Imagine embarking on a fascinating journey through Jason Garbis' career, the founder of Numberline Security. We promise that you'll gain a wealth of wisdom from Jason's experiences in the tech and enterprise architecture world. Together, we explore his life's path from a tech enthusiast to the role of an independent consultant and everything in between. Jason's candid discussions on his own journey, the influence of mentoring, and strategies for managing multiple projects are sure to provide our listeners with insights and guidance for their own career development.
In the second act, we share a deep and insightful discussion about continuous learning and branching out of your comfort zone. What are the secrets to career growth? Jason, our accomplished guest, has the answers. He emphasizes the essence of humility, the spirit of embracing new experiences, and the need to take on challenges. We further discuss the pivotal role of Zero Trust in our current world, urging security leaders to advocate for its adoption. This segment wraps with a preview of Jason's anticipated presentation at The Open Group Summit, where he champions superior security approaches.
As we cruise into the final chapter, we examine the future of Zero Trust and the challenges it presents. Will government mandates and enterprise adoption push Zero Trust to the forefront? Listen closely as Jason shares his own strategies for balancing ongoing learning with current projects and provides insights on how to handle setbacks, reassess, and pivot when necessary. As we wrap up this episode, we express our deepest gratitude to you, our listeners, for your continued support.
We invite you to stay tuned for upcoming episodes, promising a smorgasbord of topics and expert guests. Let's continue this thrilling journey of growth and learning together!
Copyright © The Open Group 2023-2024. All rights reserved.
Imagine embarking on a fascinating journey through Jason Garbis' career, the founder of Numberline Security. We promise that you'll gain a wealth of wisdom from Jason's experiences in the tech and enterprise architecture world. Together, we explore his life's path from a tech enthusiast to the role of an independent consultant and everything in between. Jason's candid discussions on his own journey, the influence of mentoring, and strategies for managing multiple projects are sure to provide our listeners with insights and guidance for their own career development.
In the second act, we share a deep and insightful discussion about continuous learning and branching out of your comfort zone. What are the secrets to career growth? Jason, our accomplished guest, has the answers. He emphasizes the essence of humility, the spirit of embracing new experiences, and the need to take on challenges. We further discuss the pivotal role of Zero Trust in our current world, urging security leaders to advocate for its adoption. This segment wraps with a preview of Jason's anticipated presentation at The Open Group Summit, where he champions superior security approaches.
As we cruise into the final chapter, we examine the future of Zero Trust and the challenges it presents. Will government mandates and enterprise adoption push Zero Trust to the forefront? Listen closely as Jason shares his own strategies for balancing ongoing learning with current projects and provides insights on how to handle setbacks, reassess, and pivot when necessary. As we wrap up this episode, we express our deepest gratitude to you, our listeners, for your continued support.
We invite you to stay tuned for upcoming episodes, promising a smorgasbord of topics and expert guests. Let's continue this thrilling journey of growth and learning together!
Copyright © The Open Group 2023-2024. All rights reserved.
Welcome to Open Comments with myself Ash and me Irene. A show that opens the conversation onto career advice, career journeys, lifelong learning and more. Through this innovative podcast, we'll be offering insightful dialogues with an equal mix of humour and candor. Join us as we embark on an engaging conversational journey with a diverse set of guests from different walks of life. We hope you enjoy our show and look forward to bringing more topics into the fold for you through each episode.
Speaker 2:Let's dive in, okay with us today is Jason Garbis, who is the founder and principal at Numberline Security, helping enterprises prepare for, define and execute effective zero trust strategies. Jason has also authored two books on zero trust security and is co-chair of the Zero Trust Working Group at the Cloud Security Alliance and is a frequent contributor to and speaker at the industry conferences. Thank you, Jason, for joining us for this episode at The Open Group Houston Summit. We look forward to speaking to you about your career journey, how you can balance your projects, graduate advice and much more.
Speaker 3:Great thanks Irene, thanks Ash. I'm looking forward to this.
Speaker 2:All right, so let's jump right in. So, Jason, can you walk us through your career journey so far? What got you interested into your field?
Speaker 3:So I've been working in technology for well over 30 years, which makes me extremely old. I guess I was fortunate that growing up was during the during the late 70s and early 80s was when personal computers really hit and it was an exciting time to get a computer in your house for the first time and get to spend endless hours playing with it and and learning how it worked. And you understand that there was a lot, of, a lot of depth there, going to computer clubs and teaching myself how to program in basic and you know understanding. I didn't quite understand you know, what the software business was as a teenager, but I realized this was a field that I was interested in when I went to college. I studied computer science and I graduated and got a job as a software engineer working for a fairly large company, and that really started me down the road, realizing I really enjoyed this technology side of it. I like building software and I didn't understand the business side of it and I think that's something. Over time, as I progressed in my career I became more and more exposed to that and involved in that. So I spent about seven years working as a software engineer writing C and C plus plus and Java code and building distributed systems, network systems. And then I shifted into a technical consulting role for a middleware company where I was working and I really enjoyed that because I spent a lot of time traveling but, more importantly, visiting customers, enterprise customers, and going in very quickly, understanding what their architecture, their environment, what their problems were and helping them to very quickly try to diagnose and solve the specific technical problems but also set them on the right track from an enterprise architecture perspective.
Speaker 3:And then, when my wife and I started the family, I needed to change away from a high travel role. So I shifted into product management, which I had spent close to 20 years doing working for software companies. So in that role it's a very technical role, but what I really enjoyed about it was that I brought my horizons to focus on how does a technology company bring a product to the market, how do you enable your salespeople, what is what even is a sales process? Or how does marketing work in that world? And then so I continued in that role, taking on some executive leadership roles at a couple of software companies. And then at the beginning of this year, I stopped that on my own and now I'm doing independent consulting helping enterprises with their zero trust strategy. So I've gotten I feel like you know this big picture across how technology companies work and how enterprise and enterprise architecture works. At the same time, I've gone deep into information security. So that's a little bit of my meandering career path.
Speaker 2:Oh, wow, yeah, so you really do have a big picture, a big wide view on everything that we've done so far in the past. That's great, and it will lead you to being an independent consultant.
Speaker 1:K a taying on the route to helping enterprises, can you tell us a little bit about what mentoring means to you and how important that is in your career?
Speaker 3:It's really important because, for a variety of reasons I mean, clearly, when you're a manager, when you're hiring people, part of what you want to do is to see them grow and to challenge them and to take some responsibility for I won't say shaping them, but guiding them in the right way.
Speaker 3:That is number one, something that's going to help them professionally.
Speaker 3:And number two is aligned with their personality and their interests and their skills. Obviously, different people gravitate toward different things and some people might be more suited to different roles than others. And as a manager or as a leader, as a mentor, that's something to recognize, and part of it is you do want to challenge people and, at the same time, you want to encourage them to grow and to try to work in areas that they're well suited for. So I was very fortunate that many of the people I worked for my direct managers have acted as mentors as well and really given me good guidance and helped me. Number one see the big picture and they've supported me, coached me and beaten me up when I fell in short or got off track. So I've been very fortunate to have those types of folks that I've worked for. And, of course, there's folks on the other side of the picture, where you have people that you either work directly or indirectly for that, you learn a lot about how not to do things.
Speaker 2:Nice, so I'll face this question. So, when you were first starting off with your career journey, do you remember any mentorship advice that you received in order to help you jumpstart your career?
Speaker 3:Thinking back in the ancient past. There I came up with specific mentorship advice. I remember that my first manager and technical lead right when I graduated from school was really helpful, as they understood my strengths and weaknesses and there were areas of software engineering that I was pretty good at and there were areas where I was brand new to it. So they recognized that and they said, okay, great, you're good at these technology things. Let's talk about what a software engineering process is at this company. Let's talk about how we work as a team, and then we do code reviews and we have a quality release process, et c. So I really got to learn through them about, in this example, software engineering processes. So I think it was a recognition of it was something that they recognized that they couldn't assume that I knew everything and through the question and answer and the discussion they realized, okay, he doesn't know about this. Fantastic, we're not going to yell at him about that. It's about guiding and educating and teaching so that he could be a productive member of the team.
Speaker 2:And so would you say that you would constantly have to trade comfort for growth in order to move to where you are now in your career trajectory, and that way you could do continuous learning.
Speaker 3:I'm a big fan of continuous learning and trying new things and even at an advanced age, like I am, of being a beginner at something and realizing, oh, I'm trying this and I'm really terrible at it and that's okay. I think that, especially as you advance in your career and you get fancy titles and people look at you with respect because you've done a lot, it's important to keep some humility as well and try whatever it is whether it's not a lot of activity or musical skill or something and recognize okay, I'm a beginner and I'm terrible at this, but that's okay, I'm interested in learning about that. I think I lost what was the first part of the question. There was a thread there.
Speaker 2:Oh, if you found yourself constantly having to trade comfort for growth.
Speaker 3:I would say yes or no, right? So there's, if you think about the career, my career, a career there's certainly areas where you wanna go deep, and I do wanna encourage people who are listening to go deep and make sure that there are some sections or some facets where you really deeply understand things, because, if you don't, because doing so it's gonna give you the confidence and the knowledge to be able to stand up and speak about this confidently, to lead and even confront people who are wrong about it and say no, no, this is really how this thing works. So it's important to go deep and I wouldn't say that that's an area of discomfort, but there is definitely areas of growth and challenge.
Speaker 3:For me, public speaking, being on stage and presenting is very it's hard for me, it's draining. Some people are naturally very extroverted and I'm not one of them. I can give a good presentation, but it's exhausting for me. So that's a skill. That's something that I've practiced, and definitely for many times and for many years it was. There was a lot of discomfort, it was nerve-wracking and a lot, of, a lot of mediocre presentations before I really developed this skill.
Speaker 2:You've been number-wise now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and staying on that as well. How would sorry pause, let me start again. And staying on that route, what does it mean to, according to you, stepping out of your comfort zone, and how do you approach that? So have you felt like, over time, you've become more confident in certain areas, or do you think it was a more gradual process? Or do you find you take it one step at a time? Certain presentations you may prefer in terms of where it is or the subject matter, or is it just really just a mix of all different things?
Speaker 3:It's definitely a mixture because it could vary so widely by domain.
Speaker 3:I mean, certainly there are some things that are well understood and well structured, like giving presentations.
Speaker 3:Everyone's given a million presentations and you could start off and say, all right, I'm presenting to a five-person team or a 10-person team and then, oh, I'm going to a conference and I'm presenting to 50 people in the audience, and then it grows from there where you get to these giant conferences in Europe upon stage in front of a thousand people or in some cases even more than that. And that's kind of one area for this and it's very straightforward and I won't say it's necessarily easy for people, but there's a natural progression there and you can practice and you can take presentation skills classes, you can have interactive things to do with other people to practice. But then there's things where you're kind of off the roadmap, whether it's a leadership role in an organization or whatever we're working in right, no one knows what the future is going to be like. And there's definitely, especially as you grow in a responsibility and organization, you're asked to take on leadership roles and make decisions with what's always going to be incomplete information.
Speaker 3:There's always going to be uncertainty, and that's, I would think, the hardest and most exhilarating and exciting and dangerous part of things, when you're like, okay, we have to make this investment of time and money or we're going to shift the company or shift our team away from this over here and we've got a vision. We think we know what's going to happen, but no one really knows. There's degrees of confidence and there's degrees of uncertainty around that, and that's definitely something that requires that does push people I think everyone out of their comfort zone.
Speaker 1:And what would you like attendees to gain from your presentation here at The Open Group Summit?
Speaker 3:So at the summit today I'm presenting on, I've got one presentation on Zero Trust called Zero Trust Past, present and Future, and I'm also on a panel discussion with some of the other presenters here.
Speaker 3:In terms of the presentation, I'd like people to understand a little bit more about the historical context around, why we are where we are from a securities perspective and, in particular, why traditional networking and security technologies have put us into a difficult place from a security perspective, and how and why this concept. It's really this collection of best practices and in a called Zero Trust. That is a security strategy and a security philosophy and it's focused on taking the best practices of security and tying them together in a somewhat unique and more dynamic way. Why that's so important and I really want people to understand. Number one this is a demonstrably better way to approach security. Number two given the world in which we live, we all have a responsibility as security leaders to push and pull and poke and make our organizations move forward and adopt this, because we're all under constant attack and that's a simply non-unacceptable world to be in where we're not using the best defenses that we possibly can to keep our hospitals and our banks and our subway systems and our enterprises operating and safe.
Speaker 2:So what does the future hold for Zero Trust? Would you say that there's a big push for it now that you're seeing?
Speaker 3:There definitely is, and a lot of this is part of, I should say, a lot of it is driven by the US federal government's mandate for this, but a lot of it is also driven by adoption and awareness within the enterprise, and I think the future is bright.
Speaker 3:I think the onus is on us too, as enterprise security practitioners, to demonstrate that Zero Trust isn't just marketing BS, because there is some of that out there, that it's real and that we are, as an industry, are obtaining value from it. I really encourage enterprise practitioners to share those case studies, talk about what they can, and to present at conferences like this about hey, I work at this medical research facility or bank, whatever it is. This is how we embrace Zero Trust and this is how we benefit it, and these are the challenges that we have. I think that we are also going to see continued vendor investment in integrating platforms with other vendor components, which is really helpful. Hopefully, they will start to use, or continue to use, open standards around this rather than proprietary APIs, to help with an open approach and to encourage innovation across the board. So how?
Speaker 2:do you balance your current role or projects with your ongoing commitment to learning and growth?
Speaker 3:It's difficult because we all have always have short-term commitments and short-term deliverables and things like that, and I really try to block off time to do reading and research, but I'm not very good at sticking to that. So what I have done is I started a book group with a group of colleagues and we meet every couple of weeks and just go through one chapter of a particular book. So it's not a huge investment, but you do have your peer pressure to actually read the chapter and be prepared to talk about that. I also am a big reader.
Speaker 3:I spend a lot of time reading, so I do like to read about technology or things around that, as well as detective novels and fiction and things to just have fun. So it's hard. I do think you have to think about how you want to spend your time deliberately and everyone's brain needs a break. So I love a good trashy police procedural novel as much as anyone, but at the same time, I do listen to podcasts or read books about technology and spend time reading news and diving into some of the vulnerability reports or articles, technical blogs around that, to really understand how this stuff works and to try to be able to make connections and have, of course, anecdotes to share about them, nice.
Speaker 1:And how do you approach challenges and setbacks? Do you have a certain mantra o do k know? If you're coming across a problem, how do you break it down in order to solve?
Speaker 3:i. I wouldn't say there's a and there's one kind of pattern or technique around that. I mean clearly there is trying to take a step back and get as much information as you can around what the problem is or why something's failing. I really try to take a collaborative approach with people that I'm working with, whether it's professionally or with my family, just to talk about things in brainstorm and to try to put things in perspective too. I mean, sometimes it worked really hard in something and it's not being successful and it's okay to say, all right, you know, we're gonna, I'm gonna stop doing this because, whatever reason and I want to reassess, maybe this isn't the right track and it's the hard balancing act to be able to make that decision versus to have the confidence and the determination to to move forward and push things forward.
Speaker 3:Right, it's there's. You don't want to. You can't always give up, but you do have to know when to stop putting energy and or money and time into something that you've learned it isn't the right track or doesn't look like it's going to be successful. I mean it's. It's important to learn something from everything. There's definitely an art to. Hey, I'm working on this project or I'm writing this article, or I'm writing this program or I'm starting this business initiative and you know, whatever reason, it's not working for me. You know there's definitely an art to determining how much to keep going at that and when to say okay, I've learned. This isn't quite right. You know people aren't interested in buying this work map or this project or this consulting engagement, so I'm taking it into a different direction.
Speaker 2:So how do you find yourself letting go of something that you're passionate about? If there's just, you know, something topic or something you're working on and you really feel like it's something good, you know you're striving for it to be successful, but you constantly find yourself in setbacks. How do you navigate going through that transition and having to let it go?
Speaker 3:I think you wonder. I've always tried to talk to as many people about this and people who may or may not be experts in your field or may or may not even be directly related, but find people that you've got good working or personal relationships with and kind of bounce the ideas off of them and they're not going to understand the domain like you will, but they're going to probably pick up on things that you haven't even thought about or you haven't even recognized because you're so deep into it. And in today's world, of course, almost anything you can create has different delivery mechanisms. It can be a podcast, it can be a book, it can be a webcast, whatever it is, and you know it's okay to say, all right, I've been writing this.
Speaker 3:Let's say someone's writing a book and there's no one interested in publishing them Okay, well, you could self publish it or you could turn it into a series of articles or blogs, or you could find some other way to. You could be a guest on someone's podcast to talk about that topic and start to see what kind of traction that you can get. I don't think, for the most part, effort and things that you put into something that's going to be wasted. It may take a different form than what you had originally envisioned, and that's okay.
Speaker 1:Now, before we end, we'd like to start a short round of quick fire questions. So first one is what bucket list item do you most want to check off in the next six months? Quite a biggie, hmm.
Speaker 3:I don't know if I have a mental bucket list, so we can pause the recording for this.
Speaker 1:Maybe Okay. No, no, I got it Okay. All right, Okay.
Speaker 3:So I mentioned at that at the beginning of this year I started this business and so far it's just me. But I've been very pleased with the amount of traction that I've gotten and the work, as well as the pipeline of work. So for me the really exciting next step is going to be to hire a first employee.
Speaker 2:All right. Well, I hope you get there soon.
Speaker 3:Yeah, me too.
Speaker 2:Right, and if you can invite anyone from the past or present to dinner, who would it be and why?
Speaker 3:I know I'm not supposed to think about this too much, right.
Speaker 1:We could, if you'd like, change that to if you'd like to have dinner with someone famous. That's about a good question. A celebrity, past or present? How about next? Oh, we can skip this one. Oh, and what's your favorite holiday destination?
Speaker 2:Or can we ask what book or novel you're reading?
Speaker 1:Okay, let's start.
Speaker 2:And so you mentioned earlier that you love reading novels and your free time. So what book are you reading currently?
Speaker 3:So I mentioned my police procedural, so I just finished, I would say, most of the Michael Connelly Bosch series. So those are great, really good and well done, and I like the characters in them. The serious book that I'm reading is called the Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zubat. This came out about two or three years ago and it's really fascinating and scary and the author does a fabulous job of kind of coalescing and making a very detailed case for the real challenges we have around privacy and how everything that we do is now digitized and monetized and it's shaping our society in ways that we're not even aware of and we really need to be.
Speaker 1:Thank you. So, we'd like to say thank you for joining our show today. It was great having you on and, you know, discussing your career journey so far, advice and also just yeah, just getting to know you and learning more about you. So thank you so much. We'd also like to thank our listeners, open comments community, who have been tuning into the podcast. We've really been enjoying bringing different topics into the fold for you, along with a vast variety of subject matter experts. Please stay tuned for the next episode coming soon. Thank you, stay safe.