All posts by Jim Guckin
Leaders Fix Processes They Don’t Blame Employees
I’ve talked several times about learning the lessons from every leader that I’ve ever had, good or bad. I was recently talking with a mentee, and they had an issue at their work and their boss berated the entire staff for making a mistake that brought a system down. From the description of the incident,…
Mentor your staff
I think an often overlooked part of leadership for many people on every level, is mentorship. In my career, I’ve had no mentors, indirect mentors, and only one real mentor. Yet from every boss that I have ever had, I have learned something from them, sometimes positively, other times not so much. Yet, I do…
Auditing Standard: A Starting Line not a Finish Line
In one of the many groups I belong to, someone had asked how much do standards really help a company. My answer, as much as I wanted to be, wasn’t straight-forward. I uttered a, “It depends…” I went on to explain the same thing I will here, the nuances of my thoughts.
Multi Factor Authentication Considerations
It still is somewhat shocking to me that most businesses still aren’t taking Multi Factor Authentication seriously, and don’t mandate it for the employees and like I mentioned the other day for executives. Yet, I see articles like this one from Yubico that shows that people are making the effort in increasing spending by 75%….
Protect the Executives
For years, I’ve advocated spending extra attention to accounts on a network that once compromised, can cause devastation to the environment. Depending on what industry your work in, these are Executives, VIPs, Politicians, or even the C-Suite, whatever you call them, these are accounts, you may not have considered dangerous, but they can be. The…
Q&A Monday: Is IT Security nothing but paperwork?
In my current company, I just switched over from the server operations side to the security side of the business. While I have only been in this position for about two weeks so far, I’ve been doing more meetings and paperwork than I have other work. Is security nothing but paperwork?
Leading Remotely…Making better Leaders
Most businesses are switching to either a remote or hybrid model to help employees in these pandemic times, and employees are loving the freedom in which it brings. I’ve seen more than a couple managers struggle with this change
Project communication between “non-techie” stakeholders and “techies”
In all the different jobs that I’ve had over my career, I’ve had a mix of technical and non-technical managers on projects. Most of the time, the non-technical managers just leave the technical stuff to the technical ones in the project, but sometimes I don’t believe that’s the best for a project, because each of…
How to Improve your enterprise E-mail Security
One of the things that I’ve noticed during my time is that phishing emails, ebb and flow like the waves of the ocean. It seems like nothing significant for a few weeks, then the flood gates open and a bunch all come in a short period of time. The security, mail and support teams get…
Designing and Implementing a Document Control Number System
While most mature organizations already have a well documented process for creating, approval and numbering of documents, not all do. So what do you do, when you come across one, where you a making the process. The first question, you might come across is why, do you need these documents? Those policies and procedures for…