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Featured Community Member: Anthony Gayadeen

By Jennifer Tullman-Botzer posted Mon October 07, 2019 02:28 PM

  

The IBM Security Community exists in order to provide our members with a space to come together to share experiences and best practices. One of my greatest joys as a Community Manager is getting to talk with and learn from members like you, at events like Master Skills University and through initiatives like our recent #BackToSecuritySchool contest.

Anthony Gayadeen, our contest winner, was kind enough to answer a few questions about his professional life and how he benefits from our Community. Now, without further ado…

 

Meet Anthony Gayadeen

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 Anthony joined the IBM Security Community at Think 2018 in Las Vegas and is thus one of our earliest members. He admits it was the free Nike hat that originally caught his attention (and there’s no shame in that!), but before long he “saw the potential of this bunch of happy fellows. People giving their feedbacks in a positive way, giving suggestions and comments. It feels like we have an impact on the evolution of the systems we manage.”

Anthony has an engineering degree in telecommunication and has spent the past 8 years working for a French-Canadian service provider, where he started off in the OSS-NMS operations team. In spring 2017 he moved to the Security team and discovered QRadar. He’s now been an admin for more than 2 years.

I asked Anthony about what he views as the biggest challenge in security today, and his answer was unexpected and yet absolutely spot-on. Anthony sees the toughest problem facing security professionals as the (in)ability “to take vacations. There are so many things that have to be done in security, but so little time. Security exhaustion is not a myth, it’s a real thing.”

His response about vacation time may at first seem lighthearted, but it in fact perfectly captures the struggle that Anthony and others in his position face. The work of security admins and analysts is so critical and so endless that even taking a long weekend away from work, let alone a full week or two, may seem impossible. 

And yet there is some good news on the horizon. The IBM Security Community may not be able to hand out vacation days, but hopefully we can at least make life a little bit less challenging or stressful for our members. In particular, Anthony appreciates the “good tips and suggestions in these forums” as well as “being exposed to other ways of thinking.” He was also very happy to have some of his questions answered by IBM experts, which is of course exactly what we’re here for!

Finally, Anthony offered some great ideas for how to improve our Community as we head into 2020 and beyond. He proposes using “IBM AI to suggest other related discussions as you go through topics,” and I for one think it’s a great idea. Anthony, we’ll see what we can do for you!

 

I hope you enjoyed meeting Anthony Gayadeen, and we look forward to profiling many more Community members in the future. And if you’re not yet a part of our Community, we welcome you to join and start collaborating with over 5,000 security peers from around the world.


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