IT Automation Insights from Mike Burroughs, Global Head of IT at Shockwave Medical

Summary

In this episode of Heroes of IT, Landon Miles interviews Mike Burroughs, the Global Head of IT at Shockwave Medical. They discuss Mike's extensive background in IT and cybersecurity, his experiences with using Automox, and the importance of automation in improving efficiency and work-life balance for IT teams. Mike shares valuable insights on managing endpoints, the significance of curiosity in technology, and strategies for effective IT management.

Transcript

Landon Miles: Hello everyone, and welcome back to Heroes of IT, the podcast where we here at Automox interview people who are our IT heroes. My name is Landon Miles and I'm normally the host of the Hands-On IT podcast, but I'm filling in for Ashley today. So we've got a really exciting guest for you today. We'll be speaking with Mike Burroughs who is the Global Head of IT at Shockwave Medical. Hi, Mike.

Mike Burroughs: Hi!

Landon Miles: All right, hi Mike, let's go ahead and get started. Would you like to give us a quick background on yourself, your job, and what Shockwave Medical does?

Mike Burroughs: I am Mike Burroughs, I'm the Global Head of IT for Shockwave Medical. I've been at Shockwave Medical for about five years, also served as the organization's Chief Information Security Officer. And my background has been primarily focused as being the security or IT leader for medical device and healthcare organizations. And really focused on both

Landon Miles: Yeah.

Mike Burroughs; enterprise security technology advancements and on medical device security as well.

Landon Miles: Very neat. So how did you get into IT in the first place?

Mike Burroughs: Yeah, so that's always a fun question. So I actually started within, I would say, the legal field, doing forensics, doing a little bit of IT work with that, being an expert witness on complex, whether it was civil technical cases or criminal cyber crime related cases and testifying as an expert witness through the discovery process as well, and then translated on to the world of IT and security when it comes to consulting and building programs from scratch to get them certified, to help the business achieve their overall transformational goals, both within, again, that technology and security space.

Landon Miles: Well, sounds like you've got a lot of experience in that field and that's very neat. So is there any advice that you'd like to give to kind of someone looking to start a career in IT or looking to advance their career in IT?

Mike Burroughs: Yeah, always be curious. Be curious of what is going on from the technology side and technology advancements. I think we know AI is really hot right now. And I always encourage my teams, especially the junior folks on my teams who are just starting their careers to certify, to be curious and explore, and really understand where the landscape is changing and going to try to stay ahead.

Landon Miles: Nice, yeah. A while back we had a guest on this podcast that said their advice was, anytime you think, "huh, that's kind of weird", go take a look at that. So I like that advice. I like that advice too. So let's dive into your background with Automox a little bit. How do you use Automox?

Mike Burroughs: That's exactly it. So first and foremost, I would say I'm a long-term customer of Automox. I've used them at other organizations and brought them in. How we use it at Shockwave is our primary tool to understand our vulnerability landscape, to also prioritize patching and get visibility to our remediation efforts when it comes to vulnerabilities. And then also push out and provision new applications to our

Landon Miles: Alright.

Mike Burroughs: our very expansive remote user base to make sure that we are achieving technology operational efficiency and excellence within our IT and security programs.

Landon Miles: Very neat. how many, around how many endpoints would you say that you manage?

Mike Burroughs: So we're around 2,000 endpoints overall.

Landon Miles: Okay. Very nice. That's a lot. That's impressive. I have a demo environment that I run with like 60 endpoints and they're just all little VMs to kind of show stuff and 2,000, that's pretty cool. That's pretty cool. Yeah. So are mostly remote? Do you have people all over the US, all over the world or?

Mike Burroughs: It's pretty wide and pretty expensive for sure.

So we have folks all over the world. We manufacture our products within the US and also in Central America. So our footprint really spans the globe. And I would say we're about 60% remote, 40% in office.

Landon Miles: Okay. Yeah, wow, okay. And then are there any unique challenges that your company has that Automox has helped you solve?

Mike Burroughs: Yeah, it's really touching those remote systems and users from a variety of IT needs, whether it's pushing out a software need that an end user needs to making sure our sales force, which is predominantly remote, is patched up to date as they're entering healthcare organizations that have strict security policies for guest devices. It's been phenomenal and instrumental.

Landon Miles: Yeah.

Mike Burroughs: to help us shape IT and keep our organization safe.

Landon Miles: That's great. That's great to hear. So you said you've used Automox in the past. What has your journey been like with Automox? You've used it a couple other companies I've heard. and then do you have any advice for listeners on moving from just getting started with Automox to some more advanced implementations?

Mike Burroughs: Yeah, so Automox is definitely my go-to tool. When I typically come into organizations, they're at a low maturity from a technology landscape. So by being able to deploy Automox quickly into a vast amount of endpoints relatively quickly, I'm actually able to articulate unique metrics to our board when it comes to the meantime to respond to critical patches all the way to being able to have a wide variety of vulnerability capabilities or vulnerability remediation capabilities to a non-standard user base that's now more remote than an office. 

And my biggest advice that I give to organizations that are looking at Automox looking to deploy Automox is, is really spend the time to invest in the platform, spend the time to curate reports, and be able to continue to sell that value and sell that value of vulnerability remediation and that value of having clear and concise visibility, whether it's a Mac, Linux, or Windows device of your environment. That's the biggest advice. And really take the time to take the training and work with your account teams because there's so much value that's added.

Especially in the community portals as well, there's always something new that you can add to your tool in arsenal.

Landon Miles: Okay. Yeah, one of things I really like about working at Automox is getting to kind of interact with the community there too. And that's been, that's been a, been a lot of fun to get to meet those people, get to work with those people in that, the community. So what's your, what's kind of your breakdown of endpoints? Are you mainly Mac, mainly Windows, Linux servers or kind of what, what does your breakdown look like?

Mike Burroughs: Yeah, so I'm primarily 95% Windows. The other 4%, I will say, will be Mac devices, and then 1% is Linux. I mean, you always have to have some level of Linux in your environment. Yeah, always fun.

Landon Miles: Okay.Okay. I love Linux. That's great. Yeah. What are those primarily servers or kind of what are you using on the Linux?

Mike Burroughs: Yeah, primarily servers and they focus in our operational technology space.

Landon Miles: Okay, nice. And then do you have any recommendations for managing servers versus managing endpoints within Automox?

Mike Burroughs: Yeah, I would say definitely create your unique workflows for servers that are completely different than obviously your standard endpoint devices and focus on with the philosophy and the mindset of what are things that you can utilize Automox for that take away the dirty tier one work away from the system admin and allow them to work on high value tier two, tier three, if you're working those model frameworks.

Landon Miles: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Mike Burroughs: It improves work-life balance, I can definitely say for sure, and it increases efficiency. I mean, it's very rare to be in an organization where we are really hitting our remediation SOAs. We're able to push out software much quicker, much faster to our broad virtualized server environment.

Landon Miles: Yeah. We love to hear that and love to hear that it's saving time, work -life balance. And one of the jokes that was made in another one of our podcasts was that one of the best things about Automox and the best way to find a problem to automate is if you find something you really, really hate doing. it's like, "I don't ever want to do this again." yeah.

Mike Burroughs: No, that's a good one. That's a really good one.

Landon Miles: So this month in our podcast, we're focusing on next level automation. So can you share a couple of your favorite things that you've automated, a couple of problems that you're like, Hey, this, I'm really proud of how we automated this. This is great. Or even like, Hey, I'm glad I never have to do this again.

Mike Burroughs: Yeah, I think one of the biggest ones for our organizational advancement was we added it to our overall lifecycle management process below. So we are able to identify the actual business groups of PCs and be able to automate the push of certain software off the bat. We've been able to also automate

Landon Miles: Okay.

Mike Burroughs: vulnerability remediation efforts when it comes to critical and high patches and getting through our vetting process a lot quicker out to full production and deployment. And so what did this do? It actually reduced the need for a lot of headcount in our life cycle management area just because it was very manual, very burdensome. We've even actually been able to show ROI and value of efficiency of using Automox

Landon Miles: Yeah.

Mike Burroughs: when deploying software and getting our business users up and running. And when I mean business users, our most critical frontline folks, which is our sales teams that span the globe. it's been great and there's been advancements with automation and workflows within Automox that we're continuing to leverage, we're continuing to explore. So it's just overall been a great relationship.

Landon Miles: Well, good to hear. Good to hear. then with 2000 endpoints out there, do you have any tips on staying organized with groups or tags or how do you make sure everything's organized within your console? Make sure that sales devices are in the sales group or kind of what tips do you have on that?

Mike Burroughs: Group and tag everything is what I basically tell our team. And then take advantage of integrations to other third party platforms that you have in your environment that can feed information to back and forth to be able to better identify and tag a user to a particular device, which also maps to a business union group as well. I think that has been astronomical, especially from an IT compliance perspective where...

Landon Miles: Yeah.

Mike Burroughs: When you are auditing and you're auditing your environment, sometimes it's hard for your internal audit team to identify where the system sits and where this particular group is ensuring the role sets there. I think that has helped us instrumental by following those steps that I just cascaded.

Landon Miles: That's great to hear. And I will definitely be using some of those tips for myself too. The tag, tag everything. I like that tag and group everything. Well, thank you so much for hopping on this podcast with us today and really appreciate your time and your insights too. And, yeah, it was my pleasure and thanks for listening to the Heroes of IT podcast and be sure to check out the other Autonomous IT podcasts every Tuesday and Thursday for new episodes.

Mike Burroughs: Thank you very much for having me.