ADAPT FASTER ⚡️

Avoid These 7 Pitfalls

7 years ago to the day, I left “the most admired telecom company in the world,” AT&T.

This was my very 1st Linkedin article I had ever written, actually, it was the 1st article I had written on any publication.

Goodbye AT&T, Hello World.

I wasn’t going to do a cringe 7 things I wish I knew 7 years ago post - but here we are. I’ll do my best to avoid the cringe and stick to real value 🙃.

I’ve been beaten before, I’ve been defeated, but I’ve managed to hold my ground and continue providing value in the market. Unfortunately, I’ve seen other technology advisories with a similar model struggle to their ultimate demise.

These 7 pitfalls have the potential to make or break your efforts whether you work in a corporate organization, have a side thing, or are an entrepreneur on your own.

1. People

2. Purpose

3. Awareness

4. Model

5. Adaptability

6. Money

7. Skill

People

People will always be your biggest challenge. Some will lift you up, great clients, great partners, great people. Others will derail your efforts, not on purpose (hopefully), but out of misalignment - You’ll become a better judge of character over time. You’ll learn to weed out misaligned partners & clients. It takes time to develop this and everybodys making the moves up as they go, it seems.

Purpose

You’ve probably seen or heard all of these internet influencers talk about their goals of transforming 100k lives or some other audacious, arbitrary goals. I applaud them, but for the rest of us what drives you? Freedom? Family? Faith? Fall in “love” with either your “why”, your “what”, your “who”, or your “how”. If you somehow manage to love 2/4 or miraculously 4/4, even better. 1/4 isn’t so bad either, consider yourself lucky.

Awareness 

You build an awesome thing that nobody knows about - fail. Be abundantly visible anywhere and everywhere you ought to be. But also, work on refining your value prop as clear and concise as possible - be able to explain it to an 11yr old.

Model

The business model will limit you, propel you, stall you, or drop you. You must get this right, not perfect, but solid.

Adaptability

Adapt or die. It’s the oldest business mantra in the book, in life. Everyone adapts, but do you adapt slower or faster than others? The early adopters feel the biggest pain, but often get rewarded for it. We’ve adapted and changed our business model many times over to get where we are today, out of necessity to survive, and out of opportunities on the horizon. We’ve been close to death (business death) a couple of times, but we’ve always managed to find our pivot.

Money

They say don’t chase Money, yet the ones who say this seem to either have all of it or none of it. Money is a tool, a motivator of success. It’s also an enabler for your growth, your clients, and your collective mission. Following your passion is great, you should, but you also need to follow the money to an extent - balance is key. A broke business is no good to anyone.

Skill

Without skill what are you bringing to the table? Skill can be acquired & learned, or it can fade. Spend time mastering your craft - add skills and stay sharp. I’ve managed to find time to attend various cyber & cx trainings over the years and I keep myself informed.

All of these are a part of the Adapt Faster mindset and areas I’m going to continue to focus on positive growth.

TRANSFORM SMARTER 🧠

Catch Quadrants

I’ve had this idea building up for many years now regarding my distaste for the manipulation that takes place in these so called “magic” quadrants released by Gartner and pay to play Forrester Awards.

And now I finally started it. I put it out there this past week on Linkedin as an experiment and I think it has been well received. This is possibly the start of something great, time will tell; Catch Quadrants.

This all started from my obsession with the SASE market, which dates way back to my obsession with SD-WAN in 2017.

Quick side note: I even started out on YouTube with “4 Reasons for SD-WAN.” Go easy on the quality here, this did land me an SD-WAN consulting gig with Coca-Cola (I’m allowed to talk about this now) about 4 months later 🤯

If you have no clue what I'm talking about, SASE stands for:

Secure Access Service Edge

It's a marketplace offering on the convergence of traditional network & security infrastructure.

Think of a traditional network. You’ve got routers, switches, access points, and more. Next, think of traditional security. You’ve got a firewall and maybe a VPN concentrator plus more.

To the untrained it may sound complex, but this is what IT pros have done for years. It’s actually very basic, yet there’s a lot a manage, a lot to break, and a lot to scale.

Now imagine we remove the router, firewall, & VPN concentrator (if you have one of those) and consolidate them into a single device where the majority of the processing power is handled somewhere else (cloud).

Not only that, now you can add new capabilities and security controls from a centralized component and apply it to your entire network, whether its 2 locations or 20,000.

As demand rises for next generation security controls such as Data Loss Prevention, Remote Browser Isolation, or Managed Detection & Response, modern SASE platforms are able to consolidate these functions into one platform, thus reducing vendor sprawl in the organization, improving security posture, and simultaneously adding a physical scalability we’ve never seen before.

It's currently in position to cannibalize legacy networks including MPLS, and we're already well on our way.

Here's the problem, everybody now wants to be a SASE provider, but only a couple of them actually meet the original standards - they’ve since changed.

There's a lot of smoke, mirrors, and fancy marketing in addition to tons of money changing hands to be the "top SASE vendor" - we know how the game works.

The "ACCESS" at 1st glance sounds extremely vague, so we need to define it:

Does it provide access to the internet? YES

Does it provide quality of service? YES

Does it offer packet duplication on active-active internet sources? SOMETIMES (it should)

Does it provide application acceleration? SOMETIMES (it’s supposed to)

Is there a global backbone of interconnected data centers allowing for quick access to the "DATA FABRIC" with quick connect access to Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, + every other SaaS that our team needs?

Extremely rarely (it must)

For my clients and I seeking the best SASE player, the answer MUST be a resounding YES to all.

And so that leaves us with two players on the grid and one of them may be going through an identity crisis.

I’m going to be looking for a way to host a dynamic version of this, tied to a public database, with the help of open source / crowd sourcing. I don’t have it all figured out yet, but this is all part of a bigger plan.

Expect to see more Catch Quadrants from me in the future.

PROMPT SMARTER 💡

Analyze Cyber Companies Using ChatGPT

Analyze a successful individual or company in [industry] and identify the key factors and decisions that drove their triumph. Leverage these insights to find solution for [situation/decision].

Industry = [Insert here]

Decision = [Insert here]

Interestingly, ChatGPT shameless chose Rapid7 for pen testing based on this prompt. I wonder if we’ll ever see AI being paid for sponsored results. I hope not.

NEWS SMARTER 📰

CISA issues DDoS warning after attacks hit multiple US orgs

Reminder to all of us in Cyber that threat actors see long weekends like this as an opportunity to strike.

Stay vigilant, but enjoy your long weekend.

ADAPTING FASTER ⚡️

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Thanks for reading.

See you next week.

KB

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