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Blog - Thomas Kranz

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My dog is registered with the ICO: start taking Data Protection seriously

For a while now, the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has required businesses to register with the ICO and pay a data protection fee. Unfortunately, a lot of businesses in the UK are misusing their ICO registration.

Why have we stopped training managers?

When I first started my career back in the early 90s, being promoted to a role where you managed other people was a big deal. The promotion was announced, but then you had to attend a practical course, where you were taught the skills needed to manage individuals and a team. Soft skills. At the end of the course was an assessment. If you didn't pass the assessment, you didn't get the promotion.…

A Case Study in Bad Hiring Practice: And How To Fix It

In this day and age of cybersecurity professionals crying out for roles, we're still seeing companies complain that there is a skills shortage and a lack of talent. A quick scan through your LinkedIn feed will show this is absolute nonsense: there is a mass of experienced, capable talent out there looking for roles. So what's the problem?

Secure Services Within the EU: DNS4EU

In light of the recent fun and games over the pond in the USA, digital resilience for the EU has become a hot topic. The USA has increasingly become hostile to foreign visitors, along with Trump's ongoing and unhinged rhetoric about the EU. Moving away from reliance on US Big Tech, especially given their continued breaches of EU law, seems like a good idea.

What Trend Micro gets wrong about Rogue AI

There's been an interesting series of blog posts from Trend Micro about Rogue AI, and they're definitely worth your time to read through. They raise some interesting discussion points, but what I want to address is their final post, which talks about what the "Security Community" is missing.

Accenture, Ransomware, and Ambulance Chasers

The Lockbit 2.0 ransomware gang have been stepping up their game over the last year, and yesterday they claimed a big scalp: Accenture. With a haul of 6TB of data, and clearly wanting to pile on the pressure for a pay-out, the Lockbit crew went public and gave Accenture only 7 hours to pay up, instead of the usual couple of days.

Building Your Career in Cyber Security: Certifications

“The long term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience. I will dispense this advice, now.”

How Do I Get Into Cyber Security?

Along with “You can’t say that” and “Hey, how’d you get in here?”, one of the things I’ve been hearing from people recently is “How do I get a career in Cyber Security?” I thought I’d throw my notes from those conversations in a sort of Liber Primus for those interested in moving into Cyber Security — either as a side hustle or a career. First: what is it you actually want?

The Matryoshka Dolls of IT

I often get complaints from clients that their IT projects are always cumbersome, delivered late and over budget. They’ve had an impact on the business, certainly, but it’s far from a positive one. There’s a lot of blame to go round for this, and finger pointing can be fun, but what needs to be done is to get our C-level stakeholders and project sponsors to understand the implications of proposed…

The DAOO Loop

Everyone should be familiar with John Boyd’s OODA loop — Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. There are a number of variations (pick a favourite!) but the basic premise remains the same: you gather information before acting.

On the S3 Outage and Agile Cloud Native Serverless Failures

Our newsfeeds are filled with hundreds of articles about Amazon’s S3 failure on Tuesday. Doom, gloom, S3 down in US-East-1 and cascading failure — dogs and cats, living together: mass hysteria! It’s been covered on Forbes, Business Insider — even The Daily Mail and The Sun (hardly bastions of technology reporting, but “OMG Instagram is down!” cuts off their supply of click bait).

Why digital transformation fails

A 2013 report by McKinsey showed that 70% of transformation programs fail. We’ve all seen our fair share of high profile disasters — the BBC digital transformation, the NHS National Programme for IT and the Co-Op Bank’s failed core banking systems replacement are all prominent examples.