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DevOps

There are many buzzwords in technology and especially corporate IT. Sometimes they mean different things to different people, sometimes they are thrown around to show that a business is keeping up with the trends, sometimes to attract talent and probably all these use cases are not wrong. However, the value

IT Budgeting

Here in the United States it comes to that time of the year when budgeting starts for the next fiscal year, which coincides with the calendar year. When I was working in Australia, the fiscal year would be July to June and we would do budgeting at the start of

IT hygiene - hardware assets

IT hygiene - hardware assets

In my experience, one of the hardest items to manage in IT are IT hardware assets. I am referring here to the core items in any business which are laptops, phones, tablets, monitors and accessories, all the way up to printers, servers, switches and firewalls (which I hope you don&

IT Hygiene - Software Licensing Management

IT Hygiene - Software Licensing Management

As I mentioned in a previous post, every business nowadays is a technology business and software is powering operations, service delivery, finance, HR, manufacturing or any other department you might have in your business. Software is generally licensed one way or another and managing licenses comes with certain IT hygiene

IT Hygiene - Telco & Mobility

IT Hygiene - Telco & Mobility

One of the less glamorous aspects of IT, mostly in the current environment of AI and cloud buzzwords, is managing a company's telecommunications requirements. For a standard business, this involves office internet, mobile phone plans, data plans and hopefully non physical landlines. Given the requirement for these services

Cyber Security Hygiene - Get Help

Cyber Security Hygiene - Get Help

This is the final article in the series and as you have seen so far, keeping cyber security standards is not easy. Although the general advice applies in most cases, when it comes to implementing security, the nuances will need to be specific for each business, the investment adjusted to

Cyber Security Hygiene - Email

Cyber Security Hygiene - Email

Regardless of how much investment you make in your network, cloud, identity or training awareness for cyber security, one channel that you will continue receiving constant threats on will be email. Basically, anyone can email anyone in your organization and on many occasions, this will pass your spam, malware and

Cyber Security Hygiene - Awareness

Cyber Security Hygiene - Awareness

Cyber attack attempts will continue happening and having multi-layer defense is critical to reducing the impact they can have. One layer which cannot be neglected, as it's the one that can be exploited the most and never removed, are your people. It's generally through phishing or

Cyber Security Hygiene - The Cloud

Cyber Security Hygiene - The Cloud

I have managed on-premises data centers and set up everything from sourcing multiple ISPs with distinct physical paths to the office, to active/passive firewalls, to redundant everything (switches, servers, storage) and virtualization on top of everything. And although that has been a great learning experience, it has also been

Cyber Security Hygiene - Patch & Vulnerability Management

Cyber Security Hygiene - Patch & Vulnerability Management

In the previous post I talked about endpoints management and security and a critical part of keeping those devices secure is to keep up to date software, which is easier said than done. Every day there are zero day vulnerabilities published on various websites and no software maker is an

Cyber Security Hygiene - Endpoints

Cyber Security Hygiene - Endpoints

In the world of Cyber Security, endpoints refer to any IT device: laptop, desktop, tablet, phone or even servers (physical or virtual). Endpoints hold corporate data, run software and are essential to running any business process and also one of the main way that Threat Actors get access into your

Cyber Security Hygiene - Identity

Cyber Security Hygiene - Identity

One of the most common ways for Threat Actors to get into your network is through social engineering and phishing attacks. This can be significantly reduced if you have some basic controls in place in the way you manage identity: * Have Multi Factor Authentication on all user accounts. * Minimum 12

IT Hygiene - Cyber Security Landscape

IT Hygiene - Cyber Security Landscape

The first post of the IT Hygiene series goes to Cyber Security and for a good reason I will explain. I have been close to this domain for the last 15 years: it started with attending and graduating from a Master's degree in Information Security, then with a

IT Hygiene

Regardless of the industry you are in, as a leader or professional with more than 10 years of experience in your field, you know what good looks like in your domain. You have seen it before, and you have seen the opposite of it as well and with one glance

A new beginning

General Featured

A new beginning

My name is Alex, and I am the founder behind AskAlex.How. I have been working in IT for the last 20 years, first as a software engineer and then moved into management and executive leadership roles, across Europe, Australia and the USA. Parallel to this, I have been consulting