Fulcrum Insights
Blog
Expert CTO insights for scaling your business securely and implementing AI effectively.
Journey to the C-Suite, are you ready?
There's a marked difference between "being the best at what you do" and "business acumen", and the marriage between those two is what starts to form you as a true executive leader.
Human first technology strategy
Where is the most pain? Where is the risk? What do your customers want more of? What do they want less of? Does the money we spend in our technology reflect efforts toward those things? If it doesn't, plain and simple, we're missing it.
Easy is a warning sign
Easy seems like an obvious "good thing", but over the years it's become a pause for me. Truly great things rarely (if ever) come easily, so when something feels easy, I've trained myself to start looking for unintended consequences. Pain, difficulty, perseverance, friction, failure– these are words
What AI can, and cannot do
AI is making a lot of things easier, but it's not a magic bullet that cuts your payroll in half. My hope is that you leave this blog with an understanding of what AI can, and cannot do so when you're being sold a world of promises, you're grounded in some reality.
My business is too small for Cyber Security, right?
Nearly every day I have to explain that the size of your business doesn't matter, then work through the realization that not only do they need to be concerned about cyber security, but that they desperately need to do something about it (and fast).
Demand for sincerity in an AI generated world
AI is pattern recognition and predictive completion, not original thought. When it refines your words, it's washing everything that makes you unique through the collective average of the world which is decisively, not you (or anyone else).
Leverage out performs ability, always
It's weird, but having "ability" when you're building a business as an owner or a leader isn't necessarily a good thing. What is ability? Talent, skills, learned specialization... being "good" at things. Basically meaning that, when you have that ability, it's so simple to just do things yourself,
Your product doesn't matter
Your product doesn't matter until churn and retention. This is a truth that's been burned into my head over the last several years of doing my best to build various businesses– some on my own, some from within, some as a consultant, and doing that work in multiple verticals all over the world. One t
TECH: Simple 365 trusted device authentication strategy for Windows+MacOS+Mobile
Introduction The scope and goal of this blog is to check the box in the simplest way possible that only Entra devices (at any level) can authenticate to 365. The easiest way to do that is to target Entra Registered as our goal post so that's what this blog will describe. Keep in mind that the Cond
TECH: Clearly defined vulnerability management SLOs you can use today
Introduction Frameworks like NIST and CIS provide guidance on vulnerability management– but they don't really spell out exact remediation timelines for all types of vulnerabilities with a full scope of considerations (PCI is the closest). Instead, they leave it up to each organization to define the
Accomplishing a Lot With Not Enough: Defeating a "Busy Team"
MSP life is difficult The MSP is responsible for a lot...and that's an understatement. Almost daily it seems there's a new attack vector, security control, tool, project, or just something out there in the wild that we the MSP need to consider, and likely take action on. This is even assuming we're
TECH: Why It's Time to Ditch Servers for the Serverless Cloud
Perfection is the enemy of progress... Lets talk server elimination. Why do we need to eliminate servers, and how do we do it? What does that even mean? Before we get into that, lets address the most common objections: "My clients have to have servers! They require Quickbooks or, my clients want th
TECH: Automation 3 step framework, considerations, and expectations
Intro Automation can be complex. How do we do it well? In this article, we're going to establish a system– a basic three step framework to bring structure to your automation. After that, we're going to go through an automation example so you can see what this looks like in real life. It's a bit of
TECH: Reporting & Maintaining MSP & MSSP tooling (Plus KPIs)
Introduction If you're in the MSP / MSSP world we all know there are a million tools you use on a daily basis. We may have people or departments that are responsible to make sure these tools are deployed, maintained, and configured, but how can we be sure the job is actually being done? How do we b
TECH: READ THIS Before You Get Into Vulnerability Detection, Management & Remediation
Why read this first? Aren't there tools that solve the vulnerability problem? Yes there are tools, but the tools don't solve the problem by themselves. They move you forward, absolutely, but there is a web of labor and process to untangle here that needs some in depth thought and planning before yo
TECH: Bullet Proof Windows Patching Verification (Plus KPIs)
Why is it so difficult to verify my endpoints are patched...that seems easy? Windows patching is deceptively difficult, and the tools that are built to help you make sure nothing is broken are they themselves, broken. All of them. Don't believe me? Go dive into how your tools are recording patches
Stay in the loop
Get notified when I publish new content. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.