
A conversation with TAC President Peter Schay, and TAC Founder Alan Guibord, a frequent speaker on IT leadership, organizational strategy, future trends in IT, and cybersecurity.

A conversation with TAC President Peter Schay and guest Bruce Guptil, TAC expert and skilled speaker, media contributor, and author of hundreds of research notes, reports, blog posts, articles, and presentations on business IT change, strategy, tactics, planning, acquisition, and value, from cloud, mobile and social IT, to digital business transformation, to changing IT roles and value.

Monitoring has evolved to mean much more than just managing the network components in the IT production data center. In the good old days, a Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) management product was sufficient to manage all the network components. For today’s complex IT environments, we need a multi-tier monitoring architecture.

Unfortunately, employees tend to forget or disregard policies, especially mobile security policies, so they may engage in risky behavior without thinking about it. They’re generally unaware of the potential risks, and often treat their mobile device like their company PC, assuming it’s secured by IT.

I’ve been using the Windows 10 Technical/Insider Previews (slow ring, now build 10130) on my primary work laptop since October, and it’s clear to me that in Windows 10 Microsoft has successfully salvaged the Metro/WinRT technology, introduced with Windows 8, to create a winning new OS version.

How could Home Depot and Neiman Marcus fall into the same trap that Target did months earlier? Could it be that this is not considered material enough to spend money on both the technology (to prevent & detect data losses) and the human behavioral changes needed to minimize incidents?

“You don’t know when they were there, when they left, what they took, and what they left behind”. And until you acknowledge that, you will leave gaps in your defenses or your monitoring that the bad guys will easily exploit.

Should the prevalence of cyber security stories worry your company or you personally? You bet it should! The scary thing is that even with all of the media attention, there are thousands of breaches taking place daily that do not show up in the news. In many cases the hacked companies and individuals don’t even know they’ve been compromised!

You are not going to stop BYOD from happening. Failure to actively support it will simply lead to security exposures and dissatisfied users (some undoubtedly in senior management). Moreover, unless you currently pay the mobile service charges for company-owned devices, and refuse to pay them for BYOD, IT costs are going to go up.

Windows 8 is about moving real Windows (in contrast to Windows CE derivatives such as Windows Phone) downscale — to mobile, consumer-oriented devices. The disruptive “Metro” user experience is the most visible aspect of this strategy, but only part of the big picture.