Gratitude Monday: Making a difference

As I discovered last week when the access permissions went belly up, the application I manage is heavily used and highly valued. We did a batch upload of about 700 users in the build we released on Thursday, but I still took my laptop home on Friday in case there were any issues.

And yesterday I checked my Teams chats on my mobile, and there was someone in Europe who said he and at least one of our consultants still had the hands-off permissions we give to sales. And the consultant had a critical demo today, and he really needed access. The first chat post had come in at 0537 EST, but I didn’t pick it up until about 0830.

Well, I fired up my work laptop (you can’t access company systems unless you’re on the VPN, and only company devices can get on the VPN), provisioned the support guy who’d hooked me in on Teams chat and his consulting colleague. So that was good.

I was worried, though—we have about 500 consultants, and the reason we’d done the batch upload on Thursday was that I did not fancy going one-by-one through the names and changing permissions, as I’d done for about 300 people through the week. I was afraid that all 500 consultants somehow didn’t get uploaded. I asked the support guy to check on a few random names to see if they were provisioned, and thank God they were. I’ll still have to check what’s going on when I get into work today, but that’s today’s problem.

Anyway—today I’m grateful that I’m the one who can help my colleagues out in the field, giving them access to a critical tool; that I took my laptop home on Friday; that I checked my mobile for alerts; and that I fixed the issue in time for my European colleague to do the job this morning his time. The work he and his mates do makes a real difference to the cybersecurity of organizations. My work helps them do that.