Scott: 00:00

Find something that you're good at that you enjoy, coding, networking, privacy. And then stack a skill set on top of that organizational skills, communication skills, anything along those lines is really valuable.

Intro: 00:11

Are you ready to know what you don't know about Privacy Pros? Then you're in the right place. Welcome to the Privacy Pros Academy podcast by Kazient Privacy Experts. The podcast to launch, progress and excel your career as a Privacy Pro. Hear about the latest news and developments. Discover fascinating insights from leading global privacy professionals.

And hear real stories and top tips from the people who've been where you want to get to. We're an official IAPP training partner. We've trained people in over 137 countries and countries. So whether you're thinking about starting a career in data privacy or you're an experienced professional. This is the podcast for you.

Jamal: 01:08

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Privacy Pros podcast. I'm your host Jamal Ahmed, founder and CEO at Kazient Privacy Experts and Privacy Pros Academy, the world's number one place for data privacy education. And I recently became the international bestseller for my book, The Easy Peasy Guide to the GDPR.

Today we've got a fantastic episode for you and I've got an amazing guest for you. Scott McCrady has over 25 years of experience working in the networking, telecommunications, and information security space. Scott is currently serving as the CEO of SolCyber Managed Security Services. Scott's worked with large companies and startups, among them include IBM and EDS, where he held security engineer and team leader positions, both in US and in London, and previous to SolCyber McCrady built the Asia Pacific Japan business at Symantec. He ran the global managed security service and the Symantec and Accenture joint venture. So we're in really good hands. Scott, welcome to the Privacy Pros podcast.

Scott: 02:07

Thanks Jamal. Pleasure. Thanks for having me

Jamal: 02:10

my absolute privilege and honour to be hosting you today. The truth is we all face challenges in our careers. Can you walk us through a particularly challenging moment in your career? How you tackled it and what were the invaluable lessons that it left you with to achieve the level of success that you have?

Scott: 02:27

For me, there's two really critical pieces. And one was before my career, actually, which was I went to university and the university mandated four years of speech course, and I was a very shy engineer and I thought it was the stupidest thing ever. I'm like, why am I taking these speech courses? They're terrifying. I remember the first speech was a three minute icebreaker, three minutes, Jamal. And I was terrified. Sweating buckets what am I going to say? All you had to do is get up and talk about yourself for three minutes. I went to high school I played sports. I'm getting a computer degree. Anyway those four years were probably one of the best things that ever happened to me because it allowed me then to take my career. And when I got in and got hands on keyboard deploying security and networks. I was often the person that got sent to see customers or would be talking to management and that ability to stack skill sets, I think is really sorely missing in a lot of people.

And people don't understand how valuable that is when you can stack skill sets. So find something that you're good at that you enjoy, whatever coding, networking, privacy. And then stack a skill set on top of that organizational skills, communication skills, anything along those lines is really valuable.

Jamal: 03:38

Thank you for sharing that and I really resonate with what you're saying like I can't believe I haven't had you in the podcast before because we have this Privacy Pros accelerator program which is where we take someone from where they are in their career to where they need to be and one of the challenges that we find amongst people who are looking to go from a mid level role to a senior role is the challenge they face is they get passed for promotion. It's not them and it's not because they're not technically great at what they do technically they're brilliant at what they do. But so is everyone else what they're looking for is people who have a strong personal brand people who can command respect, people who are credible ,people who are visible people who gets that buy in and those are the soft skills that you mentioned the communication, the presentation, the listening skills, the personal branding all of those things actually matter and I don't know what it is, but for a lot of people they just seem to struggle to even understand why stacking skills is important They're like, hey, I do privacy. I do security. I'm legal counsel. That's me. That's what I do and they just stop there. But they don't see that's the thing that's stopping them from catapulting their career and getting the same results that people get when they do actually stack their skills. What would you say to someone like that listening right now?

Scott: 04:46

I'll be very candid. There's two ways that companies hire one is technical proficiency and this methodology is going down. Companies hire a lot less than technical proficiency. So the easiest way to think is you take a bunch of tests and you do better than somebody else does on that test. So therefore you get hired. And the reason why that's going down is what we've all come to realize is we can teach technical proficiency. What we can't change is a person's attitude or behaviour. That is impossible or as close to impossible as you're going to get. You will come up to somebody and say you really need to be more customer friendly. You need to be more engaged with your co-workers. You need to be less sensitive about when we're having a conversation about what's working, what's not working. That does not go over very well, but it's very easy to go to an employee and say, Hey, you took this test on, DLP solutions and you got a 60. We really need you to be at an 85. People are very comfortable with that. We all learned that in school, so it's not as personal. And I think definitely with our company, we're looking for. that really get along well with everybody in that try really hard because we feel we can teach them the technical components.

Obviously you need to have some background in the core thing that you're doing but we can up level people from a technical standpoint. And so I would highly encourage everybody out there. Find some courses that really drive that whether or not sales courses motivational courses, whatever it takes to start working on the personal side, because it will catapult your career for sure.

Jamal: 06:11

Great. And I completely agree with you. And this is what I'm always saying is great companies, great CEOs, great hiring managers, they hire first for attitude and they know they can upskill. Yes, you need the competency. Of course you need the competency. You're not going to hire just for attitude, but when you put two people who have similar competencies together. The one that's going to get hired is the one with the better attitude. And so on our Privacy Pros Accelerator program, we have five core pillars that we focus on. And the first pillar that we focus on is all about mindset. And that's where we say, let's have a look at your mindset. Let's have a look at where you are now, because where you are now.

best level of thinking has got you to where you are now and we need to go and change that. And we want them to adopt the growth mindset, the abundance mindset and some assumptions of empowered leadership where everyone is doing the best that you can with the knowledge and resources available. You take responsibility and you go and kindly empower them and educate them and get them to do what they need to do.

And some of the other communication skills and presentation skills and we help them with the branding as well. So I'm really happy to hear that great CEOs and hiring managers and great companies like yours are actually looking and saying the same things that we're teaching and equipping with people on the program. Stacking skills is the most undervalued thing I've come across both personally and professionally.

And I think the people who get the levels of success, the people who you look up to. And the people who you think are really talented, they didn't become talented overnight. They've been stacking those skills and they've been working on them and they've been making sure that they get good enough and then they get better and then they add on a new skill and that's how we continue to be successful.

So thank you for sharing those with me. Now I want to ask you a little bit more about SolCyber. What kind of company would really benefit from that?

Scott: 07:48

So I spent most of my career working with the Global 1000, so the super large companies. And when we started SolCyber, what we realized is even those large companies would get breached. And there was a consistency of why that would happen. And essentially it would be a breakdown in the security program, but when you go talk to companies and you say, let's talk about your concept of operations for security. Like you want to see people's eyes roll over and glaze over talk about concept of operation for security.

But what we realized was what we call the mid market. So we support companies that are 100 employees, we support companies that are 10, 000 or 15, 000 employees. But even larger actually, but in that space, the ability to run a security program consistently is oftentimes the gap. And so we offer a really amazing managed security service, traditional managed security service, just in a much more modern and identity focused way. That's our entry point, but that's used to be where all of the other companies stop. We up leveled that to what we call managed detection and response service with the MSSP. Basically, what does that mean? Is that 50 percent attack against the machines with malicious code? We can do that. And then our preeminent product, which most people buy is what we call foundational coverage. And it's a security program subscription. So instead of having to hire the people and figure out which 4, 500 tools that you need, and then run all the programs consistently. We just drop all that in for per user per month.

And so it's a really great solution that allows for companies to take this security threat component off their plate and just allow us to run that for them consistently and they can take their security people and put them into a lot more architectural type roles. And we see this happen a lot is that a lot of companies don't have anybody or maybe have one person and that person gets pulled in lots of different directions and you don't really want them trying to look through management consoles at eight in the morning to see if something went boom last night and then on to their next responsibility. That's what we do. A security program as a service and customers love it. It's a really great service.

Jamal: 09:47

Awesome. Thank you for sharing that. And if anyone who's listening would want to get in touch to learn more about how you might be able to solve some of their challenges that they're having right now, what's the best way to get in touch with you?

Scott: 09:57

Sure. SolCyber S O L C Y B E R Solcyber.Com And easy Scott@SolCyber.

Jamal: 10:03

Okay. Awesome. And we'll link those into the show notes on the podcast. So just go and click there once you've listened to the podcast and then you can get in touch with SolCyber and see how they can actually help solve some of your challenges.

And what I really liked most about what you said there is it seems quite flexible and adaptable to me. So it's not Hey, this is the thing. And then what happens if we grow or if we merge and we get more users? Or what happens if we, something unexpected happens. We don't want to be left without any security solutions, but it's per user.

So it doesn't matter. You can scale up really quickly and you can also scale down very quickly as well. So I really liked that. And I think that's going to be a really strong selling point for some of the kind of clients that we actually work with as well, because that's one of the questions and objections that do come up sometimes. Are there any last nuggets of wisdom that you'd like to share? With the audience before you go?

Scott: 10:46

I appreciate the time and if we're always looking for better ways to explain how we do what we do and get buy in from companies and organizations, so feel free to reach out if you have if your security, your company's security needs, obviously we're there, but if there's other recommendations or ways of making this easier on everybody we're here as an, as a group to try to make the companies that we work for and work with a more secure and more and keep the data that's important, private.

Jamal: 11:10

Thank you very much Scott And if you're listening and if you just heard what Scott said, I don't I want you to pay attention to what he said But I also want you to pay attention to something else and this is scott's attitude his mindset. He has come on this podcast. He is someone who is in very high demand. He's come here to share all this knowledge and the last thing he says is, Hey, I want to learn how to get better. I want to, I'm open to ideas. We're a community and this is the attitude and this is the mindset that helps the great people in this community do well and really learn from each other's experiences because we only know what we know, right?

Sometimes we don't even know what we don't know. And when you look at things from different cultural point of view, when you look at these things from different industry point of views, We pull all of that together collectively, and that is where the power of community comes in. And Scott, I really want to take my hat off to you for sharing those attitudes and the humility and the modesty and all of the great things that you've been doing, you've been part of the solution for some really great tools.

And I know you're protecting a lot of companies, so keep up the great work and whatever we can do to support you, let us know, and I look forward to catching up with you again soon. And for you, our listeners, until next time, peace be with you.

Outro: 12:19

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