This week, we've been focused on speed: both in terms of Dynah's performance and the ways you use it.
We've added a lot to the dashboard lately. From better graphics to progress indicators and targeted recommendations. And of course the Big Board which shows you all your customers all at once. Until this week, we hadn't been spending nearly as much effort on the back-ends which supply that firehost of data. Until now.
Lucas and Jeff have been elbow-deep in every aspect of the application, streamlining codepaths and optimizing inner loops. They've put self-warming caches in strategic places to reduce the round-trips to the back-end and the amount of calculation that happens in the front end. This work isn't done — there's always more to optimize. But the dashboard should be noticeably faster than it was a week ago. And we're continuing to build plenty of performance headroom in so that we have space to grow.
We've also sped up the initial batch of questions for new accounts. We want to give you actionable insights and clear recommendations from day one. So we now ask people a number of Dynah questions when they set up their account. The exact sequence of questions varies, but the goal is to rapidly work out where this person fits in the organization, and identify which of several possible low-hanging fruit are most relevant for their team.
Tarah's Top Tips
Time for a new semi-regular segment on this almost weekly newsletter. In Tarah's Top Tips we give you one (1) weekly recommendation to improve your security posture. Think of it as a mini teaser of how easy security can be when you take it one concrete step at a time.
The great part about every singe one of these tips is that they can also help your team get to a better security place. And of course, if you use Dynah, these are things you'll be able to answer "Yes! Yay! Done!" on when you get the related questions.
This week's tip should take less than five minutes unless you have a truly astronomical number of cellphones.
In the settings on your phone, go to where you can enable software updates. In most phones, it will be under General > Software Update. If there's an option there to "Turn on all automated software updates", then toggle that on. Sometimes, phones come with a default setting of "Automatically install security updates only" and it's a far better idea to just turn on all updates anyway.
Tarah will be holding Cybersecurity Office Hours next week. At 11AM Pacific on Thursday Nov 30th, Wendy Nather will join Tarah to discuss the Security Poverty Line and how MSPs can efficiently and effectively defend SMBs against threats. Follow Red Queen on LinkedIn to get the dial-in info as soon as it drops.
If you're an MSP and you want to talk in more detail, you can also reach out to Tarah directly at tarah@redqueendynamics.com to book some time to talk about the security challenges you face and get advice (and sympathy). This isn't a sales pitch! We genuinely want to help. Sometimes the process of software development to help people at scale doesn't compare to the satisfaction giving one person a bunch of support over an afternoon.
Talking of the Red Queen LinkedIn, I think it's time for me to start plugging all "the socials" in this highly visible newsletter. Tarah and I have our own LinkedIn accounts too, as does Nick, our Head of Sales. You can also reach any of the three of us via email, at tarah@redqueendynamics.com, tilde@redqueendynamics.com, or nick@redqueendynamics.com. (Bet you can't guess what Jeff & Lucas's emails are.)
Red Queen is also on the Fediverse at @redqueen@infosec.town. Tilde is @tilde@infosec.town and Tarah is @tarah@infosec.exchange. This newsletter goes out first to the folks who sign up to get it in their inbox, but you can also get it via RSS. We post the same content to the Red Queen Blog and to the LinkedIn version of the newsletter.
To our readers in the US who celebrate, we'd like to wish you a happy and safe Thanksgiving with the people you care most about. May your plates be ever-full, and your pagers ever-silent.
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