I’m Joe Tiedeman, I’ve worked in technology my entire adult life. Starting in frontline support for a web hosting company in 2001 where I worked for a total of 4 years, progressing to back end support, building dedicated servers for customers and troubleshooting web, email and database issues. Since then I’ve progressed on through infrastructure, architecture focusing on belt and braces like patching, internet exposure etc and policy/process eventually becoming the CIO at the Higher Education Statistics Agency, a non governmental body responsible for collecting and quality assuring data on staff and students in the UK Higher Education sector, warehousing personal data on over 20 million individuals. I left HESA in early 2022 taking a short career break to spend more time with my family and also give myself some dedicated time to work on a side project which I’d had in the back of my mind for some time. I’m currently Head of DevOps for the Howden UK & Ireland Group (previously A-Plan Insurance)

I will be launching the side project at https://cybaa.io soon, it will be a tool for small and medium sized businesses to monitor security and setup fundamentals. I also plan on blogging about the journey, the trials and tribulations of trying to follow and deal with standards and fragile implementations of those standards so stay tuned here for more information!