Faces of SteelCloud: Automation is a Lifestyle
Wherever Joe goes, automation follows.
Joe knows automation. Wait, that’s not true. Joe lives and breathes automation. It’s not just something he does for work, it’s something he does for love. He does it for fun. To explore. To push boundaries. And yes, to earn a living.
As Manager of Consulting and Dev Ops, Joe Montgomery gets to help others simplify their jobs through SteelCloud’s multi-patented and proven cybersecurity compliance automation solution, ConfigOS. But it’s hard to know which is cooler—the steel-clad automated hardening capabilities he helps develop for our nation’s most sensitive systems or the automation he’s deployed at home to make his family’s lives easier.
You’re a seasoned tech veteran. What brought you to SteelCloud?
SteelCloud is the culmination of everything I have done in the past. I use my customer service skills, IT skills, implementation knowledge and Windows expertise here, but in much more exciting ways. Much of what our department does is enterprise consulting. We ease customers through their custom implementations using best practices and SteelCloud’s “special sauce” of tips and insights. We also develop specialized automations to suit particular needs, such as a command line interface automation we just developed for our largest client, and a Splunk app called ConfigOS DashView that suits many clients’ needs. As a voice between our customers and development, we help convey needs and requirements from the customers’ perspective, as well as our own. SteelCloud takes its own medicine, as well, so my team develops automations to simplify internal processes at SteelCloud.
What are some of the platform adoption challenges that come up in your job and how do you address them?
The biggest challenge we see in adoption is around remediation and understanding the workflow through ConfigOS. While most agencies are accustomed to using automation to scan their systems for vulnerabilities, they tend to address remediation manually. So, they are used to doing things their own way. Our biggest challenge is convincing them there is a better, more secure way and that we are not doing remediation differently, but just more comprehensively and with more support.
What do customers marvel at most about ConfigOS, either during the adoption or post adoption phase?
This is another area where remediation is a big story. A good number of our new customers have been doing manual remediation. So, automating that is a big deal. The fact they can have one policy that they can apply to everything is lifechanging. Another thing customers love is how the policies work themselves. We make updates very easy to implement. Once people understand the workflow around policies and how quickly they can do it, they become evangelists. And, finally, we all know STIGs break things. So, customers really get a lot of value from our support in troubleshooting individual controls.
Why do you love doing what you do?
In a general sense, I love helping people. I like both the problem-solving part and the reward of helping people do their jobs easier. Automation, in general, is a passion of mine, so it’s rewarding that my job focuses on automating around these policies and building really secure networks, so threat actors have less of an ability to get through. At SteelCloud, I feel like I have a big impact on making the most sensitive systems secure. And if we don’t hear about incidents, that means our work is having a big impact on the agencies and contractors we serve.
What do you think SteelCloud does best?
It’s two-fold. Remediation is our biggest value proposition. Nobody else really does that. It’s a big pain point that we have been addressing for years. We are easily the most proven provider in the industry when it comes to remediation. And the other part is the support we offer for our software. We offer top-tier support. The entire company revolves around STIG, CIS and CMMC automation—scanning, remediation, and reporting. We know our products well and support them even better.
When Joe leaves the office and goes home at night, the automation continues. After chasing his 2-year-old around who greatly enjoys trying to write on everything in sight, or spending time with his teenager introducing her to all of the glorious pop-culture from the 90’s, he’s working on continuously improving his home automation. He has a Google Home in every room and has Home Assistant turning on lights, controlling the garage door, starting and locking his truck and locking the doors. The system also has presence-sensing, so it automatically knows where people are in the home. If no one is home, it locks the house up, adjusts the home’s temperature, turns off fixtures and keeps everything secure until they return. Joe’s all-in on automation and we’re lucky to have him on our team!
