Here are some key quotes from my latest podcast with Bart McDonough, CEO and Founder of Agio, speaking about managed IT and cybersecurity:

“There’s a little bit of what we consider the science, the white paper design that everyone should be doing. And then there’s the more nuanced decisions that clients get to make. And we’re there to educate them on the risk/benefit analysis of a lot of those decisions.”

“I think the strategic advice I would give is focus, is identify a problem, identify a solution that you’re trying to either deliver to your clients or solve internally, and really sprint forward. Even if that sprint only takes a week, or a month or a quarter, really apply very structured disciplined focus. I think just discipline starts out trumping intelligence. It starts out trumping hard work.”

“[About the book,] I thought there’s a lot here that people need and most of the cybersecurity books are actually designed for cybersecurity professionals. And there really wasn’t anything out there designed to what I kind of called the working professional or the adult that has a lot of their life online. And so that’s the audience of the book, a very broad audience.”

“One [piece of cybersecurity advice has been] to really standardized, centralize any COVID related communication, and “standardize” might mean we’re only going to send it out at 5pm, and this is going to be the format, and this is going to be who it’s from. A. . . . [I]f everyone had heeded that advice from the very beginning, I think we would have prevented some damage.”

“And then we really wanted people to make sure that they were only using their devices. And if they had to share their device with a child, or another adult in the house, that they were making sure that they were logging in separately.”

“The private cloud, public cloud distinction. Unfortunately, it’s really mislabeled. So private clouds tend to be run by, at this point, smaller organizations like ourselves, like AGIO has a private cloud. But the base technology and the premise of it is really no different than a public cloud, which is best represented by things like Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services.”

“So we sell a private cloud, but my recommendation to a business is to go to the public cloud. And so we certainly provide and support our clients in the public cloud.”

“Sometimes – we say this a lot – that if we just do what our clients tell us, it’s not what they want. So sometimes we have to challenge our clients in a way that we have to explain the totality of the decision that they’re making, and not just do what they tell us in the moment.”

“I think we’re going to see more and more adoption of cloud technologies. And at the same time, while a lot of those cloud technologies individually are quite secure, I think the other trend we’re going to see is more and more hackers of people’s data, but more specifically, of their funds.”