Our Security Spotlight series is all about the people behind the scenes, and how they bring cyber security to life in practice. This month, we’re featuring Solutions Sepcialist, Kim Dawson.
I’m a solutions specialist at Infotrust, where I’ve officially been working for 15 years, this year. My core focus areas are networking and infrastructure, so anything from switches and wireless through to virtual servers and Azure.
I completed a computer science degree at University, and my first role was working in tele-sales within Netbox Blue. Netbox Blue (since called Cyberhound / CyberEdge) created a UTM product that started as a spam filtering appliance for SMBs, and grew into being a full filtering device for K-12 Education. My role there morphed into being more customer service and inside sales, contacting customers about renewals but also assisting them with any questions of challenges they were having with the product. My current manager left to create his own MSP (Beachhead) and saw that my skillset was being underutilised, so pulled me across as his first full-time employee.
I can’t think of a specific experience, but generally just listening to customers and also recommendations from vendors. I tend to do a fair bit of consulting around network design that centers around best practices for zero trust.
When I first started with networking, it was fairly rare to see a school that had their networks properly segmented. That would be basically unheard of now. I’ve also been extremely keen to learn new products and ways of doing things, so adapting and absorbing new ideas and recommendations has come fairly easily.
I mostly work in projects, so being able to successfully deliver a solution to customers that has added value to their environment and that they are happy with is very rewarding. I’m passionate about customers and trying to do the right thing by them and delivering great solutions that I trust.
My advice would be to get an absolutely solid grasp of the basics and then everything builds on there, especially the basics from a networking perspective. Keeping in touch with the industry news and attending information sessions / events is key.