any future where humans somehow share knowledge collectively. Everyone knows what everyone else knows. Your password? Known. Your PIN? Known. Your favorite food? Known. Your mother's maiden name?...
Leadership
If your disaster recovery plan includes calling Bob because he's the only person who knows how something works, congratulations. Bob is now critical infrastructure. 😄 We spend a lot of time in IT thinking about redundancy. Redundant power. Redundant internet connections. Redundant storage. Backups. Failover. High...
Technology
As community colleges prepare for another Fall semester, many of us are continuing to strengthen cybersecurity by expanding Multi Factor Authentication (MFA). It's the right thing to do. But here's a question I've been thinking about. Should owning a personal smartphone become a requirement for accessing a community...
System
I've been thinking about a term I recently heard: digital dust. It's the data we continue to keep because nobody has decided whether it still has value. As IT leaders, we're often asked, "How long should we retain backups?" The discussion usually turns into storage costs, licensing, or cloud pricing. Those are...
System
That sounds obvious. But many organizations unknowingly build monitoring solutions that rely on the same power, network, internet, and infrastructure they are supposed to monitor. That creates a dangerous blind spot. If your primary environment fails, your alerting platform may fail with it. No power. No network. No...
Technology
You can teach anybody to be a technician. You can teach somebody how to reset passwords, replace hardware, troubleshoot networks, manage systems, follow documentation, or learn a new platform. Technology changes every few years anyway. If somebody is willing to learn, the technical side can be developed over time. What...
Cybersecurity
There’s a growing reality in IT that we don’t talk about enough. The hardest part of troubleshooting today isn’t fixing the problem. It’s figuring out where the problem actually lives. Hybrid environments have changed everything. On prem systems. Cloud workloads. SaaS platforms. VPN tunnels. Identity providers...
Leadership
Spend enough time in technology and you start to notice something interesting. The people who make the biggest impact in IT are not always the ones who know the most commands, the most programming languages, or the deepest architecture diagrams. Technical skill matters, but it is not the skill that ultimately defines...
Leadership
Lately I have been focused on something that does not get enough attention in higher education information technology: data governance agreements with third party vendors. We invest heavily in cybersecurity tools, multi factor authentication (MFA), endpoint protection, security information and event management (SIEM)...
Technology
Business Continuity Planning (BCP) is one of those subjects people acknowledge but rarely prioritize until a disruption happens. At that point everyone realizes how critical it is. A BCP is not a binder gathering dust. It is a framework that keeps an organization moving forward when uncertainty is at its highest. The...
