Thoughts on technology, leadership, security, infrastructure, automation, and the systems between them.
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Cybersecurity
There was a time in IT where the safest strategy was to stay slightly behind on patching. Let peer institutions discover the hidden landmines first. If an update caused issues, the community would usually uncover it before it ever reached your production environment. That approach is becoming almost impossible now...
Leadership
I’ve learned over the years that most technology products are not what fail the relationship. Support does. Too often, the sales process feels like a courtship. Fast replies. Endless meetings. “We’re here for anything you need.” Then the contract gets signed. Suddenly the emails slow down. Questions take days...
Leadership
For many of us who came from the K 12 world, summer has always been hardwired into our mindset as “project season.” Campuses quiet down, students leave, and IT departments shift into deployment mode. It becomes the time to upgrade infrastructure, migrate systems, test new processes, and prepare for the next academic...
Cybersecurity
The Evolution of Mailbox Security Policy Most conversations around email security focus on prevention. Block the phishing emails. Inspect links. Detect impersonation. Score risky messages. Use heuristics to recognize behavior that does not fit your environment. Archive messages for legal hold. Protect sensitive data...
Cybersecurity
When it comes to email security, the easy route is to block and whitelist. But easy isn’t always safe or right. My approach is about building a culture of visibility and control, even when protection gets tougher. In our environment, nothing is whitelisted. Even trusted vendors can be compromised. A 20 year old...
Leadership
That line has been sitting with me lately, and it reflects the reality of IT leadership more than people realize. As an IT Director, the day doesn’t stay in one lane. It’s budgets, policies, vendor conversations, onboarding new hires, planning a help desk space, refreshing systems, and keeping the environment stable...
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
I came across the term “peanut butter raises” recently and it stuck with me. It describes the practice of spreading raises evenly across everyone. High performer, steady contributor, and even someone on a performance plan all receive the same percentage increase. On paper, it looks clean. It looks fair. It’s easy to...
Technology
As IT leaders, most of us plan for inclement weather. We think about generators, UPS capacity, backups, and keeping critical systems online if the power goes out. Those are the obvious risks. The blackout scenarios. But the events that cause the most operational surprises are often the brownouts, not the blackouts. A...
Cybersecurity
Today I had the opportunity to stand on stage and talk about email security. One idea kept coming back throughout the conversation. Cybersecurity is no longer just the responsibility of the IT department. In many ways, everyone in the organization is now part of the IT department. Over the years we have invested...
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...
Cybersecurity
This week we enabled a bulk email quarantine feature that, if I am honest, I would have hesitated to turn on a few years ago. In higher education, email is oxygen. Work order confirmations. Vendor ticket updates. Grant opportunity notifications. State and federal communications. Conference invites. Research...
Leadership
There is a mindset that quietly follows many of us from K 12 into higher education IT. Block it. Filter it. Shut it down. Social media gets restricted. Gaming is immediately labeled a distraction. Streaming is allowed only if it fits a narrow definition of “educational.” But here is the question we need to ask...
Leadership
Every few years, a new technology wave hits and suddenly everyone feels behind. Right now, it’s AI. But if you’ve been in IT leadership long enough, the energy feels familiar. We saw it with virtualization. We saw it with cloud. We saw it with BYOD. First comes the hype. Then the fear. Then the spending. Then the...
Leadership
Early in our careers, most of us are rewarded for being responsible. We build the system. We fix the outage. We make it work. That competence gets noticed and often becomes the reason we are promoted. At some point, though, responsibility turns into accountability, and that transition is rarely discussed out loud...
Automation
Every now and then someone on your team casually mentions something in passing and you realize two things at once. One, they know their craft. Two, there is a quiet story of problem solving underneath that most people will never see. That happened recently when one of my team members brought up using an application...
Leadership
Most IT leaders recognize this moment instantly. A challenge surfaces somewhere in the organization. It matters. It carries risk. It needs to be solved. And instead of landing with the group that owns the function, a figurative sticky note gets placed on IT’s desk that simply says, “Make it happen.” IT is often chosen...
Technology
During a high stress systems issue, a comment was made to me that stuck. “It’s your baby.” I was being associated with a particular platform or system, and while I do not believe it was meant negatively, it landed in a moment when tension was high and answers were needed. After things settled, I reflected on it with my...
Technology
With ice storms and winter weather impacting power and connectivity across large parts of the country, this is a good reminder that business continuity planning is not just a compliance exercise. It is a real world capability that gets tested when conditions are less than ideal. When power is lost, can your systems and...
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)...
