Documenting a Day

Waking up at 5:30 AM, I began my standard morning routine of:
  • Reading – Reading a chapter from Psalms and Proverbs
  • Reflecting – Considering my wins, loses, lessons, and gratitude from the previous day
  • Breakfast – The standard cup of coffee, orange, oatmeal, and boiled egg
  • Grooming – Brushing my teeth, Showering, and combing my beard
  • Dressing – Today, I tried the trend of the fleece vest by sporting the steel blue zippered vest I bought over the weekend.  I paired the vest with a blue dress shirt, khaki pants, and brown slip-ons.


The drive to the office was uneventful and clocked in at about 35 minutes.  I decided to continue the trend of parkin on the lowest parting level under the building. 
Once at the office, I obtained a medium black eye, a coffee with shots of espresso, from the Platform, a Starbucks inspired coffee shop.

Enjoying my coffee, I caught up briefly with my manager, Paul while walking by his office to mine.

At 8 AM, I hastily joined my first meeting view Zoom, an online conferencing system.  I was meeting with my Palo Alto account team to discuss:
  • Our Resident Engineer
  • Firewall quotes for the Gulf of Mexico
  • Renewal for a threat intelligence feed - Autofocus.

At the conclusion of that meeting, I meet with Manav. Manav recently joined the Enterprise Architecture team from the Data Office.  His knowledge and experience in various technologies makes him incredibly valuable to the company as well as to ensure we are secure.  This was our first formal meeting and I spent several minutes setting the stage of why I scheduled time. various cyber-threats my team is monitoring and asking him about his new role and responsibilities.  The meeting was productive, and I left him with a copy of a book named, “Sandworm”, by Andy Greenberg that details the rise of Russian cyber skills.

From that meeting, I took some time to review newly arrived emails and to review my task list for the day.  Unfortunately, the day was meeting heavy, a common phenomenon, so I did not make any headway on completing my tasks.

After setting an unrealistic expectation for my non-scheduled time, I attended a whiteboarding session with PWC.  The purpose of the meeting was to define the 2020 Cybersecurity program.  Though planning had occurred internally at the end of 2019, our new team member Salman has some additional ideas around governance, security reviews, and risk management that he wanted tackled this year.  This was our second discussion, the first with another vendor, to define this work and the additional project resources that would be required.

After escorting the PWC team back to the lobby, Salman and I decided to grab lunch at the Hess dining Hall. The dining hall provides numerous all you can eat food options for $7.00.  During lunch, Salman and I caught up on both work and last weekend’s activities.

Immediately following lunch, I jumped on a Skype meeting about the proposed Bakken Operational Technology Field Network Assessment to be performed by Cisco.  I was engaged in the conversation when Hess asset IT found out about the planned assessment.  IT was concerned about the assessment contradicting their network strategy that had been underway since early 2019 and as often they brought security along the way.  Often these days due to the critical nature of Cybersecurity, IT will attempt to use me as a pawn, to prevent work they are unhappy with.  In this case, the work was fine. After the discussion and reviewing the proposal by Cisco, I found no issues and asked to be engaged more for education than for a burning security issue.

The day finished with a three-hour meeting with Accenture over their proposed Cybersecurity Services.  Today, Accenture provides our Security Operations and Security Tools management, but the contract ends in December.  Several third parties have been engaged to provide these services moving forward including Accenture.  This meeting was my first opportunity to hear their proposal and as with most to work they do for me, I was unimpressed.