Episode Details

Connect with James Fair

Website: executech.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamesmfair/

Lisa Ryan: Welcome to the Manufacturer's Network podcast. Our guest today is James Fair. James is an IT and cybersecurity veteran with 35 years of experience. He's held every role from entry-level tech to senior VP, and now he's working in cybersecurity. James, welcome to the show.

James Fair: Thanks, Lisa. It's an honor to be here. I'm very excited.

Lisa Ryan: Great. Please share a little about your background and what led you to do what you're doing in those 35-plus years.

James Fair: Yeah. I've been doing this since computers were around; I'm an old-school guy. What started for me was a passion for technology. At age 13, I got my first real PC. At age 16, I would deep dive into that, and no one would see me for two years. When I came out, I would know everything about it. It's always been a passion of mine to dive into technology. I've been doing technology for a long time, but part of that has always been cybersecurity because back when I was doing it, there was no separate role for cybersecurity. Now you did everything.

No one realized there was a separate need for that, and there wasn't because there wasn't much going on out there, or at least we weren't aware of it anyway. Over time, I have developed a passion for helping organizations stay protected, prevent attacks, or deal with them when and hopefully if they ever happen. Hopefully, they never happen to anybody; if they do, I want everyone to be prepared.

We do not wait until the cyber stuff hits the fan before deciding to take action. Now, we'll make a plan. They're like, Ooh, what? What do we do in this situation? Let's get ahead of that. That's what I'm after. Let's help organizations be protected and respond better when something does happen.

Lisa Ryan: Yeah, and it's scary stuff with all the ransomware and everything else that you're, I've had friends that have gone through that and without proper backup or thankfully they had outside backup, it didn't cost them as much time or money as it could have, but it was a pain to deal with. So, what are some common cybersecurity threats you see in manufacturing?

James Fair: We see some similarities across all industries, but mainly manufacturing is, first of all, the common one, ransomware, right? As you mentioned, I want to caution your listeners for organizations and home users; please have backups. You can recover from about anything: fire, flood, theft, ransomware if you have good backups. And I've had tough conversations with people to say, Hey, this lady called me up, just, it was awful. She said, my grandmother passed away last month, and I have all the pictures of her, and they're on my computer, and now there's this ransom note on my computer.

What should I do? And that is not a conversation I ever want to have with anybody. Please make sure you're backing up. I don't care what product you use; I'm not selling anything, but please ensure you're backing up your home machines and organizations. Okay, back to your original question.

Lisa Ryan: Since we're talking about that, what do you think of cloud backup? I've been using Carbonite for years, but is there something about it going into the cloud, like a product like Carbonite, or should it be a physical backup as well? Or is there? It doesn't matter. Like, where does that fall for? Yeah, home and business.

James Fair: The cloud is perfectly acceptable for home and always works. Business may be different in that you may need to recover the data quickly or a lot of data very quickly. And if it's all in the cloud, you ha