What do you do in the industry?
I work in cloud identity engineering and security at Microsoft. I do a ton day to day, but my primary goal is to help enterprise organizations shift to the cloud in a safe and secure manner. Looking back, I appreciate that I learned about IAM in on-premises environments and all the manual, nitty gritty processes that came along with it. It has always been important to me to understand what the people and process look like before technology comes in to play. That’s what got me to where I am today. I’ve been in a cycle of constantly learning as technology evolves, in this industry you’re always in learn mode.
Why is Cloud Access Management important?
Costs, scale and intelligence. Most companies use point solutions that do one or two things and may or may not integrate with other technologies. Now let’s say that an organization wants to deploy a capability like multi-factor authentication, they then have to purchase yet another tool/product from another vendor. Essentially more infrastructure equals more overhead equals more money spent. Furthermore, and since most of these tools don’t really play well together, the intelligence and preventative insight is lost. Suddenly, your environment looks clunky and you have the gift that keeps on giving – technical debt.
Over the long term it’s also more cost efficient, you get greater centralization and have more visibility over your environment. At the end of the day, the answer really boils down to an organizations threat model, risk appetite, or lack thereof, and their security posture.
What does a normal week look like?
There’s no such thing. But if I had to choose, I’d say lots of meetings, architecture discussions, and helping to unblock customers migrating their identities from on-premises active directory to Azure Active Directory. I work with enterprise organizations, sellers and field teams to ensure that our customers are getting the best solutions for either a hybrid or cloud-based model. Sometimes I feel that I’m more like a tech therapist, listening to customer’s needs and drawing out my recommendation for architectural solutions. It’s cool when you see organizations moving forward and modernizing their environments though, I love progress. Another bit of my week is focused on learning because there may be scenarios that I’ve never encountered. I do have to research and figure out a solution by deploying stuff in my lab and testing things out. I’m also working on other internal projects or I could be representing the team at conferences and events. Every week is different with new challenges and complex scenarios. Things move at a crazy fast pace!
Why is Women in Identity important?
I was so happy to see Women in Identity – I was like “oh my god, there are others that understand all this stuff too, yay!” It’s so important for women to see that there are other women and non-binary folks in this space, because as we both know, technology and security are mostly male dominated. That can be discouraging at times you know what I mean. If women see other women in this space, they start to believe they can be here too. It’s also important to have these communities where you feel empowered to have conversations about the things, we are all passionate about.
Groups like Women in Identity are about equalizing the playing field.
How did you get into technology space?
When I was growing up, I loved computers, but I didn’t know there were jobs that would allow me to work with them. There were things like becoming a doctor, lawyer, or the roles that you see everywhere you go. Historically we’ve done a bad job of promoting our roles, we put our heads down and get on with the work, but no one really knows what we really do and how we solve problems at scale. Now we see more women being thought leaders in these spaces which encourages not only younger generations, but those of us still here who also need encouragement from time to time. This is also very lucrative space and it’s pretty new, in the sense that when I started a lot of people had no idea what identity was. Identity is now the entry point to any environment, so there’s a huge security focus and that means cash at the end of the day. Inspiring a young woman to move into identity can change the course of her and her family’s life.
If you were CEO of a company, what one thing would you make compulsory and what would you ban?
People first would be compulsory. I don’t believe in comparing folks, stack ranking or influencing based on authority, so I would do away with that. Influence should be based on other principals like trust, consistency and transparency. In this industry, people can get promoted to higher ranks, not on merit, but because of likeability and because they can speak better bullshit. I am not a fan of folks getting rewarded for being mediocre, so I would definitely do away with that, am a fan of constructive and actionable feedback so that one can improve. I would also foster an inclusive open-door policy without retaliation.
What book/film/piece of art would you most recommend?
I try to avoid reading yet another technology book, instead, I love to read writing that offers you an insight into why things work the way that they do. I’m such a consumer of books – I really loved The Art of Not Giving a F**k because it gives one perspective and that’s something we all really need in this industry. Another one that I’ve re-read a few times is Propaganda by Edward Bernays. It really dives into what makes people tick and how there’s this illusion of choice which has really opened my eyes to the power of storytelling and marketing. The Memo, by Minda Harts is essential reading. I’ve also just started reading Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hanson.
The more you research, read, and discover, you learn that even with emerging technology and trends, people aren’t necessarily reinventing the wheel, they are just discovering new ways to tweak the narrative and make things sound revolutionary.