Technology's Impact on the EMC Industry, with Anthony Kent

[Music] welcome to the it matters podcast where we explore why it matters and matters pertaining to it welcome to the it matters podcast I am your co-host Keith hawy Aaron Bach will not be with us today but we have two special guests on the on the it matters podcast I'd like to introduce to you Jesse Erikson who is a technology advisor at upala and Anthony Kent who is the VP of it of 4 County membership Co-op today really what we wanted to get into was how is technology impacting the Electric Co-op industry it's they operate off a different model than most publicly traded and private organizations a lot of what they what Anthony has to deal with is is the operational technology aspect how cyber security is impacting his environment and diving into the details of electric co-ops and what are the trends what what do we see in the future and it when it comes to technology impacting the industry Jesse Erikson how did you meet Anthony so first thanks for letting me jump on the show this is actually my first time doing a podcast and so I'm really excited about it I have provided content ENT a lot of times for some of my partners in other industries that do podcasts but I'm really looking forward to the opportunity to actually talk so how I know Anthony so last year I went to um technology conference in Myrtle Beach for emc's we went there for upala trying to Showcase what upala can deliver and how much value we can add for the EMC space um stayed in contact and then just recently said hey you know my partner Keith he does this podcast based on what you talk about and the things that you post and your content on your LinkedIn page I think you would be a great asset to this show and so that's where we are right now we're g to talk through it we're gonna try to you know pull out most of that information from his uh mind in this short hour that we have with each other and then hopefully we can you know use that to educate uh the technology you know folks out there so Anthony to start off here we love to get into somewhat of uh the background of how did you end up where you are how did you decide to join the uh Electric Co-op uh that that you you manage the an environment of can you tell us a little bit about your background and in your career Journey here I've always been a a techie from a little kid I I remember when I was little you know taking a part old boom boxes and putting them back together and trying to put more speakers on them and stuff like that I've always uh had a technical inclination and After High School I was one of those people that I was not ready to uh to go to college so I joined the Marines and I really wanted a challenge and something to help me grow up and anyways one of the best decisions I ever made join the Marines uh did that for five and a half years had a five-year contract got involuntarily extended for six months due a deployment all good things that happened after I got out I actually started at a software Cooperative that served electric co-ops and it was called applied Technology Solutions it's now owned by Meridian cooperative or as part of Maran cooperative and uh anyways while I was there we had uh I think it was about 40 or 50 electric cooperatives that we served and for some of them we were actually the IT department for them the the real small cooperatives and so I was basically working day in and day out with co-ops and just got really acquainted with the uh the industry and the folks in it and hearing more about cooperatives it's the best business model out there I'll say that we can go into that later after that actually took the job as a it manager at a Electric Cooperative that we served it was Buckeye Rec in Southeast Ohio where I grew up um I did that for three years and long story short I wanted to relocate back to North Carolina where I was stationed for the most part in the Marines and worked for a while afterwards so I went back to North Carolina and I supported the department of the Navy as a cyber security analyst um working for hu Packard Enterprise well at first it was uh EDS electronic Data Systems Ross bro old company if people remember that might be showing my age with that and then later it was uh hu Packard Enterprise but that one that was really a good exent of my life and I got to learn a lot um so I don't know a lot of folks probably don't know it but the Navy Marine Corps internet is the largest Network in the world the only thing that's larger is the internet so I got to see the largest Network in the world second to internet and you know one of the most secure environments that you can be in and got to see how it operated now granted you know we can't take that scale to anywhere else because that you know they those are multi-million dollar contracts s and uh obviously you know electric cooperatives we don't have that type of money but a lot of the principles I've gotten to take from that and apply it my own way to the the co-op world but anyways I I worked there for eight years my wife she works at Muran Cooperative so even when I wasn't working at a co-op I was hearing about co-ops all the time just meeting her having talks and just knowing a lot of the same people and an opening I wasn't looking for a job I was very content with where I was at but I saw an opening on LinkedIn for uh the it super supervisor and anyways I was like you know let me just see what it's about not sure I'll want to do it you know but just let's see what it's about and once I just started talking with Co-op people like it just that old history just and you know all that work I've done kind of kicked in and it got my blood pumping and I was just instantly sold myself within 30 minutes of talking to those folks anyways I got the position and uh shortly after I got promoted to the vice president of it but anyway that's uh how I got started in the industry yeah that's pretty awesome you know when I first started talking to folks in the you know energy Co-op space I've been a member for a long time I live out in the country in North Carolina I still didn't understand you know what a co-op's role is yeah you know my life or how it even functions so I think for our listeners you know can you kind of give us a little bit more of an in-depth background on what the energy co-opt is kind of its Mission and and maybe a little bit of role that technology plays in its operations I'm going to be brief try to summarize it because there's a there's a lot there's a long history to Electric cooperatives especially in a nutshell so I'll just break it down there's three different types of electric utilities there's the IOU the investor own utilities such as like duke or a obviously they're owned by uh stockholders and then there's municipalities mainly what I see municipalities in the smaller towns or small cities and then there's all the rural area which no one wanted to serve and what happened is basically the folks got together and stood up electric cooperatives partnered with the the federal government with money from the federal government to help Finance but anyways what we are is so like for 4 County Electric we serve about 35,000 folks and what they are is they're not our customers they're our members um so they're member owners one thing as as a member owner what they get to do is our board of directors that help you know governance they do the governance for the Cooperative you know they can hire and fire the CEO the members actually votes the board in matter of fact just last year we had an election and uh we had two people running we had a new board member elected the members here if they have an issue they can go straight to the top they can go straight to the board of directors and communicate with them the other thing as member owners is so like the margins that we earn you know those are put back and obviously we got to have cash flow to run but the excess funds that we get eventually they are retired as capital credits and give back to the members every Co-op kind of does it in their own way uh in the that's something the board of directors guides you know when and how that's retired back out to the membership we're not worried about our stockholders we're worried about the people we serve and I think for them that's the the best possible outcome they could get is with us that's pretty awesome The Rundown there definitely seeing the value in it it sounds like you're very much a part of the community there's democracy and and who's running the co-op you are not only providing electricity and and energy and power to 35,000 homes but you're involved and investing and you know giving the funds that are in excess back to the community that you serve I don't I don't understand why this this is the model everywhere Anthony yeah it's uh it's Unique and uh anyways it's it's here to stay though I think there's cooperatives in all but two states I could be wrong um but I believe that's the the case there's cooperatives all across and a lot of folks Like Jesse mentioned you know they don't even they're not even aware that they're part of a Cooperative but anyways uh that's something I I anyone should look at and there's a lot of stuff that they do and you'd be surprised what they're doing if you dig into it I'm already intrigued and something else I'm I've been intrigued with is your your job is to drive the strategy and manage the team that manages your infrastructure from an IT standpoint what technologies over the past couple years have impacted your role and the IT initiatives of the Electric Co-op the most you've seen I would say the one that's hitting us the hardest right now as far as a new new techn well I don't know how new it is but it's new to us and that's uh the low code tool sets we do have one developer in house but I'll say this cooperatives so we're at 35,000 meters that's typically how electric cooperatives kind of measure their sizes by meter count the average across the country is probably about five or 6,000 meters so we're actually I mean there's cooperatives much larger than us but in a whole we're really small organizations but anyway most folks don't have a developer or they don't have a fleet of developers we're very fortunate to have one the low code pool set so in this case most of it is Microsoft power apps and Salesforce it's allowing folks that you know didn't get a CIS degree you know one of our system administrators has kind of picked up quite a bit on that and it's able us to develop custom tools you know to help meet our needs any company has this whether you're Electric Co-op or not but you're going to have processes that are you know ancient they're decades old and you know really could be revamped and modernized Our IT department we kind of Stand Out is we're not just trying to keep the business running but we're also trying to improve the business so we're looking at these processes that are outdated and a lot of it is brought to us you know hey we're doing this on paper you know we'd love to be able to do this on an iPad or do it on a computer and or not have this in office you know getting delivered between our our districts there's just lots of things that they're seeing and identifying to us and we're looking at the technologies that we have and seeing how we can apply those to help streamline or make process better the other technology I would say is AI I think that's the easy answer I think AI now I feel like we're just getting into it you know it's the early stages of it we're using the AI tool for our rideway management so rideway is like the tree trimming and for most cooperatives you know our biggest cost is going to be power you know us purchasing power but typically one of the the next biggest cost is right away you know triming the trees down the lines and so we're using an AI tool called AI d it's helping us one validate our trim cycle we go on a fiveyear cycle for our distribution and it's helping you know is is that the best cycle we want to do and then also um there's certain types of trees and there's certain areas where maybe they they've got more moisture in the soil where they're next to a river or lake or something like that and the trees grow faster and you know that fiveyear cycle might not be fast enough and with AI Dash It's identifying this vegetation and basically shown when we should cut it you know that's one tool and then there's the tools that everyone is really familiar with like chat gbt you know of course we're using that I do say this AI kind of reminds me of the cloud going back maybe 10 12 years ago there were a lot of folks where you were either for the cloud or completely against it there was no middle ground and today you'll find everyone's using the cloud you know in some shape or form um I see a lot of folks that you know don't want AI in their environment um I will say this you need to have some buffers in place to help protect yourself protect your data and your organization but I think AI I would look at it like the cloud it's it's here to stay and it's going to be a bigger part of the future going forward you know we utilize chat gbt we're piloting Microsoft's co-pilot I think there's going to be a lot of growth there right now the one use case we're wanting to get out of it is just using it to basically capture all of our meeting instead of taking notes let Microsoft co-pilot take the notes and then summarize the meeting and give action items out of it um so we're getting ready to start piloting that we've we've got it in place we just haven't had the meeting yet to test it but anyways we're I'm really looking forward to see what that brings especially with like data analytics just even with chat GPT like you can upload you know a data set and like a CSV or a spreadsheet it's amazing the analytics that it can pull from it it's really going to modernize reporting you know it may not be able to do the visualization such as other tools but as far as just uploading a data set and getting Trends and getting stats we uploaded a fictitious data set to chat gbt and didn't even realize that we made mistakes on the data entry and it identified we basically did a flights and travel and it was actually able to identify you know data entry errors and it that couldn't happen it was like this person can't be traveling because you haven't traveling on this record you know so anyways it it showed Trends it showed anomalies anyways there's there's a lot of power there and I'm sure in the future it's going to do a whole lot more for us yeah I actually see a lot of uh you know one of the conversations I had when I was down in Myrtle Beach last year was how AI was enabling just usage monitoring by the members right and being able to forecast with almost complete accuracy when those Peaks and Valu were in power consumption yeah and ultimately for a co-op correct me if I'm wrong you know having that type of accuracy in those Peak usage moments usually results in a return to the customer at some point my understanding is um for most co-ops the cost of power the cost of electric us purchasing power is typically between 60 and 70% of our total cost I mean that's the bulk of it you know so 60 to 70% of our cost of that about half of it is demand um it's not just the kilowatt hours and for those that are in the industry they understand Demand versus kilowatt hours I'm not going to go into that but yeah the uh reducing the Peaks you know that could save a lot of money and it's really needed and co-ops are already doing Technologies there's a a thing called conservation of voltage reduction and what it is is when it depends on where you're at but you know typically in like the winter like if you're up north especially in the winter uh during the morning is when you know everyone's taking a hot shower turning their heat on and that's when you're going to use the most electric of the day and what they found with CVR is that they can reduce the voltage just a little bit where it's still in the thresholds where things don't break that you can reduce that and it'll actually reduce the power that's needed during that time so but yeah with AI like I'm sure it's going to take it to the next level speaking of of AI you mentioned earlier that you were testing co-pilot that's brand new for most consumers today I think it went GA just a couple months ago that's one of those things where I've heard a lot of people they just want to put their head in the sand and don't want it on their network if you got that mentality I mean I could be wrong but I feel like you know people got their phones with them you know they're going to get on chat GPT on their phone like they're gonna find a way to circumvent that if you're blocking it the way you know I I think there needs to be rules and policies in place but I feel like the best approach is to see what it's about see how you can apply it and see what you need to secure on it and the only way to do that is to start looking at it and testing out that technology what are your thoughts on on copilot so far what have you tested do you have any feedback any success or or or failure stories it's a new product and I I feel like they're still rolling quite a bit out but I'm a little disappointed so far in just comparing it to to chat GPT as far as uh things I've fired I I think it'll grow out and the thing is they're using chat GPT just the way they apply it there's some things that seem really cool that I have not tested out so the one thing that's awesome and this is where you don't want to use chat GPT is you know you don't want to be uploading sensitive data or anything like that to it you know you got to really watch what data you're putting into it but with Microsoft co-pilot and this is the part I really need to test out and it this might be awesome is you can actually take your files and they can be the source of your data and you know that's your now don't get me wrong Microsoft could it's my understanding that they're not sharing that out that's your data anyways need to dig into that further we're not yet or ready to test that part out but uh anyways that's that's a huge potential just be able to you know take a a spreadsheet or a word doc and you know be able to use that as the source when you're giving it guidance or giving it the command what you want it to do it's amazing to me the opportunity for productivity enhancement with in the workplace I you were mentioning uploading uh Excel files and asking chat GPT questions to draw analysis and to you because before that that that might take a couple hours out of your day to work through and understand the parallels and the correlations in the data to be able to extract that within the matter of of seconds that's lifechanging that's that changes what you have time to do because I know in it a lot of the times you guys are you're in the trenches you're you're fighting fighs uh and you don't have a lot of time to do that strategic work that's so necessary for driving the organization into the future I get poked out a little bit a lot of times with like General emails that I'm sending out to to all employees sometimes I I'll go back in my guy's area and they're like chat GPT wrote that I'm like um you know just something simple so we like we knew we had network maintenance from 6:00 pm to 8m and I just said hey chat GPT you know make a basically generate an email same we're doing Network and really you know I had a tweet it of course you know you have to review everything and and go through it but it created a you know a very succinct email and it was straight to the point and actually guessed at what systems would be impacted and I had to tweak that a little bit but it was pretty unbelievable it would have took me 20 minutes 30 minutes to write that email and it took me two minutes to generate it and it took me two minutes to review it and send it out yeah allows you to spend the rest of those 16 minutes on something more specific for your job and just enhances productivity yeah my previous job I was I was a military officer for you know 26 years and I would have loved to have that capability at my hands just to manage the sheer amounts of email that kept me chained to a desk these uh these phones they're electronic leashes if I could just get it to respond to my text that would be a huge step too yeah so we talked a lot about AI right we talked about some of the other current Technologies you are currently using Within in you know the EMC space one of my questions is how do you manage and integrate all of that technology because I'm sure it comes with its own set of challenges just the integration alone and I'm trying to understand what problems you've encountered and how you kind of navigated that challenge so there's a lot of challenges for like most co-ops are relatively small I mean most organizations out there are small you know we're not all F Packards or cisos and stuff like that so we we don't have you know a bunch of bodies that we can throw at every solution but specific the AI I'll say the the good part of that is you know right now we're not doing any technical restrictions or anything like that and it's kind of its its own tool set um we are really looking forward to getting it integrated into a lot of our systems now like the AI Dash you know that was a product we purchased and it's a standalone product but what we're looking to do is sorry this is actually more future stuff I'd like to see done and it's really just communicating with our vendors though so we actually had um Centurion cares uh one of our our vendor for our call center and they do our ivr and we were talking about the future and talking about Ai and we really shared a lot of the same thoughts on where this could go and like so for like call centers if if you work with a call center you know typically it'll record the calls and then you know also like the supervisors can jump on a call and like you know kind of silently listen and if they wanted they could you know do a team chat or do some kind of chat and kind of Coach them on the side what we were talking about with with Centurion cares is you know wouldn't it be awesome if AI could actually analyze all those call recordings and give us you know give us metrics from that you know because the text of speech that's available you know just getting that integrated to where you know it can say how many times did people talk about my power bill was too high or how many people were interested in solar you know right now we have to manually note all that stuff um so and our supervisors don't have the time to listen to every call that would be imp possible you know they can only listen to a handful you know a week um so to have a tool that could look at all that data and give us all those metrics that would be so awesome so I I think one of the the biggest things is really just working with your vendors communicating with your vendors and hopefully you guys share the same dream in this case we 100% do they're already looking into you know those Solutions the other part I did miss on is like the coaching like you could have ai listening to the call and say they bring up solar well it could bring up like a cheat sheet of like your solar program and stuff like that you know bring up you they all have notes but you know it's going to take them a minute to go find them and if you could have you know it listening in the background and just pre-populate their screen with whatever they're talking about um there's just so much that's possible out there but I think as far as that um co-ops we use a lot of unique software for the most part and with that I think it's just important that we're reaching out to our vendors and communicating with them um because we've got a lot of things we would like to The Tackle and accomplish with tools such as Ai and you know we just you gotta have start having that conversation making them aware with the uh like the low code tools like such as Salesforce and uh Microsoft power apps that one you know we're we're hitting snags to to getting them integrated into our systems and I'll say this we're blessed because our CEO and board knows how important it is and we have more IT staff than most co-ops are size we've got two folks that know the databases pretty well and can get stuff integrated so what we've done and also working with a vendor we've been able to get data out of other systems and push up into the Salesforce you know we're scrubbing we're not putting any pii or anything like that but we're putting the data needed to basically build tools off of and do that um so we're doing like energy audits um people we've got folks that go out and do energy audits at the home and now they're able to basically capture that data and notes in there instead of on a piece of paper they can capture it Salesforce and you know if uh someone and said they had an issue and you know they could see if an energy audit has been done in the past and what the results were you know talk to the member about that there's a million things to do but for that one we had to have the expertise to be able to to get that data out you know sometimes a vendor can work with that it's just really having the the bodies and the the capabilities out there it's hard for co-ops because I know a lot of co-ops they've got a single individual and I really don't know how they do it they they really need more support obviously you know you have a plan for the future with the technologies that are out there you have a very healthy conversation with the vendors that you are already partnered with and you're actually helping them innovate based on use case so that's tremendous that you have that open line of communication I can I can already tell Anthony just based on the the it leaders that that I work with professionally you're ahead of the curb for sure when it comes to finding applicability with the artificial intelligence tools that are available today and having it land to make impact quickly but safely as well you know there there are the precautions that you're taking and and obviously you're achieving results very quickly I actually learned a few tips and tricks today just listening to you so I appreciate you sharing and I'm sure it's it's valuable to to the audience that's listening today as well leading an IT team comes with successes and it comes with unexpected challenges I'd love to hear about successes but I actually personally think that the failures or the mismatched expectations of of a certain project going left or or Haywire I tend to find those more interesting and and you learn from you know failures do you have any stories that where you had these these Grand Ambitions about a project that that you were working on that didn't quite pan out exactly the way you'd planned unfortunately we have several of those stories yeah one one this morning yeah um I I'll be generic because this is a trend that we learned and I mean just we're all learning I mean I've learned a lot in the last five years at Fort County I've I've learned a tremendous amount one thing early on that we had a lot of issues with with rolling out a new technology or is basically just rolling that out on how we think it should be and even if that was the best way if you don't have end user Buy in that solution is not going to work this isn't all me this is a lot of this is my folks you know one of the weaknesses we had when I started one of the things that brought to my attention was the communication with the IT department you know I was told basically it needed to be better and anyways and that that goes in all areas that's us communicating with each other and US communicating you know with the the other folks at for County EMC but um we had a few instances where we rolled out a product we went from the beginning to the end and we didn't talk to the people using the product until the end and I can tell you now after doing it a few times you never want to do that I mean I guess there's probably an instance where you would but you really need to get those folks involved at the beginning of the story at the beginning of the project one it just it helps them buy into it either way just being part of that conversation you know they felt like they've been heard and they kind of understand why things are the way they are almost every project that we do now if if it's something that we're rolling out that you know affects a group or a party you know not security of course but like rolling out a new product so we did truck inspections and this is now this is a success story but it it's because we learned off of previous failures but with uh truck inspections we wanted to go from paper to digital and also do stuff with that date instead of filing in a box and putting up in a storage room and never see it again forever one of my folks Earl Moore he's the system administrator he got the folks at the very begin and said you know how do you envision this how do you see this he would meet with those folks like every two weeks every month you know sometimes there's a little bit of lag and you know other projects go on but with having all the people involved in that conversation this has been a very successful transition I was told upfront that this is not going to work it's too hard to go from a piece of paper to an iPad because there's too many categories and you know all this we actually made the process better it's easier like the folks and since we got them involved it's not only that I mean we build a good product but you know having them involved and listen to them the guys you know they think it's a better solution like outside of all the extra stuff we got out of it for them it's easier to do it on the iPad than it is to do it on a piece of paper but we've had several instances where you know we built that product without you know speaking with folks in the end either we'd get very little feedback basically what would happen is we get folks that wouldn't use a product so you know we'd spend 20 40 hours even even more working on a project there's no one using it and I can tell you from a person that works in it there is nothing more disheartening to me or to the folks I work with is building you know working your butt off and getting a product out there and for it not to be used that really it really hurts hurts the soul you know a lot of that was our own doing a lot of that was my own doing and we've learned to just basically incorporate the folks cannot stress the importance of that you have to do that you put the human touch on technology and really what you did it's leadership 101 right so you created Buy in with the end user and so I mean once that once you have that almost every plan you put in place will execute you know so that's that's tremendous that you're able to have that foresight to be able to add the the the leadership challenge to onboarding new technologies looking ahead though you know without talking about AI because I know that you guys are getting ready to roll it but looking ahead and and you can look at the OT space and the it space you know what technology Trends or Innovations are you kind of most excited for OT is moving at a a blistering speed maybe for the large organizations they're already there but for a lot of us smaller organizations you know at first it was just getting kind of like remote connectivity being able to remotely control something or turn something off you know back feed an area or disable a circuit so people can safely work on it you know that's decades old at this point you know people are looking they're want to get analytics they're want to know is this phase out of balance you know is you know what's the voltage look like down line um so really what you started to see with the OT environment um now this is kind of getting to the the grid but you'd see a lot of stuff at the substation and what we're doing now is we're actually going down the distribution line where're you know we've got all the analytics out of what we want out of the substation and there's some you know we're still working on but we want to get more analytics we want to go down you know where the members at where the consumers at and see what the you know the voltage is like you know what's the load like on their lines we don't roll out something that doesn't have communications or connectivity now you know back in the day they would just roll something out a recloser or a breaker and it wouldn't have no connectivity you'd have to physically go there you know and make those changes and now you know obviously you can still do that you can physically go there but we want to be able to do it from the office because it reduces you know our response time and you know one of the biggest things you know with co-ops you know we want affordable safe reliable energy and you know the reliability comes into that we want to you know if there is an issue we want to get the power back on as soon as possible there's a lot of talk of OT versus it and a lot of people probably won't agree with this but the way I look at it you're either going to do this is down the road I don't this is one of those things where it's kind of like the cloud and AI like there's there's no going backwards there's only going forwards and the engineers are wanting more data analytics you know out of everyone's Wan more analytics out of these OT systems so it's either you're going to have to build that connection into your it Network or you're going to have to put somewhat like an IT product over in your OT environment everyone's got to figure that out on their own the OT networks they used to be just kind of like the for us they'd be like the ska devices and maybe one server and a couple workstations that could access it that is the old days like things are moving forward there's a lot more servers a lot more systems in place one of the things that I'm always conscious of is is just like critical infrastructure you know we live in a dynamic world and there's there's State non-state actors all over the place we have our grid you know is the lifeblood to our you know way of life and so seeing these Technologies decrease the likelihood of any you know significant issues with it is is kind of what I'm keep paying attention to unfortunately either if whether you're opening a hole to the it Network or you're putting another system in your OT you're adding risk to that environment you can't eliminate it you can mitigate it but you're you're going to add risk you know and you what you want to do is you just want to reduce that the best you can I love the fundamentals like I know there's a lot of tools out there and stuff but you know if you look at like the Purdue model or the N guidance on OT environment like I would always recommend anyone starting there and any application use that guidance to put that system in place once you got the fundamentals then look at the other tools that that can help you out and I'll say this there are a lot of new tools coming out for the OT environment um and matter of fact we're uh the most of the co-ops in North North Carolina have been working together with our Statewide organization ncemc and we're applying for grant money to get some OT tools the convergence of it and OT are going to dramatically impact the security concerns going forward for for every organization you sounds like there there isn't an an easy way to implement efficiency whether you're you're bringing OT into it or it into OT without very consciously considering the you know Potential Threat landscape as you do this you know I've learned a lot Anthony during this podcast uh I can probably say the same for for Jesse in closing here you know one thing that we like to do is if if you could send a message out to an i leader you know fresh on the job what message would you send uh to them what what what what's an important tenant you live by or something that you learned that that is applicable to you know any it leader that's looking to make an impact what I would say is sometimes and everyone that's in it listening to this knows it this job it doesn't matter what your role is it can be overwhelming honestly I know cyber secur has been out there but a lot of it's relatively new to a lot of folks in the industry um a lot of the the changes that and there the changes are coming drastically try not to get overwhelmed and think about all the things that you're not doing that you should be doing or you feel you should should be doing focus on improving like you know year after year being better than you were last year you know you can't tackle these things overnight a lot of these projects can take some of them can take years to get to and I would just say you know try not to get overwhelmed break things down into the smaller bites to where you can handle and just focus on being better whether that's with security or technology you know being better than you were last year just just keep moving along we're we're all human we all make mistakes you know all we can do is just try to be better than you know the next year I do have something I would like to push to folks outside it that I think is important to the industry and this is really to like the CEOs and the senior lead leadership is you know as I've mentioned a lot of these co-ops they can have a single person I've met a lot of these folks I have been one of these to where I was the only person you know in it at the organization and as good as these people can be like there is no way they're doing all the fundamentals there's no way that they're doing least privilege across all systems there's no way that they're patching every system um you know zero trust you know they could maybe take a stab at it but there's there's no way one individual even without sourcing a lot of this can do and I guess what I would like to say to senior leadership you got to have the IT staff to support your business to me it's a cost of doing business you know we rely on it so heavily you have to protect it and to protect it you have to be doing a lot of these fundamentals and I yeah couldn't agree more and Anthony what's a way that our listeners can find you if if we have someone that wants to bounce some ideas off of your expertise and and your experience how can our listeners Reach Out sure um I'm on LinkedIn of course and uh I have a podcast off the wire and actually we're going to be in the transition of revamping a little bit um we were focused on cyber security but we're also going to start looking at technology stuff as well but off thee wire or LinkedIn is a good way to find me awesome well we'll include those and the show notes and really appreciate Anthony you joining the podcast and Jesse thanks so much for for uh being a special guest as well we will catch you on the next episode thanks for joining everyone thanks Keith thanks Anthony thanks for listening the it matters podcast is produced by ofala an IT advisory firm that helps businesses navigate the vast and complex it Marketplace learn more about abala at opka la.com [Music] oh

2024-04-14 03:51

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