Tech Leadership Meets Wellness: How Movement and Mindfulness Shape Cyber Response with Tony Kirtley

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Transcript

Speaker 1 0:20

Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Tech Exec Wellness Podcast.

Speaker 2 0:23

I'm your host, melissa, and today I'm excited to bring on a guest that I know. He's definitely a great person and I can't wait to hear some of his wellness tips and some of the things he's been doing these days.

Speaker 2 0:35

With more than two decades of experience in the information security industry, tony currently leads a team that specializes in responding to cyber breaches of all kinds and sizes, as well as proactive incident response preparation and threat hunting assessments. X-force IR's team of veteran incident responders helps clients, from Fortune 100 enterprise companies to the small and mid-sized companies, recover from cyber breaches and improve their cyber resiliency. And improve their cyber resiliency. Tony works closely with his team to deliver excellent service every time to return their clients to a secure state. So, tony, before we get started, if you've listened to the show, I got to ask this question. Every time we have a guest on, before we start, can you tell us what you're listening to, what your favorite music genre is and if you have a couple of memorable concert experiences that you can share with our listeners?

Speaker 1 1:25

So welcome yeah thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be on with you today. Thank you, I love music and my whole family loves music. We have music on all the time in our house and I learned a lot about music from my kids, who are all musicians, and I've come to like indie folk quite a bit. Noah Khan is a big artist in our house. Hozier is another one. In fact, the Noah Khan concert that was here in St Louis last summer was very memorable for me because I had four of my five kids with me and my wife and it was just a great time.

Speaker 1 2:02

But I have to say, most recently my youngest daughter is a fan of Stephen Day and I wouldn't call him indie folk, but he played a concert in kind of a historic place in St Louis called the Blueberry Hill Duck Room, where Chuck Berry played for like 17 years straight at the end of his career and end of his life, and that was. It's a very intimate place. It only holds about 300 people, and I guess that's what made it so cool is that you're hearing the songs that you know from this artist and hearing them live and seeing him and he was. He's a great performer and so it was just kind of a cool experience with two of my daughters and my wife, so that was pretty neat.

Speaker 2 2:44

That's awesome, so I really appreciate you taking time out of your day to talk with us. I've been wanting to have you on the show for a bit here. Can you walk our listeners through what led you to a career in cyber and specifically the breach response?

From Civil Engineering to Cybersecurity

Speaker 1 2:58

Yeah, so cybersecurity kind of dropped in my lap around the year 2000. I was actually a civil engineer, had been for eight years, that's what my degree is in and everything and I was also at a parallel career in the Army National Guard and along. About 2000, the National Guard stood up a organization called the CERT the Computer Emergency Response Team in every state and so I threw my name in the hat, I got training from them and occupied one of the seven positions on that team and that was it. I changed to my civilian career later that year and never looked back and that's kind of how I got started and I've got a lot of training and experience with the National Guard and executed a parallel career for about 25 years Well, 25 years ago and then I retired from the National Guard in 2014.

Speaker 1 3:57

So it kind of dropped in my lap and I'm very, very grateful for the experience that I got in the National Guard and the exposure to cybersecurity which allowed me to kind of go into this career outside of the military and just kind of take it from there.

Speaker 2 4:17

That's great. What does a typical day look like in the life of Tony?

Speaker 1 4:20

Well, last fall I took a job with IBM. I had been working for SecureWorks for almost 10 years and decided to come over to IBM to run their incident response team and I'm thrilled to do that. And I manage a global team and so I've got a lot of team members in Europe, the Middle East, even in Asia. So my day now because I interface a lot with them my mornings are full of meetings with my coworkers in Europe and some team meetings here with US coworkers, and then the afternoon quiets down a little bit, and then late afternoon and evening when Asia comes online, I'm interfacing with those guys, so I have the time a little bit to go heads down and do some planning, some strategic things for the practice in the afternoons, but lots of calls in the morning, some evenings, so that's kind of the typical day for me.

Speaker 2 5:16

So, when you have the time, how are you decompressing? What are you doing to relieve stress?

Daily Routine and Workplace Movement

Speaker 1 5:21

or getting yourself up and about doing to relieve stress or getting yourself up and about and things. Well, I work from home. Speaking of up and about, I like to work from different places in the home. I take most of my calls from my office because that's where I have the best setup with the camera and the mic and everything. But I also have a deck. I have a hearth room, so I like to change it up, you know, location wise.

Speaker 1 5:43

So when the weather's nice, I'll go out on the deck. When it's cold out and I want to put on the fireplace, I'll go in the hearth room and just, you know, I've got out talking with my wife or whatever is a way to kind of take those short kind of breaks. But then I have to work in some exercise, at least not necessarily every day, but four or five days a week. Usually five days a week I'm going to exercise and I'll either do that before work or after work, depending on what my schedule looks like. Sometimes afternoon or evening calls make me work out in the morning, or morning calls have me working out in the afternoons. I just kind of move it around, depending on my schedule.

Speaker 2 6:34

I'm going to stop you there for a minute because I have a couple, I have a comment and I have a question. My first comment is I think you're the first person I've had on the show in the last year and a half that moves around within their home.

Speaker 1 6:47

Because most of the people are like, I have an office.

Speaker 2 6:49

Yeah, let me ask you this Because you've got that variety, you've got two different rooms. Do you think that makes a difference in your work and projects that you're doing?

Speaker 1 6:58

I do. I think that sitting here in the same place, even though I've kind of got it to where it's comfortable with the foot rest and I've got a comfy chair and a big monitor and everything, I just like the change of scenery. I think it helps with the creative process and it helps clear the mind and, you know, just changing it up a little bit, and I'm surprised that I'm the first that you've heard to do that. You are.

Speaker 2 7:22

I can't wait to highlight that when this episode comes out, because I want to. I want to see if, if people are doing that and from the show they have not mentioned that, but I'd like to see if that increases productivity, if that changes mood. You're going to be, you're going to be the example.

Speaker 1 7:38

I do find that it changes the mood, nice. I believe that it enhances productivity because you're just kind of resetting, and resetting your physical environment can help you reset your mind and maybe even the creative process. So I find it really helps and I call it my West office. It's kind of the deck and the hearth room are next to each other, so it's kind of both of them are my West office. It's kind of the deck and the hearth room are next to each other, so it's kind of both of them are my West office, so I find it helps a lot.

Chocolate Labs and Pet Training

Speaker 2 8:09

That's really cool. Okay, here's my question Are you ready? What kind of dogs do you have and how did you obtain them? So I'm guessing maybe two or more.

Speaker 1 8:18

I have two dogs. They're both chocolate labs. One is six and one is five. They came from the same breeder and the breeder was my uncle. I say was. He's no longer a breeder, he's still my uncle, but he's no longer breeding. My cousin was selling his dogs on Facebook. She was really pressing hard. She got to my wife, who's a sucker for dogs. The first one was so damn cute that we just couldn't help ourselves. Then it became well, this one needs a friend. We ended up with two, but their names are Tater Tot and Bean and, as I said, they're chocolate labs. Tater Tot is very big, he's over a hundred pounds, and Bean is 70. And they're my wife's favorites in the family, quite frankly. She takes very good care of them and she is the source of their life. They just adore her. They're really good dogs. I love having them.

Speaker 2 9:15

I love that. I'm a dog person and I always say when people talk about their pets, you know they're good people because I think it takes a lot to raise a dog, get them socialized, and there's a lot of care involved in, you know, taking care of pets children too. But I really have a soft heart, a soft space for people that have dogs and cats.

Speaker 1 9:36

Yeah, I mean, and if you want the best experience with dogs especially, I think that it's worth putting the time and effort into training them, especially big dogs like ours. You can't walk them and have them misbehave. They're just too big, they'll pull you down, so you have to train them to walk and you're not picking them up and moving them around, so you need them to come and sit and stay in a certain place. So training for big dogs is especially important.

Speaker 2 10:03

No, I agree, Even the little ones can be rascals. I've got experience with that.

Speaker 1 10:08

You know, this is. This is great.

Wellness While Traveling

Speaker 2 10:10

This gives us all you know cause I'm visualizing what that hearth room looks like, the pets and all that us all you know, because I'm visualizing what that hearth room looks like, the pets and all that. You talked about doing exercise and whatnot. How about when you're traveling? Are you mindful of your fitness, nutrition, sleep, yeah, when.

Speaker 1 10:24

I travel. It makes it hard, the sleep especially. I find the exercise I find the hardest Nutrition. You still have to eat and if you're, if you've got in a place where there's some choice in the restaurants you can go to, I find it not very hard to eat well on the road. You just have to make a point to do it and that for me, includes just making sure you have your major macros, your proteins, your carbs and fiber is super important. You can go to like any restaurant really and eat a meal that doesn't have much fiber vegetables in particular but I think that you can also find anywhere choices that have a good amount of fiber. So I think it's important to eat well.

Speaker 1 11:15

As far as sleep goes, it depends on what I'm traveling for. In the past, when I've gone on incidents, you know sleep is a premium and you just got to make sure you get as much as you can. But sometimes that's controlled for you because of the workload and also, like for internal meetings. There's always social events at night and the meetings during the day. So I always make sleep a priority. So the workouts is the real hardest thing for me, because you're out of your routine, You're in a different place, you have to adapt to the facilities you have. Even if you're just going for a run, you're in a new place, you don't know what you're going to run into. If you're in a city, that makes it especially hard, and some people just tend to go on the treadmill in the hotel, which is really not the best place or the best way to exercise. So I find exercise really hard to do while I'm traveling and I don't do it. The best I try, I always take my workout clothes and everything.

Speaker 1 12:16

I don't always get it done, but I know it's important to do the intent is there.

Speaker 2 12:21

I don't know about you, but I was a early Peloton adopter and I was excited when Weston put Peloton bikes in their hotels.

Speaker 1 12:32

Now I know that, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 12:34

Yeah, and you know they didn't put it in the room because they they do that too. They'll put a treadmill in your room if you want. I was like, nah, I don't need that, but they had the Peloton there. I recall several times where I would get to my hotel, get in my workout clothes and do a Peloton rides. Do you do anything like that at all, peloton?

Speaker 1 12:51

I don't do Pelotonoton but I have family members that have them and they swear by them. They love them, not just for the biking but the other kind of workouts you can do with with the program. I've not personally used a peloton but but uh, I get it.

Speaker 2 13:07

I get that yeah I don't know about you. Some people that we have on the show have all kinds of apps and wearables. What about you? Where do you stand with that? Are you using any? I am?

Speaker 1 13:18

not a huge wearable guy. I've got an Apple Watch and sometimes I'll look at my pulse on that. I don't really track steps because I'm sitting at my desk all day, I'm not out and about and getting a lot of steps. Most of my activity is in my daily workout, so I'm not that much into wearables. However, when I do work out, I do like to use a heart rate monitor and this program that I used to be on use these heart rate monitors from my zone and it used the zone methodology and your heart rates and everything and put you in like different zones and you can monitor that and shoot for different zones depending on what you're going for.

Speaker 1 14:03

So I do like to monitor my heart rate when I work out so that I can you know if you stay low you can recover faster, and but sometimes you need to go hard into the zone four and zone five and be more intense. So I do like to keep an eye on that. But all of the other metrics, like the whoops and other wearables, I've not really gotten into that much. It's interesting, I just haven't personally adopted that.

Heart Rate Zone Training Explained

Speaker 2 14:32

I'm thinking about going back to a regular watch, just because I don't like having alerts and sometimes if I'm just kind of meditating it'll go off. I'm like that's too connected, so I might be doing the opposite.

Speaker 1 14:43

Yeah, the Apple Watch can be annoying to, you know, with too many alerts. You just have to make sure to put it on Do not disturb, I guess. Yeah, I like that you can do that from your phone, and it also silences your watch, so maybe a way to handle that. Meditation is another thing that I've always been interested in and learning about, but I've never practiced the daily routine of meditation.

Speaker 2 15:10

There's this misconception that you have to be in a dark room. I got into the meditation thing and I kept asking and searching online and they said you could even meditate while you're running or you're walking if you're not listening to music. I think I do that to problem solve, it's not. Maybe you can try that, but I I don't want to sit in a dark room. That's not fun. I get bored. You and I talked about this before and I was hoping maybe, if you don't mind, to go a little deeper into the zone training Remember we had that conversation, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 15:40

You want. Can you talk about that and tell users why and how? And?

Speaker 1 15:45

all that good stuff, sure. So I learned about like zone heart rate training from my son, who's an endurance athlete. I don't remember how he learned about it but he as he's training for one of these distance events, he's a, he's a kind of Ironman coming up. It will be his first Ironman. He's done triathlons and marathons. But he was telling me about the methodology and the way it works.

Speaker 1 16:12

Is you, depending on your age, you will have a maximum heart rate that you can hit. That's your absolute maximum heart rate, and the zones are determined as a percentage of that maximum heart rate. So the magic zone for getting a good workout but being able to recover quickly is zone two, which is between around 70% of your max heart rate. So for me that's in the ease in one piece beats per minute, and so the concept is, if you're in, that's considered a relatively low intensity workout. So it may be a brisk walk. For some it may be a slow jog or like on a biker or a rower relatively low intensity.

Speaker 1 16:59

So they say that you should be able to carry on a conversation with someone if you're in a zone two heart rate. So your breathing shouldn't be so fast that you can't talk to someone and oftentimes my son will call my wife and I while he's on a long run in zone two and we can hear his footsteps the whole time. It's kind of interesting. But the whole point is you're exercising, you're burning calories, you're exercising your cardio, but you're not doing it so hard that you're not able to recover and exercise the very next day. So they say that about 80% of if you're prescribing to this methodology, about 80% of your workout should be in zone two, whereas the other 20 are in a higher zone, depending on your goals. You want to tax your cardio system once in a while, just to kind of show it its limits, to expand those limits. So that's what the 20% is for.

Speaker 2 17:56

That is really great Iron man. What made him decide to take that endeavor on?

Speaker 1 18:01

Well, he did cross country when he was in high school and just fell in love with, I guess, the feeling that he got when he exerted himself in that way as an adult. When he went to college, he got into the triathlon club in college and did some triathlons and it just went from there. Now he lives in Washington DC and he's in a triathlon club there and he'll be competing in the Ironman in Madison this fall. So I think it's really great that he's taken something from high school, a wellness activity that he started in high school, and is executing it in his adult life.

Speaker 2 18:47

I like that. I have mad respect for anybody that does a triathlon. I mean, I see them, or I've seen them in a lifetime, and it just looks there's so much going on from the water to the bike to well. You'll have to let us know how he does.

Speaker 1 19:02

Yeah, and it'd take. I'll have to say, it takes an enormous amount of training and effort and discipline to really do that. I don't know how people do it. It's, it's, it's a lot, a lot of training, many, many hours all the time.

Speaker 2 19:20

No, absolutely Circling back to work. How do you check in on your people's wellness, and I know that you're kind of new to the role. How long has it been? A year now? I don't know.

Speaker 1 19:26

It's been about seven months since I've been in this role. And how do I check in on the people?

Leading Through Burnout Prevention

Speaker 1 19:31

I have managers of managers, so I've got my organization is several levels deep and so I don't get the opportunity to check in on all of my people, but I do try to set the culture in the leadership philosophy of hey, when I need you or when our clients need you, they need you, you got to be there, and when they don't, you know, then we can have some flexibility, even you know, to the point where, hey, if there's something you've missed while you are on this engagement, go take care of that personal thing, take care of your family, take care of your family, take care of your relationships, take care of yourself and all of your errands that you may have missed since you were working.

Speaker 1 20:24

So I think that is critical to managing burnout, which I space because it is hard, it's, you know, you're working long hours maybe for an extended period of time, and it's important to get some time off to recover and rejuvenate at the end of all that, and not only physically but mentally as well, because it requires your heart and soul.

Speaker 1 20:57

When you're in it You've got to put every ounce of your mental capacity into solving the puzzle and helping our clients through the hard times that they're going through.

Speaker 1 21:10

I always say that being an incident responder is kind of a combination of a firefighter, a doctor and a counselor. Because you know the firefighter is obvious, we're putting out the fires, we're trying to get our clients back to business as usual, and a doctor we're noticing things that are broken when we're in that fight with them, and so we're making recommendations to our clients. You need to have good security hygiene to our clients. You need to have good security hygiene. You need to do these things specific controls and like a doctor who makes recommendations to their patients patients don't always follow those recommendations, and so we see that all the time. And then the counselor people go through kind of a mental anguish sometimes depending on the type of incident, but if it's an existential event for our clients, the people involved are really having a hard time. So you kind of got to kind of talk them through the emotional effect of a cybersecurity incident.

Speaker 2 22:12

No, absolutely. One thing that I see is I'll have people young people, college age people reach out to me and say hey, I'm interested in cyber and, like you, I've done proactive and I've done IR. It's not uncommon for us to get questions after these podcasts. If someone were to reach out to you Tony I heard you on TechExact Wellness what advice would you give if I wanted to go into IR?

Speaker 1 22:42

Because based on what you said about it being exciting, a lot of different things going on what would you tell them? I would tell them that there is a lot of challenges. It's not a regular kind of run-of-the-mill IT job. I always say that security incident response especially is different from all of the IT jobs out there because we battle against actual people and not against the machines themselves. There's actual bad person on the other end of the keyboard, so just expect that it's going to be different.

Career Advice and Personal Goals

Speaker 1 23:10

I would say that learn all that you can to contribute, because in security you're going to see all kinds of stuff. You're going to see all different sides of security and the more you know about these things, the more effective that you'll be. If you think about someone who's trying to solve a crime, the more they know and pick up, can pick up on different clues that aren't obvious to a lot of people, the better they're going to be at solving the problem. I would say learn all you can, take care of yourself, take time off when you have it and make the best of that and, of course, in the spirit of this podcast, take care of yourself from a physical standpoint and get the exercise, eat right and just keep yourself in good health, because I've seen I've allowed it to happen to myself and and I've seen it in a lot of other people where the stress of the job gets the better of them and they just their health declines.

Speaker 1 24:05

I had a young employee a couple of jobs ago who came. I served with him in the army. I hired him at our civilian employer and he was a very results oriented person and would work long hours. And we were talking about exercise one day and he was like well, I haven't been able to make the time. And I said listen, I know this job can be stressful, but you have to make the time to continue to exercise. Because I didn't want to see him go down the path of declining health because he was working so much he couldn't exercise.

Speaker 2 24:38

So that's very important to that's interesting that you bring that up. That's one of the reasons I started this podcast. I had my own little bout there of illness and I was working in IR, and IR is something I think you have to be firing on all cylinders. You can't have one cylinder out. You'll miss something. People like yourself that are in leadership. It's like what do we do for sustainability and wellness? How do we keep people at their best? It's good that you've got that as a priority, because I think it really matters.

Speaker 1 25:11

Yeah, yeah, it sure does. And I think people appreciate it too that you're thinking of them in that way and you're not just, like you know, making them burn the candle at both ends. So if you show a little appreciation for people and you know help take care of them, they really give it back to you.

Speaker 2 25:29

No, absolutely Any professional or personal goals that you have as we're into the fourth month of the year.

Speaker 1 25:36

Oh my goodness, where did the time go as we're into the fourth month of the year oh, my goodness, where did the time go? I know Well, this being my first full year at IBM, I've got a lot of business goals to meet to kind of bring the practice to the next level based on the experience that I bring to the team, and so we certainly want to do that. I came in with a goal of kind of rebuilding the team a little bit. I did a lot of hiring, I did some training, and so for 2020, I want to take that training that we've done and take the practice to the next level for IBM and for X-Force. So, professionally, that's what I'm looking at.

Speaker 2 26:12

On the personal side.

Speaker 1 26:13

I think you and I have talked about me getting into kind of a sport called High Rocks.

Speaker 2 26:18

Yes.

Speaker 1 26:20

And so I did a race last fall. It was my first one and really enjoyed it. It was up in Chicago and I'm planning on doing another one this fall, not sure where, but with the same group of people who really love the sport we train every Saturday. I just want to kind of improve my personal time. I mean, I'm not getting any younger but I can put more effort into it and train a little harder to improve my time there. That's kind of like a personal fitness goal that I'd like to achieve.

Speaker 2 26:57

Now that's, that's cool. I know that when you and I talk about that stuff, it's cool to like to hear about what you're doing and probably stay with me with Peloton, right, Tony? Hey oh, my goodness, I am so glad that you I was able to get you on the show. I know we've been talking for a while, since we crossed paths at Dell SecureWorks.

Speaker 2 27:15

Thank you very much for coming on at Dell SecureWorks. Thank you very much for coming on. Please remember to subscribe to our podcast on various platforms, including Apple, spotify, iheartradio and many more. Thank you for tuning in and take care.