What 📚 or content have you read or are starting to read in 2022? For me, it is these two books, with the simple goal of continuous curiosity, learning, building, and protecting: The AWS Cookbook: Recipes for Success on AWS and The CISO Evolution: Business Knowledge for Cybersecurity Executives.

Q: I was just promoted to being a Director. I know the first 90 days are important - are there any playbooks anyone can share? Any do’s and don’ts to call out?

First congrats on the promotion. No specific playbook that I can share but I can say since you have been promoted someone saw a potential in you and things that you can perform that role, so start by trusting your skills and abilities a little bit more :) It’s important to have clear expectations from whoever you report to on what they expect you to do at the role/position. If these are not clear I would suggest you schedule a meeting and ask directly what are the success criteria, what are you goals for first 90 days, first 6 months and one year. If you don’t know what the expectations are its hard to meet them. To be more specific, it depends on many factors, like have you been promoted in the same department or promoted to run different department. I am assuming you were manager before, is the team the same or new? Will you be managing more teams etc. Based on that info more specific advice can be given.

Q: What is important to do / avoid during the first 100 days of being a CTO or VP of Engineering?

Gather context. Understand previous decisions and their context. Then start to ask questions to drive and promote change. Ideally bottom-up.

Q: What does a Managed Security Services Provider (MSSP) mean to you?

It means I’m looking to how that MSSP is audited & inspected.

Q: Do you have scheduled fixed day(s) of a month for downtime to patch each critical system?

I answered no, because it's not a fixed day of the month. Rather, we have a weekend each quarter where we negotiate a quarterly IT outage. In our work on patching what we found was that it was far easier to hold individual applications accountable for finding their own downtime (negotiating the specific duration/date of each outage with their business customers). But when broader outages were required (think core switches and routing, shared VM infrastructure, etc) that impacted multiple applications -- and maybe multiple critical applications -- it was easier to pre-plan these weekend outages for the year. Our experience was that initially these outages were more impactful to systems because we were dealing with a lot of deferred maintenance. But after the first year (4 weekends) the impacts were much more limited in scope (in general). Our biggest learning was that it was much easier to negotiate the weekends that we needed a year in advance (and then continually remind people that they were coming up!), and that we always had work that needed to be done. Also, having these scheduled outages allowed for better coordination of support staff when bigger changes were necessary.

Q: What are the top KPIs for IT for the next 3 years?

I think it should be a lot more elastic. Businesses are changing rapidly and what’s important to measure and improve today is likely not important or measurable next year. Long-term KPIs have the danger of being rear-facing rather than forward-facing or predicting. CIOs need to collaborate with their C-Suite peers to drive business KPIs and metrics that matter to them to move the business forward and increase revenue.

Question

What 📚 or content have you read or are starting to read in 2022? For me, it is these two books, with the simple goal of continuous curiosity, learning, building, and protecting: The AWS Cookbook: Recipes for Success on AWS and The CISO Evolution: Business Knowledge for Cybersecurity Executives.

Anonymous Author · Answer

I am reading 'The Great Tech Game' by Anirudh Suri. Interesting read on how Tech is shaping world politics and balance or power.

Anonymous Author · Answer

I am halfway through &#34;Leading with Empathy&#34; , on the list for next are:
&#34;The road less travelled&#34; by M. Scott and &#34;The inner game of tennis&#34; by W Timothy Gallwey

For technology books, I prefer video training from Pluralsight and A Cloud Guru, on the list, are SC-400, AZ-400 training.

Anonymous Author · Answer

I have just started reading the following Book (hardcover)
1. Becoming by Michelle Obama

Next in the line is 
2. Beyond Business Analytics: The Foundations of Behavioral Perspective Theory by Eliezer Geisler

Anonymous Author · Answer

If you haven't read The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday, that's another really great read!