About The Speaker
Surviving IT: My career has been peppered with long roles, and short contracts. I’ve always enjoyed IT because, save for support roles, I typically don’t have contact with people outside the organization, which is something I was deathly afraid of. In 2019, I started a new job at a great company full of wonderful people. Two weeks later, my wife left me. Having spent nearly 20 years in IT (and a hell of a lot more than that working with computers at home), it struck me that maybe continuing to do what I’ve been most comfortable doing isn’t actually what I should be doing. So when Josh Manley came and asked me to be the sole technical sales engineer at Nagios, to be on the phone and interacting specifically with people who are not part of the company, I said, “Sure.”
CHG Cybersecurity
Healthcare organizations operate under extreme pressure: always-on clinical systems, sensitive patient data, strict compliance requirements, and highly distributed infrastructures. In this session, I will share my hands-on experience leading the design, implementation, and operationalization of a multi-site Security Operations Center (SOC) for Cleopatra Hospitals Group (CHG), one of the largest healthcare groups in Egypt. The presentation will walk through how we moved from fragmented security controls to a structured, measurable, and auditable SOC operating model. I will highlight how we defined a clear “Definition of Done” for the SOC program—covering technology readiness, data quality, integrations, operational KPIs, and governance—ensuring the SOC was not only deployed but truly operational and sustainable.
Behind the Session Title
Lessons Learned, Lessons Applied: Stories from my past, and how I’ve applied them later in life, often during technical demos. Turns out, working as a jack-of-all-trades kind of role in IT will let you speak somewhat intelligently to a wide range of audiences. Some stories are about taking what I know, and expanding on that knowledge on the fly, during a demo. Some are just stories I like to share because I’d like to see change in how IT is handled.
What I Hope You Learn
Why Attend: Come to hear stories about personal growth and building trust on calls with prospective clients, stay for the dad jokes and hot takes about IT.
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