By Jennifer Minella, CISSP, Advisory CISO, Network & Cyber Security, Carolina Advanced Digital, Inc.  "How did you get in to cyber security?", that's the question most often asked of me with great enthusiasm by people interested in the industry. The inquiry comes from both adults looking to make a career change as well as younger students yet to claim their stake in the professional world. 

Written By: Bob Osmond, President, and Ashutosh Vats, Research and Insights Associate, Racepoint Global. For more than a decade, companies have been rightly focused on defining their purpose. While purpose sets intention, reputation judges action. In a new era of accountability, reputation risk is top of mind for CEOs. Customer trust is the currency gained when purpose and action align.

Bill Gates inspired ‘Think Week’ I first learned about Bill Gate's 'Think Week' from the Netflix documentary Inside Bill's Brain. I liked the idea and checked with my coach, Kurt Graves, to get his opinion about it. He immediately said I should do it. It was a much more difficult task to explain it to my family :) It is funny that business trips and vacations are easily understood, but something like locking up inside a remote cabin and reading for seven days straight sounded weird when I explained it to my family.

On May 25, 2020, George Floyd was brutally murdered, his last words and breath caught on tape. While not the first murder of a Black person at the hands of police to be recorded and exposed, this video in conjunction with the world being forced to pay attention at home because of the pandemic, ignited a turning point and exposed a truth that many were already aware of – racism is alive, and it is systemic. George Floyd was a father, a son, and a friend, but more importantly he was a human being whose life was taken without consideration for his humanity.

Looking for a good summer read? Check out these recommendations from NC TECH members.

For SMBs and enterprises in need of secure, predictable, and customized IT solutions and services, RapidScale provides a one-stop cloud platform and enablement team with which to outsource some, or all, components of an organization's IT. RapidScale sets itself apart from MSPs and other managed cloud services providers with its expertise in application delivery, focus on security and compliance, and commitments to the "people" side of technology. RapidScale is a subsidiary of Cox Business, the commercial division of Cox Communications.

As the COVID-19 pandemic has forced the migration of public instruction and areas of commerce online, it has also highlighted the digital divide between those who do and don’t have reliable high-speed internet. Currently, at least 14.5 million Americans, many in rural areas, lack access to high-speed internet. In North Carolina, it is estimated that 40% of homes don’t have high-speed internet, either because the areas they live in lack the infrastructure, or because they can’t afford it.

ImagineX Consulting is a business and technology consulting firm, with cyber security at its core.  Our goal is to help clients transform their businesses by embracing emerging technologies such as devops, cloud, and white glove technology consulting.  The ImagineX culture thrives on entrepreneurship, risk taking, mutual trust, teamwork, encouraging change, and letting our consultants own their way of working. Founded in 2015, the firm has six locations across the country, including two in North Carolina.  Raleigh and Charlotte are home to two of the company's co-founders and a handful of consultants.

Larry Pickett is the April Executive Spotlight and the CIO and Digital Officer for Syneos Health, an NC TECH member. Larry, born in Asheboro, has lived in North Carolina all his life and moved away to spend 20 years in New Jersey. He moved back in 2015 to start a company in Research Triangle Park. He is married with three kids, with the youngest attending UNC Chapel Hill as a senior. Click the title above to read our Q+A session with Larry.

Racepoint and The Diversity Movement were involved in the recent virtual Diversity + Inclusion in Tech Summit held on March 24 and 25. After listening to all the informative discussions at the Summit, they walked away with ideas for incorporating DEI in their organizations’ plans. But, since every company is different, what is the best way to evaluate how to get started and where to begin? It may be time to bring in some experts. Click the title above to read the complete analysis.

Jackie Ferguson is an author, multicultural marketing consultant, certified diversity executive, global business specialist, lead course writer and human rights advocate. and the author of this month's guest blog - Privilege is Not A Dirty World. As a diversity professional and a teacher, uncomfortable conversations are part of my job. Every day is a new opportunity to explore the words and topics that make people feel awkward, to think about why that discomfort exists, and to lead the teams I’m working with toward more inclusive language and actions. We talk about racism, disability, unconscious bias, microaggressions, and exclusion. We talk about prejudice and otherness and identity. That is such vulnerable and emotional work. But I’ll tell you, privilege is the one word and topic that always elicits a strong allergic reaction.

NC TECH Chair Mark Dirks, President of Beacon Technologies, is the inaugural participant in our new "Meet A Leader" series. Click to view the entire blog. Describe your day job. I get to be the head coach of a very talented team of creative, technical and business professionals that enjoy working together to help other businesses successfully utilize web technology.  After working 15 years with big corporations, I am part of a team that gets to see the direct impact and value of our work on a daily basis.  It really doesn’t get any better than that for the last 22 years.

Founded in 1996, Raptek is a boutique consulting firm. Rapid Technologies (Raptek) provides expert level ServiceNow implementation & services with a mission of building community in 3 areas: Community of Clients: Providing our clients with the highest level of service and expertise for ServiceNow solutions. Community of People: Taking great pride in the longevity and experience of our employees. Community to support a Cause: Partnered with the Children's Miracle Network to support Children's Hospitals across the US & Canada.

Kurt Merriweather, Head of Products at The Diversity Movement and a Certified Diversity Executive (CDE), is an accomplished product strategist and marketing executive with a passion for helping leaders and organizations identify and implement growth strategies. Innovation requires exploring, and sometimes ignoring, what is around us and imagining a new future. Organizations and leaders that are able to blend proven product development practices with new ideas and perspectives are able to create breakthrough business ideas and outcomes. Building an engine for creativity requires cultivating multicultural, multigenerational teams that have access to information and possibilities to reach customers in new ways. This is the key to delivering sustainable business results and this is where diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and innovation intersect. The heart of diversity, equity and inclusion is to have the right people (diversity), supported by the right policies (equity) and integrated with collaboration practices (inclusion). Accessing the superior output of a diverse team requires inclusive leadership. 

Racepoint, an NC TECH member, provides a summary of the recent Accessibility Hackathon in partnership with their company Ablr. In October, our company Ablr had the opportunity to work with the North Carolina Technology Association (NC TECH) to shine a spotlight on digital accessibility. Together, we brainstormed to figure out how to engage NC Tech’s members in this effort. The big idea? Host an Accessibility Hackathon during the month of October, which coincided with National Disability Employment Awareness Month. Typically, a hackathon is an event in which developers or other IT professionals band together and, over the course of a short time period, set out to uncover bugs in a software project. In the case of the Accessibility Hackathon, we offered a website audit worth $5,000 to three randomly chosen NC Tech members. These website audits uncovered accessibility violations and identified barriers that would make it difficult for users with disabilities to fully utilize the site.

The School of Data Science is an industry-university partnership, committed to growing exemplary talent through research and education. As the only School of Data Science in the Carolinas, SDS offers several interdisciplinary graduate programs and the first data science undergraduate program in the state. The inaugural cohort of data science undergraduate students began classes in fall 2020.

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina (Blue Cross NC) is a mission-driven organization. Every day nearly 5,000 of us show up with one goal: to improve the health and well-being of our customers and communities. To fully achieve this goal, we must have a more equitable health care system.  We know that racism and discrimination lead to health disparities. Simply put, no community can truly be healthy until racism no longer exists. Our diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) work focuses on three areas: within our company, the health care system, and North Carolina communities.

NC TECH will host a Virtual Tech Job Fair on October 14 for tech employers to connect with job candidates. The ‘Live’ job fair will take place on October 14, utilizing an online platform, that will allow candidates to visit virtual rooms or ‘booth’ hosted by each employer to learn more about why it’s a great place to work and to view available job opportunities. Employers will be able to customize a virtual room to showcase their organization and job opportunities, access candidate resumes and connect via chat or zoom on the event day, and then view the traffic to their ‘booth’ and follow up with candidates post event.

Last week, we all learned of the news of the passing of Ruth Bader Ginsberg – a true leader, patriot and pioneer. Her death has given us the opportunity to reflect, especially as we at NC TECH launched our inaugural Summit for Women in Tech over the past couple of days. While opportunities for women have certainly improved over the past few decades, there is still a lag in job opportunities, promotion and pay – especially in the tech sector. North Carolina ranks 1st among the states in the percentage of women in IT positions, but the total percentage, 35.5%, is not where it should be. There is much work to be done to fill our tech jobs pipeline with more women, especially women of color.

Stacauto, founded in 2020, is a digital platform enabling consumers to test drive vehicles on their own at local dealerships without requiring in-person contact. They are a distributed team, founded and organized in North Carolina.