Security

Yesterday, I had an experience that crystallized the kind of work culture I believe in. It wasn’t a complex technical problem or a groundbreaking new technology. It was a first-round interview for a DevOps Engineer position, but it was the human dynamic that made it truly memorable.

The atypical interview setup

On one side of the virtual table was me. I started my journey in the tech world 15 years ago as a Network Engineer right after graduation. Today, I work as a Cloud and Security Architect, carrying a decade and a half of experience.

Recently, I decided to enhance the security and user experience of my Grafana instance by implementing Single Sign-On (SSO) with Zitadel as the identity provider. I have written an article a year ago for something similar with Zitadel and Tailscale. In this blog post, I’ll share my experience following the process outlined in this helpful article, along with some additional insights and tips I discovered along the way.

What is Zitadel? (to those wonder)

Zitadel is an open-source identity management platform that provides authentication, authorization, and user management functionality. It supports various authentication protocols including OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect (OIDC), making it an excellent choice for implementing SSO across multiple applications.

Why crash-test new vehicle?

To protect customer before it’s too late. The internet is even more dangerous than a highway. Protecting you, family, your website or system is protecting your business, private life and reputation.

Let’s discuss about protecting yourself in Internet and how important it is in this article.

Protecting yourself and your family

All work and no play make for a very dull Jane. We all like to spend time at home, with our family, maybe you like to do some online shopping, maybe you want to stream a movie on the internet, it’s really important to take time for yourself, but when you do, let’s make sure you’re secure. Whether you set up your network router or your local internet service provider did it for you, those routers often have a default password, if they have a password at all.

Why is security so important?

Today we use the Internet all the time from the time we wake up in the morning, and we check the weather on our phones to when we go to bed at night, and we ask Alexa to turn off our lights. Today there are 5.2 billion Google searches per day, and over 22 billion text messages across the globe between people every single day. That’s a lot of data. To give you a frame of reference 90 percent of the content on the Internet has been created in just the past two years. – Hmm? – You think about the world’s population there’s 7 billion of us. Did you know that 3.8 billion of those people are Internet users today? That’s over half of the world’s population. So why is security important?

Maybe you’re an information security expert. Maybe you just know a few technical things but everybody calls you for advice. My suggestion on how to talk to non-technical people, this sounds trite, but keep it simple. Non-technical people are really smart. They’re just not used to the technical terminology that you’re used to in your day-to-day world.

I have four things I want to talk to you about today, when you’re talking to non-technical people.