Network Security Policy: What to Include (2026 Guide)
By now I’ve written about assessing networks, monitoring them, managing them day to day, and the devices that make it all possible. There’s one piece missing, and it’s the one that makes the other four consistent instead of ad hoc: the network security policy — the written rules that say how all of it is […]
Network Security Devices Explained: The Full Guide
Every network security assessment I’ve ever run starts the same way: walking the inventory of network security devices and finding at least one nobody could fully explain. Not because the team was careless — because devices accumulate over years, get replaced piecemeal, and nobody ever sits down to map the whole picture at once. This […]
Network Security Management: A Leader’s Guide (2026)
I’ve written before about running a network security assessment and building real network security monitoring. Both are essential, and both are also, on their own, incomplete. An assessment tells you where you stood on the day you ran it. Monitoring tells you what’s happening right now. Neither one is the job of actually running the […]
Cybersecurity Risk Management: A Leader’s Guide (2026)
Every security decision I’ve watched go wrong shared one root cause: someone tried to eliminate risk instead of managing it. You can’t eliminate risk in any meaningful system — you can only understand it well enough to decide, deliberately, what to do about each piece of it. That’s the entire discipline of cybersecurity risk management […]
What Is a Human Firewall? Building One That Works
I’ve written before about why breaking modern encryption is a multi-billion-year problem attackers simply don’t bother attempting. That single fact explains almost everything else in security, including why the term human firewall exists at all. When the math is unbreakable, attackers go around it — straight at the person holding the keys. A human firewall […]
Data Security Policy: What to Include (+ Template)
I’ve sat in enough compliance meetings to know this exact moment: someone asks “do we have a data security policy?” and three different people produce three different documents, each partially right and none of them the actual answer. Between the information security policy, the data protection strategy, and the data security policy itself, the naming […]
Network Security Monitoring: A Practical Guide (2026)
Ask almost any organization if they have logging turned on, and the answer is yes. Ask if anyone actually looks at it, and the room gets quiet. That gap — logs existing versus logs being watched — is the single most common finding across every network security assessment I’ve been part of. Network security monitoring […]
IT Leadership Training: How to Develop Real IT Leaders
Every organization I’ve watched promote a strong engineer into a leadership role makes the same silent bet: that leadership will just happen, the way it happened for whoever’s in charge now. It usually doesn’t. IT leadership training exists precisely because the skills that get someone promoted — technical mastery, fast problem-solving — are almost never […]
How to Protect Data on a Mobile Device (Complete Guide)
Your phone is almost certainly the least-protected device with the most sensitive access in your life — email, banking, work systems, photos, and the “forgot password” reset for nearly every account you own, all reachable from one small glass rectangle you’ve probably left on a restaurant table at least once. So let’s fix that properly. […]
How Does Ransomware Spread? Detection & the Pay Decision
Ransomware is the incident every leader quietly dreads, and most of the dread comes from not understanding the mechanics. So let’s fix that. How does ransomware spread, how do you catch it before the encryption starts, and — the question nobody wants to answer in the moment — should you ever pay? I’ll take those […]