Those of us in IT managed services operate, live and work in a world surrounded by huge — often cloud-based — third-party systems which, by their internal nature, are opaque to both users and to each other. While these often unintegrated systems hold vast amounts of data, the UI, authentication, authorisation and logging of each varies wildly. We (generators of the data) and our clients (owners of the data) have little influence on how these systems integrate and little ability to apply business rules to the data. Yet, it is exactly this integration that is necessary to realise productivity efficiencies in the IT MSP industry, to provide opportunity for improved service outcomes to the end-customer.
Getting started with SASE Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), pronounced ‘Sassy’, is a cybersecurity concept originally described by Gartner in its August 2019 report ‘The Future of Network Security in the Cloud’. Gartner’s 2021 Strategic Roadmap for SASE Convergence report recommends security and risk management leaders develop a roadmap for adoption of SASE.
It’s a truism that you need to keep learning, growing and challenging yourself. Information technology (IT) provides more opportunity for this compared to other fields — it seems every time you turn around there’s a new service, API product, business model and more. Sometimes the changes are incremental, and other times they force you out of your comfort zone. I have been forced out of my comfort zone many times over the years — Linux, Windows Vista (that wasn’t just me, right?), and in more recent times the shift to the cloud, to pick a few. All these changes and developments required me to learn and adapt — to find out the best way of working with these new tools, or new paradigms?
The education sector has had a rapid infusion of technology thanks to COVID-19, but it hasn’t gone smoothly or equally at all schools. As someone who works for a school, I was on the frontline of this, and I’ve also read a lot about how other schools approached the challenge. Here’s what I’ve observed.