No such thing as bad weather

On Stress...

I liked these hotel rooms...

I loved it... the most important meal of the day

Oatmeal, Bread, Banana, Walnuts, Resin - all great things in one platter! Yummie!

Interesting perspective - characteristics of a great (IT) sales engineer

Found this interesting compilation here:

A great Sales Engineer (SE) has three characteristics
First, a “whatever it takes” attitude! This may sound like a platitude, but it's the biggest single indicator of an individual’s success in the role. As long as it is legal, honest, moral, and customer-focused, our SEs should be willing to do it!

Second, the technical chops to absorb new concepts quickly. With such a large platform, our SEs are constantly learning and exploring new technologies. In a successful SE, the deep down, heart-of-hearts response to this kind of thing is always, “Cool, I GET to do this!”

Finally, a core specialty that can then be used as a frame of reference going forward in the role. There are many potential backgrounds that are relevant to our work. We have successful SEs from all corners of the tech world, including (but not limited to) devops, storage, networking, app dev, big data, and machine learning.

The article then states a line that is close to my personal belief:

The biggest priority is helping clients find the best solution possible—even if that sometimes means losing business in the short-term

If you genuinely help your customers by proposing options that are in their best interest, they will start trusting you and will see you as a partner who keeps their best interest as a top priority.  In the long term such relationships are most rewarding.

Unable to give Linkedin Recommendation due to website error "Oops! Something went wrong. Please try again later"?

The feature of giving recommendation on linkedin used to work for me earlier, and I'm not sure when it stopped working, but it wasn't working for me for months now! Finally I found a useful tip:

try giving the recommendation from linkedin mobile app 

Guess what... I was successfully able to send recommendation from mobile app! If you are getting the same error, try this tip.

In this day and age if linkedin can have such an issue open for so long, they have some serious issue in incorporating customer feedback!

Today's Webinar - Breaking Botnets and Wrestling Ransomware 2018 Trends and Insights from Microsoft Security

This week I attended a webinar - "Breaking Botnets and Wrestling Ransomware 2018 Trends and Insights from Microsoft Security". I got some interesting insights:

• Phishing is the new "low hanging fruit" vs. macro-based malware threat
• Phishing mails have been impersonating popular brands such as Microsoft associated brands, DocuSign, Dropbox, Apple, Amazon, FedEx, DHL, UPS, banks and government services
• 50% of SaaS storage apps and 40% of SaaS collaboration apps do not support HTTP headers session protection
• Only 4% of SaaS storage apps and 3% of SaaS collaboration apps support all HTTP headers session protection methods
• 28% of SaaS storage apps and 19% of SaaS collaboration apps do not support any type of data encryption method
• 79% of SaaS storage apps and 86% of SaaS collaboration apps do not encrypt data both at rest and in transit
• Greatest number of ransomware encounters were in Asia
• About 67% of incoming attacks on Azure services in 2H17 came from IP addresses in China (31.7%), USA (18%), and Russia (15.9%); with France trailing (6.7%) at forth spot
• 54% of malicious IP contacted by compromised Azure VMs in 2H17 were located in China, followed by 22% in USA

Microsoft's Security Intelligence Report (SIR) has more details, and some good recommendations for enterprises to secure their data, network and users.