Watch this episode on YouTube.
Reasonably Accurate 馃馃 Transcript
Good morning, everybody. How are you doing today? I was off the air yesterday because I was presenting at the Aws Public Sector Summit in Ottawa Canada. And later this week on Thursday, I'm at another Aws Transformation Day in Toronto, Canada.
Now both of those are events that are normally not on my radar. I'm normally working on serverless. I'm working on A I stuff. I'm working on sort of the edge of Aws cloud of GC P of Azure.
But I think it's really, really important to regain perspective and I think this is where a lot of security teams fall down. So going to the Public Sector Summit yesterday, going to Transformation Day later this week, those are events that targeted two very different audiences.
Obviously public sector summit shockingly is targeted at the public sector and government has a different set of needs than enterprises. They work at a different pace. They have a lot more regulatory and procedural overhead than companies do and it's just an entirely different way of approaching it and solutions.
Same with Transformation Day. Transformation Day is targeted at people who are just starting their journey and just starting cultural change within their organization. So these are two constituencies that I don't tend to deal with that often.
And I thought it was really important that went out of my way to go to these events to refresh that perspective or those perspectives. And I think this is where a lot of security teams fall down. And the reason why I say that is because a lot of security teams, we're dealing with security nonstop day in day out.
We live in a world of cyber threats of cyber criminals. And it's really easy to forget that a lot of other teams while they're concerned about security, it's not that they don't care, but they don't live in that.
It's one item among many. And if you don't have that shared perspective, if you don't have empathy for their perspective, you're not going to be able to actually collaborate and work effectively because you're going to come in and go well, hey, didn't you know about this latest piece of malware or this latest Zero Day or this latest patch that was issued.
And they can honestly say no, I didn't because that's not what I do all day. I work trying to solve this business problem trying to address this customer base and that's really a challenge and I get it.
I've lived the security, you know, 24 7 in a sock, worrying about networks and things like that. And it's really easy to forget that there's a world outside of that, that not everything you come across is a threat, right?
It's the old cliche about, you know, if all you have is hammer everything as a nail when all you're doing is security nonstop. Every little anomaly and blip is a threat or an attack. And sharing the perspective of your customers, sharing this perspective of the other teams working with is absolutely important.
So for me, you know, that translates directly in security but also in cloud, I do a lot of this stuff on the edge of the cloud, on sort of the leading edge on new services that aren't even released yet on where companies are going to be in 3 to 5 years or further out.
And it's really important for me, I find to ground myself to come back and go. OK, what is the reality? What's the day to day? So Public Sector Summit, fantastic refresher on massive organizational challenges on embedded culture on how to slowly roll with a really risk averse culture.
And that's really important to have that perspective back in my head. And I'm looking forward to transformation day later this week for a similar thing is what is a day one or step one on the journey to cloud look like today.
I started that step 13 years ago. It's completely different now, right? So how do you, how does that perspective change? How is that updated? How are customers, what are they facing? What kind of issues. Do they see when they take that first step?
I think security teams need to be doing a similar thing. You need to take yourself out of the security mindset for a minute and go and experience or at least empathetically learn and listen to the teams you're working with, to understand their perspectives.
It's all too easy to lose that perspective and we do, it hurts us. What do you know, uh what do you think? Um What do you know, what do you think? Let me know online uh at Mark NC A for those of you on the blogs in the comments down below.
Um As always by email me at Mark N dot C A. How do you keep perspective? How do you reorient your perspective? How do you balance multiples? Um especially if you're in security, day in day out.
It's really easy. Um You know, we see similar thing with law enforcement, with military where that's just the world they live in. The intelligence services is the same thing, but that's not the reality that the rest of everybody experiences and in security, we're dealing with the rest of everybody all the time.
How do you keep that fresh? How do you keep that up to date? Do you even think it's a challenge? Let me know. Let's have this discussion. I hope you set up for a fantastic day. I will see you online and on the show tomorrow.
