I once worked for a company who didn’t believe in Technical Support employees working from home, despite having all the technology in place to allow that to happen. Their reasoning? Technical Support employees couldn’t be effective if they were not in the office. I’ve always thought that thinking was flawed, and my experiences with the work from home policy that WinMagic has in place reinforces that belief.
I once again had the pleasure and privilege to attend the RSA Security conference in San Francisco, CA. https://www.rsaconference.com/events/us18. The conference keynotes, sessions and sidebar conversations were a good opportunity to see what the hot topics in security are. I attended a broad selection of sessions. Here are five diverse observations that I came away with:
Back in November of last year, I was part of a conference call with a European customer who needed some high level reassurance from us. As part of that request, they mentioned that our customer portal could not help them properly manage support tickets. Thus, I hijacked the call and started a GoToMeeting session from my desktop. I gave them the opportunity to walk me through exactly what they found problematic about our customer portal. For the next 20 minutes they did a masterful job of highlighting what areas of the customer portal simply weren’t working for them. And If put myself in their shoes, I could see that they were not only right, but it was likely that other customers felt this way and had never said anything to us.
With this knowledge, I did something radical, which was to hold many meetings over the next two months where I would bring a proof of concept to the table, and have the customer critique it. This helped us to get to where we are today. Which is, to announce the release of Phase One of our enhanced customer portal.
One of the things that is unusual about me is the fact that I like to take customer support calls. Now you might find that weird as I do run a global support organization, and presumably I have better things to do than to take tech support calls when I have a staff that I have hired to do that for me. However, I feel that in the interest of making my support organization better, I need to be on the phones from time to time, digging into cases that get submitted via our customer portal, or by e-mail. Here’s why:
Canada’s economy is built upon the success of our citizens, their ingenuity and innovations. WinMagic CEO, Thi Nguyen-Huu speaks of his passion for innovation in building WinMagic, its comprehensive data security solutions, and the value that we bring to our customers in this video produced by Collins Barrow, one of Canada’s largest associations of chartered accounting firms, in celebration of Canada’s 150th birthday!
If there is one absolute truth in business, it’s that data is now everywhere. Big or small, companies wrestle with keeping data secure with an ever expanding mobile and agile workforce. Increasingly companies are turning to endpoint encryption as the answer to protecting their data.
Recently I was on a call with a customer where one of my Team Leads and the Support Agent did most of the talking. Part way through the call, the customer asked me why I wasn’t saying anything. My response was that both my Team Lead and Support Agent had a plan that made sense and could speak to that plan. On top of that they had the ability to make decisions and adjust the plan without running it by me. Finally, I had complete confidence and faith in their abilities. The fact that I was willing to put that much faith in my people and give them that much latitude was surprising to the customer. And it’s likely surprising to you as well. But I see making the people who report to me as independent as one of the keys to having a world class support organization. To that end, here’s what I do to encourage independence within the Tech Support organization at WinMagic.
As an enterprise, you should not need an occasion to ensure that your security practices are up-to-date, fine-tuned and resilient. However, when immersed in the day-to-day it’s easy to overlook or neglect some of the standard best practices to securing your environment. The first signs of spring seem to trigger an inherent need to clean, and it’s no longer isolated to the garage or the cottage. It’s easy and worthwhile to apply the concept of spring cleaning, an annual event, to getting your security house in order too.
Here’s a 6 point checklist to get you started!
Throughout our 20 years of experience in the endpoint encryption market, who do you think our biggest competition would be? Symantec? McAfee, maybe? Wrong, and wrong again. Native crypto solutions like BitLocker and FileVault 2 dominate the endpoint encryption market. After all, why wouldn’t they? They’re free, they’re integrated into the operating system, and they do their job well. But are they really our competition?
From May 17th to 19th, I had the pleasure of attending the Fifth International Cryptographic Module Conference (ICMC 2017) with my colleague, Alexander Mazuruc. Alex usually attends this conference which focuses on cryptographic modules and FIPS 140 type issues, but this year there were 8 tracks on related subjects such as Quantum-safe crypto (yes, that is a thing), and Common Criteria. The conference had about 35 different sponsors including the Trusted Commuting Group. Overall I found the conference very informative and a good place to network in the community.
