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Alphabetti Spagetti is a problem

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We’ve recently joined a Cyber Security forum, to keep up to date with threats from the Interweb:  the stuff of nightmares for IT security people.

(Of course, they themselves can also create headaches – things unexpectedly stop working when a so-called ‘patch’ is installed, because they hadn’t accounted for “Terry in Finance” linking to an old, but desperately needed programme on another server).

But these people are your guardians, the keepers of the keys: it is they who will protect you, and importantly your data, from the bad-lands of the wild-net.  Why is it then, that your ordinary Joe doesn’t seem to take much notice?

In a word: Jargon.

Let’s be honest, most professions have their own language and shorthand code. If you are not in the know, you are excluded – it’s been like this since the days of the Crafts and Guilds. However, most people think that their IT staff are geeks who have taken it to a whole new level.

Well, IT Security are the geeks’ geeks.   And their chosen medium of confusion is acronyms. Find me a security website with a sentence not containing at least one set of initials, and I’ll buy you a muffin.  I’d probably get away with “Show me any sentence with less than two…”

And not only that, but many of the chosen sets of letters can have multiple meanings within the monastic security community itself:  just in case you’re getting above yourself and think you are making progress in comprehension.

What’s this got to do with JEM?   Well, one thing we pride ourselves on in making things clear and unambiguous to our clients.   If you want staff to understand the rights and wrongs of their actions, the delivery must be in their language.

So that’s what we do: head into those funny places where nerd shall speak unto nerd, and we translate:  from the arcane and frankly mysterious world of the security expert to understandable everyday language. The result is that your staff know what on Earth they are talking about, and why it matters.   (And it’s not just the techies– the GDPR and other privacy law has a lot of legal speak which can also get quite confusing. So we try to do that too).

Let’s not kid ourselves, occasionally we too will accidentally resort to gibberish. We try not to, but sometimes it slips though.  We will always be happy to backtrack when you point it out, and try a different approach.

But the Alphabet Soup of IT security is always the most difficult to interpret, when it needs to be the easiest.

We’re here to help. Contact us if you think we are right for you.

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