Introduction

Welcome to the first ever blogpost on PROTTECIO!

This blog is a work-in-progress – just like my own skills. I always strive to learn new stuff, to see new connections, to get to know like-minded peers, to improve the workflow for others, to secure something unsecure, and so on.

Hopefully this blog will inspire you to not being afraid to start something new, learn something new, something you don’t know or improve something you do know. And if you fail, even better – failure is key to improvement and learning! It’s not about being the best in what you do, it’s all about being the best you can be at what you do. And to be the best version of you, you need to try, fail, try again, and succeed. And don’t stop there; repeat the process and improve – over and over again!

The tip of the iceberg!

What I was missing (and still do) when I started my digital journey, trying to manage a huge enviroment with thousands of users and devices, a local datacenter with hundreds of servers and the journey to cloud (hybrid heaven?) – all whilst maintaining support for all those users and of course doing what you can to inspire digitalization and innovation – was a sort of overview over how it is all connected. I only saw the tip of the iceberg

My personal opinion is that a lot off municipialities is very much a like. Both in terms of how they are organized, the lack of enough people and resources, the lack of enough time to combine both management, support, skill development++++++++. And why scope this to municipalities only? Probably this is the case with a lot of other companies as well. How do you adopt in a clever way when change is happening so fast, and the everyday tasks is consuming so much of your time? How can you implement something you should if you are not aware of it, the risk or even the consequences of doing it or not doing it?

How is it all connected?

Will this blog give you that? Hopefully yes, but that will take a lot of time. Why? Because it’s complicated. And it’s all connected somehow. It is difficult to just give/get insights on one closed topic without seeing the big picture and how those choices you do in that topic will affect a lot of other topics. Not only the technical stuff of it – but also the organizational aspect of it aswell as the people involved. Take one of my personal favorite examples of the “tri-unity of complexity” when it comes to technology, organization and users; MFA.

Based on the size of the company, there will be differences of course, but take a big, fragmented company with 1000+ users where the digital competence is veeeeery different. You could have users that does not really use computers on a day-to-day basis, users with old smartphones (5+ years) because they do not really use it – heck, they might not have smartphones or phones at all! You will have a difference between company owned phones, BYODs, and privately owned phones.

Is the technical setup of MFA going to be different in that company based on a small company? No!

The technical aspect of MFA is (to be honest) relatively easy. Combined with Conditional Access (which really is the way you want to set it up) you can dig really deep in different settings, and even granulate the roll-out so you can do different settings for different users, groups, devices and locations – but basically MFA with CA is that you have to fulfill multiple factors (hence the name;  Multi Factor Authentication) to get access and you often do so based on your different device states, your group membership, your compliance, what you are accessing and from where, and maybe an Authenticator app or FIDO2-key to prove you are really you.

Will the deployment be different in that company based on a small company? Yes!

Will the level of lobbying and anchoring in the organization be different and take longer time compared to a small company? Yes!

Because you have more users on different skill-levels, you will have more stakeholders and leader-roles you will need to involve to get the level of anchoring you need and to preach the changes to the rest of the organization, and you are probably going to need some good Superusers or Champions spread out over the entire organization to help you implement this to the end-users.

And that is what I hope will be one of the key points to this blog. One of the things that may give this blog a little edge and enough meaning to survive in the vast blog-forests; the focus on the tri-unity of digitalization; technology, organization, and people.

There are already hundreds, maybe thousands of great and excellent blogs by extraordinery people (both MVP’s and not) who are, without a doubt, much better on what they are doing than me – and is what I would call experts in their game. So why do I do this? Why do I climb out of my wonderful comfort-zone and throw it away? Because all of those blogs and people have given me so much by doing it and I have learnt unspeakable amounts from them – this is my way of giving back to the community!

Hopefully this will be one of your many go-to-blogs both for my own produced content, but also for my references to other great blogs and people that I want to point out and that is related to what I am going to write about myself.

But why PROTTECIO?

Well, a lot of my work the past two years have circulated in and around security. A lot of my coming blog posts will most definitely contain security-related stuff. Google translate says that PROTTECIO is Latin for “I protect”. Since I don’t konw Latin, I can’t argue with that…

Secondly, I think it sounds cool! 😊

But why a teddy bear-logo?

It’s not a teddy bear, it’s an armored bear (in Norwegian; Pansebjørn). The armored bear is a mythological creature – an armored polar bear which is known for their role as a protector of the people. It symbolizes security, protection, strength, and the Nordic. A traditional symbol in regards of cybersecurity is often a shield. The designer has both the shield on the armor and have also designed the head of the bear in a shape of the shield. The only preferance I had going in was; “It should look cool on a coffee-mug!” I don’t know about you, but I think it’s awesome, the coffee-mugs is already ordered! 😊 Thank you so much, designer Silje Heistein Lund for the logo and artwork! (All graphics is made by her!)

Is PROTTECIO a company?

No, at least not yet. I’m perfectly happy with where I am at, both at work and off work (familywise), and I’m not in a hurry. I learn something new everyday and get to play with some of the newest and coolest tech and tech-setup there is. And I’m also part of an awesome team which gives me a lot of positive energy and willingness to perform at my best, and let’s not forget, there is always strong coffee ready when I come in.

But who knows, maybe PROTTECIO, some day, would be a company other companies could hire for workshops, projects, management-issues, and others related to security, endpoint management or maybe even business culture, digital strategy and so on? Only time will tell, until then – enjoy these insights and how-to’s for free. And if you think others could benefit from some of this content, please share the word!

So, here we go – already looking forward to the next blog and hopefully give someone some knowledge the either didn’t know about or maybe just accknowleding that they already followed best-practice.

Thank you for your time, sharing is caring!

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