TAGITM,

Crap.  It’s already December?  How did that happen?  I was cooking 25 briskets the other day for our Employee Appreciation Lunch, and I had to mow and weed eat my yard in between adding wood to the smokers.  That’s insane on Dec. 8.  Welcome to Texas!

Happy Holidays, TAGITM!  It’s the greatest season of the year and I hope it is a wonderful time with your loved ones, and hopefully it’s a little slower around the office as many people take some much-needed vacation. I hope you and your team are also getting that extra time off where needed. 

Before Brisket-palooza, I had just gotten back to the office after a quick trip to Dallas to see my mother.  Since I was there, I decided to hop over to Grand Prairie and attend half of the North Texas Summit we just put on.  It was well worth my time.  Before lunch time even arrived, I had already decided that at least two of my staff, maybe more, will be going to the upcoming Summit on Feb. 8.  It was a great day of content from various providers, and I thought the various presenters and the Education Committee did a great job putting the event together.  I hope many of you will consider joining us in February. 

By the way, when I think of December, it dawns on me that budget time is right around the corner.  At least it seems that way.  Here in NB, we start putting various pieces of the budget together in March.  It always sneaks up on me.  I hope to get ahead of the game in Jan/Feb and focus on next year’s needs and work out the full understanding of what we need as an organization and what the real costs would be.  As with just about everything else in life, the more prepared I am, the better chance at success I have.  Success here means getting those items in the budget.  It’s going to be a challenging year with inflation, sales tax growth slowing a bit, some permit fees slowing down, revenue pressure from the state, etc.  Oh, what a fun time.  I hope you all have the time to plan ahead for your next year budget requests and have great success in trying to get your most needed items in the budget.  The aforementioned TAGITM summit actually helped get me started on some budget ideas and modifications I likely need to make.  While the focus of the Summit was Cloud/Azure/Microsoft/Security, it got me to thinking about budget.  Funny how things like that work, huh?

Tony Gonzalez,

TAGITM President

1. Mature our Patch Management procedures 
2. Concise Incident Response handling and documentation 
3. Continuity of Operations (COOP) plan with contacts 
4. Good Password Management to include admin and service accounts 
5. Update Policies 
6. Conduct compliance audits 
7. Improve time to patch lifecycle from vulnerability scans 
8. "MFA all the things" 
9. Full NAC deployment 
10. Vision for a passwordless future