dnsUNFILTERED: Kevin Dutkiewicz, It's the Community

[00:00:00] Mikey Pruitt: Welcome everybody to another episode of dnsUNFILTERED. Today I am joined by Kevin Dutkiewicz. I think I pronounced that correctly. You can school me if I didn't, but welcome to the show.

[00:00:12] Kevin Dutkiewicz: Cool. No, thanks for having me. Love giving back anywhere I can.

[00:00:15] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah, so that's actually one of the things I wanted to talk to you about because you are.

Famous for giving back. You're involved with a lot of other communities giving away your expertise. So talk to me about like how that came about. Why exactly.

[00:00:31] Kevin Dutkiewicz: So this is something I realized. The older I get, it does me no good to keep all the experience and knowledge locked up in my head.

So I've started making it a point to just start sharing everything that I've learned and it's amazing stuff that I just take for granted and start spilling it out and people are like, oh, I never thought of that, or, wow, that really happened, or that's another way of looking at it. So you just start opening up other people's eyes.

I had a great story. So I'm part of a event here. I live in the Greater Cleveland area. One of the high schools does a maker event, so I get to absolutely geek out for a whole weekend. And it's to help people who have like mental and physical disabilities, like they're stuck in wheelchairs.

Stuff like that. And one of the planning meetings I grabbed a was like, I wanna make a prototype for this thing that we're planning and what kind of tools do I have? So I look across the room, grab my pocket knife and grab the pizza box covers. So I cut those apart and started making a prototype with just some scrap cardboard a month later.

And this is one of the most rewarding things I think I've ever seen in my life. One of the students who was there in that initial planning meeting. That's what he did. This, 17 eight 17 or 18-year-old kid went over to where the food was cut off some pizza box covers and started making prototype designs with him.

Holy crap. He learned that for me. That's awesome.

[00:02:00] Mikey Pruitt: That, yes, that is very rewarding and I think you're approaching like 40 ish years of experience in like tech and it

[00:02:09] Kevin Dutkiewicz: I'm getting there. So I started in tech in 1994. I was 14 years old and started working at a little computer shop. I still did stuff prior to that, just, home learning on my 4 86.

God.

[00:02:23] Mikey Pruitt: What did a computer shop look like in 19, what'd you say? 94?

[00:02:27] Kevin Dutkiewicz: Yep. 1994.

[00:02:28] Mikey Pruitt: What did a computer shop look like then?

[00:02:31] Kevin Dutkiewicz: VLB VAs a local bus EDO Ram Intel and a MD processors use the same socket. And I would very commonly shoot my teammates with the jumpers. We had to configure the old motherboards with, to grab a rubber band and start shooting 'em at each other.

So it was. It was pretty crazy back then.

[00:02:53] Mikey Pruitt: So since then, you've really embraced the MSP and you have your own MSP, and I think you've probably worked at a few. Can you tell me a little bit about the kind of progression, like what did you see that made you want to move into the managed service provider space?

[00:03:08] Kevin Dutkiewicz: So I had been working outta college and surprise, computer science engineering degree. I got that graduated in 2002. My first job was actually for a manufacturing company and I was there for about seven and a half years or so. The last couple years I just got bored. There was zero chance for going up the the ladder because there was no ladder.

It was like three people, team and manufacturing, if you've ever had a manufacturing company. Basically the motto is, does it still turn on? Then we're still using it. There's no such thing as a lifecycle for most of the equipment. And like I said, I just got bored, so I started looking for another job.

In 2010, moved to a I was hired by a. MSP that was a couple years old here in Cleveland and I was there until 2023, so yeah, 13 years there. And I really enjoyed that entire environment. No two days are the same, which I absolutely love. And everything you do builds on the future. So the stuff I learned today can help, even if it's not directly, it's, even coming up with a process.

How to handle something. So the actual guts of the process might not matter anymore, but you still weigh a framework down that will help you going forward. And I absolutely love that. And again, this is another one of those. As I got older, I started realizing more of the human component and the MSP side absolutely deals with that as well.

I'm helping people. I'm actually making a difference on small businesses and, anywhere I work, I'm improving their lives, which is helping other people. So it really did work out and it was a good move. And that's so after the MSPI joined the vendor space here in the MSP world was there for about a year.

And that's when I started my own business, when I was let go from there. It's one, I like the industry. I like the people that are here. It's a good mission. It really aligns with my core.

[00:05:09] Mikey Pruitt: What would you say that mission is, if you could say it succinctly, the mission of the MSP.

[00:05:15] Kevin Dutkiewicz: For me it's helping people and it's doing it through strong, healthy it.

I'm actually working on a little bit of a pitch. I'm in a speed dating like networking event tomorrow and it's all I gotta get this pitch down

[00:05:26] Mikey Pruitt: practice. I got 30 seconds of talk. Lemme yeah. Let me shoot up some chat GBT questions for speed dating. It's it speed dating.

[00:05:36] Kevin Dutkiewicz: Yep. But yeah, it's one where I really like helping people.

When I see that the businesses that I'm supporting can start they don't have to worry about it. This stuff just works for them. That way they can focus on what they do. I just love that the whole concept.

[00:05:53] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah. That it just works. Is that really, your goal when you go into something because there's, a lot of elaborate things that you can build and deploy and Right.

Currently I'm trying to actually this podcast takes a lot of work to like edit and upload to YouTube and Spotify, and I'm like, I'm pretty sure that I can automate this with like innate N and some API calls currently. It's not going well. So there are ways to improve technology lives for your users and how do you avoid that complexity and just keep it working.

[00:06:27] Kevin Dutkiewicz: So this was something I learned back in high school, so almost 30 years ago. We had, again, being Cleveland, there's a big NASA presence. We actually had a couple folks engineers from NASA visit, and I'll never forget this. The little challenge was build a film canister rocket. And, they gave us the equipment.

We started building this thing, and at the end of it, they just so succinctly went up there and alright, the best design is nothing. Literally you just put the fuel in the in the little container and let it grip. None of these fins, none of these cones, none of these things for aerodynamics.

Keep it simple, stupid. That is something that I learned way back then and I've just been taking that forward. The other way to look at that is Hanlon's Law. Or no no. What was it? There was that Occam's razor. Yeah, Occam's razor sometimes the simplest solution is the best. It's just what I approach it with and the ability to tear down a problem to its most basic steps is so fundamental and so many people forget it.

I've given a couple presentations about a troubleshooting method that really. Focuses on breaking down the problem and attacking it one little piece at a time, versus looking at this huge thing. And, when I'm working with clients, it's hold on. What are you trying to do? Forget the technology.

Say in regular words like we're at a bar, what you're trying to do. And when you start talking at that method, it's oh, you could start seeing the light bulb go off oh yeah, I never looked at it like that. Yeah. 'cause you're lost in the weeds.

[00:08:09] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah, that's a good way to, to think of it. And actually I just keep picturing this innate end, giant node structure that I have going on, and it is true.

Every little piece is a little problem to solve, and once you solve one, you can get that data and go to the next. It's very similar to what we're trying to do in technology. I'm curious, how do you, so when you're having these conversations, do people I guess they respond very well to that kind of.

Maybe blunt is a good word, but just Hey, let's just talk like people, like what is the goal here? Is that really what you're trying to have the conversation about? Almost always.

[00:08:45] Kevin Dutkiewicz: Yeah. And say, just break it down. And I've told people for years, I'm the worst salesman. 'cause I'm gonna tell you what you need, not what I need to sell you.

I might not make any money off of it, or not as much money off of it. I wanna make sure whatever solution you get is the right one. And a lot of times that is just going for the simplest. Simplest solution. And even if you call that like your MVP your minimal viable product, start with something.

I had a tech, I love this dude to death. But he would absolutely go crazy and go for a perfect on your version one. I'm like, dude. Stop, just come up with something small first and we can build on it. So yeah, it's the exact same thing I try and tell everyone, and when I take that approach to my clients and just break it down to the smallest, simplest terms, they understand it, and then I can start interjecting the, all right, here's a technology solution we can do to solve your problem.

And it actually becomes really easy at that point.

[00:09:45] Mikey Pruitt: Let's talk about those solutions for a second. So you've been in the vendor space on the dirty side of the MSP vendor. You've obviously been at MSP multiple times. What is it in a vendor that you're, like, a pattern that you see maybe with their people or their product?

What are things that stand out to you from, like from the MSP perspective, but with a vendor that like you want to work with them for whatever reason.

[00:10:11] Kevin Dutkiewicz: So this is actually something that I've been slowly working on for years. Putting together a vendor assessment list where it's asking those types of questions.

From the technology standpoint, that's easy are what? How are you SOC certified? Are you doing this, that, and the other thing? How are you doing your backups? What are my assurances? What do you do when something breaks your accountability matrix, blah, blah, blah, whatever. I it, honestly, I like to see when vendors are engaged with the community because that's where you're gonna get the best feedback.

I was on a number of partner advisory councils and I was just very blunt. If someone's if a vendor would say oh yeah, I'm thinking I'm doing this, you're an idiot. Don't I have no problem telling him. A lot of times I'm friends with them. There's a little bit of comradery that goes with it.

But that honesty you can't do that. Don't lie behind my back. Don't try and hide something. Just be transparent. Just talk to us.

[00:11:13] Mikey Pruitt: When you're friends with whoever you're having a discussion with, a heated di discussion with, I believe it's just called criticism. It's not hate or anger.

It is just criticism.

[00:11:24] Kevin Dutkiewicz: Yeah.

[00:11:26] Mikey Pruitt: So let's talk about your, so you have these you have a a cabin out in the woods and you are famous for your hat. I've actually seen you a few times at conferences and I'm like. That guy looks familiar, I think. Oh yeah, I remember the hat. So you're like famous for the hat, but the, it's funny because you also live I what that hat pictures in my brain.

Like you have a, you were telling me you had a cabin and you like to get away from technology a little bit. What are you doing out in the woods?

[00:11:58] Kevin Dutkiewicz: Honestly, that's my that's my escape plan. So I've been in tech for 31 years now, and I love it. It puts food in my stomach. So I can't fault it for anything, but at some point it's, I need to get out of it.

I've just been doing it too long. I will still end up playing with the electronics, with the, like home assistant and that kind of fun stuff, but it's not gonna be what I'm doing day to day. On the personal side, my family has always held some amount of rentals and properties and real estate, that kind of stuff.

And my parents aren't getting any younger and I'm actually in the process of taking over that business. So it's one where I. The older, about 10 years or so is what I'm hoping to target. I really hope it works. I wanted to like fully transition myself out and to have the real estate stuff be more or less passive income or kinda low effort income.

I can't say low effort, but just low. Input, like I don't have to spend that much energy on it. But the cabin, I've actually started growing like different types of berries fruit trees nut trees, that kind of stuff. Because the old saying is, the best time to plant a tree is 30 years ago, and the second best time is today.

So looking ahead. I planted the trees, several years ago, and sure, they don't do much of anything for me now. But I know that in the future it's as long as I take care of 'em and a little bit of luck I wanna actually start turning all of that kind of stuff into beer and wine.

And I can't think of a better way to, wind down the last part of my life is, relatively low effort real estate and rentals and dealing with that kind of stuff. Then just making beer,

[00:13:46] Mikey Pruitt: right? You're like maybe have a YouTube channel for all your tech escapades while you're out in the woods.

I think you said you had solar, like you're basically homesteading out there and I love, go ahead.

[00:13:58] Kevin Dutkiewicz: Yeah, absolutely. It can be considered that it is a hundred percent off grid. We've got, I got about 2000 or two kilowatts of solar panels up. I've got 10 kilowatts of power stored up, so that will actually last a long time.

The water is all rainwater collection, and I did a ton of research on different types of water capture systems. I ended up building my own water filtration system, modeling it after like you see all these efforts for people to get access to clean water over in Africa and, places that just don't have access to the resources like we have in the us.

So yeah I built my own systems off of those and I haven't died yet. So they're working. Yeah, probably the water's clean. Yeah I've had the water tested, like it comes back completely clean. I use a lot of charcoal and chlorine to clean it off, but so do you have yeah.

[00:14:51] Mikey Pruitt: Do you have like a starlink at this location is it

[00:14:53] Kevin Dutkiewicz: Yeah, and that's where I'm still a nerd.

I installed starlink out there. I've got a nice ubiquity wireless set up for about a quarter of the property. There's ZigBee Radio sending data all over the place. Actually here at home I'm building my own, like soil moisture sensors, so that way I can start getting data that way. I can absolutely geek out about this stuff.

[00:15:19] Mikey Pruitt: So you are, let's talk about planting trees for a second, which you just mentioned, but specifically around your shirt. Which is Gootz, I believe it's called the p Geek Con mascot. So you've been involved with MSP Geek Con, you mentioned the tech generates, so there's all these communities that you devote time and effort to, and it seems like you're planting trees for the future, like dropping this experience that you have.

What is the takeaway that some of the. Some of the others come back with from those experiences, like at least the ones that you hope they get.

[00:15:56] Kevin Dutkiewicz: So like with MSP, geek Con, i've been on the planning committee for all three years. Actually the, when I started getting outta my comfort zone I think I slammed two giant or tall Roman cokes and approached Kyle Spooner just completely out of the blue.

Hey, I heard you're trying to plan a conference. I've done that before. Do you want help? I am. Honestly, pretty introverted at the end of the day. I can thankfully at least turn that dial down and turn the extrovert one up. But it's one where that's not what I normally like doing. That in itself is its own lesson.

I stuck myself out there and that's really tough to do. A lot of people in it are very much introverted. And what have I gotten out of putting myself outta my comfort zone? I got a lot of friends. I got a lot of people I can talk to. If I have problems, I can reach out to them.

And that's both on the personal level and the professional level. Hell this morning I actually even messaged Kyle Spooner about the whole starting with a DHD meds. He was talking about that at some point, and he was honestly one of the big reasons that I started down that path. So there's a lot of benefits to reaching out.

And just sharing your experience, his little sharing about his his path with A DHD helped spark mine. And I hope that, with me sticking myself out there it sparks someone else to do something great or something to help themselves.

[00:17:28] Mikey Pruitt: That's beautifully said Kevin. I think I'm like, I can picture the clip in my brain.

I'm like, that's beautiful. But yeah, that is very cool. You really are. You should be commended for putting yourself out there and making those connections, which other people can see and you're you guys are operating in public a bit so people can see these connections and see the joy, I guess that comes from.

Having people that you can relate to about life and about business and have resources. 'cause that's what us humans are looking for. We're just looking for other humans to connect with. And you're doing that and I appreciate it. What we're doing here. Yep.

[00:18:04] Kevin Dutkiewicz: Yeah. So that's why when you reached out, it's sure, yeah, I'll talk.

I don't care.

[00:18:09] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah. You're like, yeah, let's go when tomorrow. So thank you for that. I am curious about. With all of your experience, with all of your connections in the IT space, what are some of the things that are on the horizon that MSP specifically should be aware of or concerned with or learning about?

And. Tr you know, in their, in the sense of their business growing or, I know you're in this point where you're like, I want to go out in the woods. But some people aren't there yet. So what should they be looking at?

[00:18:44] Kevin Dutkiewicz: And this is gonna really suck for a lot of people 'cause it's, they most techs.

Don't like doing this. My one buddy is very heavy in the CMMC space, and I think he just mentioned yesterday in a chat channel we're in that the final you have to be CMC approved to get contracts and you have to have, some minimum level of compliance and blah, blah, blah and that kind of stuff.

Now, a lot of our businesses don't have to deal with CMMC, but what I see happening is that level of regulation or that bare minimum of what we need to do. MSPs we're an unregulated market. Anyone can slap a Ms. P together and, say they're a technology solution provider and they could barely open up a word.

There's no doorman checking on the way in for that. As much as I don't want it to happen, I see things. I see things going in that direction where if CMMC is gonna be that hard push, what's next? And we saw that with hipaa, what, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, where it's oh, we have to do what now?

We have to walk our computer when we walk away. Oh, I don't wanna do that. Oh, you mean I have to have. Backups and test them. Who wants to do that insurance? As soon as the pandemic started just making insurance companies lose hand over fist all their money, what started happening? Oh, now I have to fill out this form and, oh, I have to have MFA.

Why don't want MFA That cost me half a second of my life. I don't want to do this. We're gonna get more and more of that stuff. And at some point it's gonna be absolutely mandatory for pretty much anyone. And that's the sucky side of this. Most people don't like putting notes in their tickets.

Oh my God. When I had a team of people getting them to write down the notes was just like pulling teeth. But you have to do that when you're in certain markets. Was it bricks something? The publicly traded one where you have to have an audit trail. I forget what it is, brick says.

Whatever you have to like, have completely documented and onboarding and offboarding for your employees. Like you have to put down the results of what you're doing, and it's like people just don't like doing that. It's so much of that. Oh, it's. The wild West, I'm gonna get my dopamine rush because I solved your problem in half a second and you're no longer on fire.

And that's what I love doing. And oh, I don't wanna sit down and write something, a dissertation about what I just did. Sadly it's gonna come to that, especially if you start getting into regulated markets.

[00:21:21] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah. So compliance insurance governance. Yeah. That's actually interesting. Not a lot of people mention that.

I'm curious, do you think that there will be some type of like official government regulation? Like back in a previous life I was a, an electrician and I got an electrical license. Still have it. If you need to pick, if you want some help with those solar panels, lemme know. But. The, you gotta take a test.

You have to prove like hours of experience and all this stuff. And the test is not easy. So do you think something like that is coming to have a license essentially for to be an MSP?

[00:22:00] Kevin Dutkiewicz: I don't think so yet. Ultimately it's, it should happen. There are too many trunk slammers out there that give MSPs a bad name.

Like most of the time when you start talking with enterprise it, they're like, oh, you're at an SP, you're horrible. Yeah, probably 80% of them are horrible, but there's 20% of us that are actually like. We give a damn. We care about making sure things are done correctly. So don't let the bad eggs spoil everything for all of us.

Eventually those bad eggs are going to cause something where there's going to be a bar for entry. Some kind of, you know, minimum you have to be able to do this or prove competence in some way, shape or form. Yeah it's been seeing that kind of stuff over the last probably five years, and there are people out there trying to make that not happen because once that happens, it's just gonna get crappy.

People are gonna try and find ways around all those regulations and that's just gonna make things look worse, which just means more regulations, which may, it's a snowball, I don't want to go down, but unfortunately there, there should be something put in place.

[00:23:12] Mikey Pruitt: So I think I've seen people talk about like self-regulation, self-governance.

I don't know exactly how that works. If you have any ideas, I'm all ears.

[00:23:22] Kevin Dutkiewicz: Self-accountability sucks. It being the only person at my company there is no one to yell at me when I don't do something. And a lot of businesses are gonna have to do that. I went through a whole bunch of EOS training and one of the biggest takeaways on EOS is accountability.

So I've baked some of that into just how I operate. But more people and more business owners, they need that. They need some kind of kick in the butt when they do something wrong. And unfortunately, that's gonna be a regulation. Do

[00:23:54] Mikey Pruitt: you mean the and entrepreneur operating system? Is that what you mean?

Yeah.

[00:23:58] Kevin Dutkiewicz: Yep.

[00:23:58] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah. Very fairly highly recommended. And funny that you say the regulation, like you don't wanna see that kind of snowball happen. And I will say out loud that passing a test to get a license is not the same thing as knowing how to do the thing, especially the way they do testing now.

So like almost anybody could go past the electrical exam as an example without being a really good electrician. Which is really sad. It's basically how well you can take the test, not how well you know, the material.

[00:24:31] Kevin Dutkiewicz: Yeah. Fun fact about me, I carry at exactly zero certificates. And the reason is nice.

Yeah. Zero. But I can do more technical work than most people. At this point. I honestly tell a lot of the younger techs, I have forgotten more than you have learned. And I can't take a test. There's just something about the way my brain is wired. I fail them. I have taken the ham radio license test six times.

[00:24:58] Mikey Pruitt: Six. I hear that's really hard.

[00:25:00] Kevin Dutkiewicz: No, it's not. It is not. It's literally no. You literally just have to memorize a bunch of questions and regurgitate them, and I am physically incapable of doing that. Now, I can still talk to hams about radio and how this stuff is set up, the electrical side. I have no problem doing any of that.

I just can't take a test.

[00:25:23] Mikey Pruitt: So what do you tell young techs getting into the industry because it's, and it's even harder currently with a lot of layoffs in the tech industry to get your foot in the door. Are you, would you tell them not to go get certifications or is that just a necessary evil?

[00:25:38] Kevin Dutkiewicz: No. So as much as test taking is painful for me it's one where I'm the outlier on this one. I would absolutely recommend that anyone coming into it go take the certifications, go after your. CompTIA, GTIA, whatever you wanna call 'em,

[00:25:55] Mikey Pruitt: you're like, I'm

[00:25:56] Kevin Dutkiewicz: not sure

[00:25:56] Mikey Pruitt: what they're called anymore.

[00:25:58] Kevin Dutkiewicz: Yeah. Go sit through any of those types of training.

If you have vendors that are offering certifications, like all your Cisco stuff absolutely go work on those. 'cause you have to have somewhere to start. Then once you have that. That works as your ability to break outta the catch 22 cycle of you need experience to get hired. You need to get hired, you need experience.

The other thing that I will tell tech is, and I would look for this as I was hiring technicians over the years do you practice this stuff at home? My home lab here rivals. All of my clients is businesses. And even when I was at the much larger, we had up to 2,500 endpoints at one time. My house was still more complicated than the vast majority of our clients.

We're talking dual hypervisors with failover redundancy backups. I had my backups going in. Across the the country years before, we started doing this in the MSP world. But that's actually how I learn. And if you can couple the book knowledge with hands on, you actually broke the stuff and fixed it in your home lab that is a powerful combination and that will take you way farther than either one of them alone.

[00:27:11] Mikey Pruitt: Based on what I know about you, I'm gonna try to guess your home lab stack. You ready?

[00:27:16] Kevin Dutkiewicz: Oh

[00:27:16] Mikey Pruitt: boy. So let's start with hardware. I'm gonna, I'm gonna be generic. It has IPMI.

[00:27:23] Kevin Dutkiewicz: Yes.

[00:27:24] Mikey Pruitt: Okay. And you have at least two 'cause you hinted there. I'm gonna say the OS is prox max.

[00:27:33] Kevin Dutkiewicz: No, I have not moved over to Prox Max yet.

I'm still rocking hyper V. Okay. So it's one I knew it most of my clients at the time used it. So it's again, this is how I learn. I would use my lab to simulate what I was trying to do for my clients. So having a hyper V. Set up at home really worked. I don't have any clients with Hyper-V anymore, so it's one where the next time I refresh this stuff, it'll probably be prox Max or what's the other one?

That's just a bunch of letters.

[00:28:02] Mikey Pruitt: Xp, XZ. Yeah,

[00:28:05] Kevin Dutkiewicz: that one.

[00:28:05] Mikey Pruitt: The one that Tom Lawrence always loves.

[00:28:08] Kevin Dutkiewicz: He's exactly why.

[00:28:11] Mikey Pruitt: Oh, speaking of I forgot the whole hardware. Is it some type of 45 drives chassis?

[00:28:18] Kevin Dutkiewicz: Not 40 fives. I managed to pick up an old Dell server. It's a Dell T seven 30 xd, so it's got 24 drive bays in it, all of which are populated.

I added some other PCIE cards inside for some SSD. I think it's got 128 gig of ram and yeah it does way overkill,

[00:28:41] Mikey Pruitt: but that's plenty of room to learn and fail and to retry.

[00:28:45] Kevin Dutkiewicz: Oh, absolutely.

[00:28:46] Mikey Pruitt: How many I'm guessing not quite a petabyte, but probably around 500 terabytes.

[00:28:53] Kevin Dutkiewicz: No, not that much.

[00:28:54] Mikey Pruitt: I'm really bad at this lot of the, I'm really bad at this game.

Go ahead.

[00:28:58] Kevin Dutkiewicz: No, there's something like f. In the house, probably close to 70 or 80 terabytes total, but divide that in half. For the system. So I built myself a nas because you have to have backups. So I've got a bunch of backups going to the nas. The actual hypervisors? Yeah, like 30 high thirties terabytes total storage, of which probably two terabytes is SSD in some form.

[00:29:26] Mikey Pruitt: So how dissimilar is your home lab versus the production equipment that you're using for customers? Not the hardware necessarily, but how translatable, are the skills of your home lab to your production environments?

[00:29:40] Kevin Dutkiewicz: My wife absolutely hates it. But there are like seven V WANs floating on the copper here.

And it's one where. I taught myself vlan 20 years ago. It's one where I started understanding the value of that. And when you start getting into the security space was it the lateral movement of some kind of foreign attacker mal bad actor? VLANs solved that pretty damn easy. So here at home I started chopping.

The what devices go where. And that is exactly how I would set up all my clients so I could build out everything here. And then oh yeah we'll come up with this standard. This VLAN is gonna be this subnet and we're gonna weave it as a slash 23, but only call it a slash 24. So that way we got room for growth.

That's another lesson that you learn the hard way when you run out of ips. Just little things like that. I, I configured my, my home router is actually a Sophos router. It's the Home edition, which is the exact same as the production ones. And those are the ones that I manage for my clients and.

I have broken more stuff here at home, again to my wife, chagrin. But she's breath, that means

[00:30:55] Mikey Pruitt: i'v.

[00:30:56] Kevin Dutkiewicz: Literally that was a problem. So I was practicing with setting up IPV six tunnels for, oh gosh, peer. My home carrier does not give me an I PV six handoff. They do, but it's only for one slash 64, which you can't really cut down.

So yeah, getting into the weeds there. But so I set up a. Tunnel over to Hurricane Electric, and then all of a sudden my wife is I can't watch Netflix. It's saying something about a tunnel and VPN tunnel. I'm like, oh, shoot. Okay, let me go tear this apart.

[00:31:26] Mikey Pruitt: Sorry. Sorry about that. You just blame it on I PV six.

That's what I blame every day. If it's not DNS, it's IPV six.

[00:31:34] Kevin Dutkiewicz: But again it's more learning the stuff here and in an environment that it doesn't. It doesn't break that much. It doesn't hurt, it doesn't cost dollars compared to trying to do that stuff at a client. A home web is absolutely a great thing.

I'm so glad I've kept one for years.

[00:31:51] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah it's slightly cheaper to aggravate the spouse than bring your customers down for a day and a half or a half a day or whatever it is.

[00:32:00] Kevin Dutkiewicz: Yep.

[00:32:00] Mikey Pruitt: You did mention in there cybersecurity. I'm curious, what kind of strategy are you going for in cybersecurity?

Keeping it like pretty simple, like what are your go-to, not necessarily products, but like categories.

[00:32:14] Kevin Dutkiewicz: As the only person in the company and I do like to sleep every now and then it was a no-brainer to stick with a MDR solution for what I'm doing for my clients and it actually works out where I can tell my clients like, I am not watching your stuff 24 7.

I'm very, again, going back to that transparency and honesty. I'm not watching their stuff 24 7. We work with, again, I partner with Sophos them to do the MDR work. That way I can go to them and say, you are covered for the things that go bump in the night. And they have very strict instructions then how we can resolve something that they find.

There are plenty of other vendors out there that have excellent products. All along those same lines. And I would absolutely recommend especially smaller businesses to do that. Now, if you get big enough where you can have your own knock and sock and have people actually monitor that stuff for you, awesome.

Go have fun with it. 'cause then you can control more of that entire line of defense, all the different steps in between. But for a smaller that's absolutely the way I'd recommend people go

[00:33:27] Mikey Pruitt: when you're so you're, a lone wolf and have backup from vendors and other places.

Are you having to deal with like cyber insurance and compliance issues as well?

[00:33:39] Kevin Dutkiewicz: Insurance? Yes. So one of my clients was actually. In the process of trying to get some federal funds for their business and they had to prove they had a certain level of insurance, and she did not have any idea of what any of the letters on the paper meant, and that's where me.

Steps in or I step in and be like, oh, this is what they're looking for. This is what it means in normal people speak. This is what you get for it. This is how much it costs. And that way I can, translate for them what the right solution is. And spoiler, she got the federal grants and all that kind of fun stuff.

So I did something right. That

[00:34:22] Mikey Pruitt: When proof. So you had talked a little bit about having that, those conversations with clients. I'm curious, what are the conversations around cybersecurity go? Are they more of are you keeping it general or saying I know what I'm doing.

I'm protecting you. Don't worry about it. Or they are, they like asking questions that are a little deeper.

[00:34:42] Kevin Dutkiewicz: That's honestly been my hardest hill to climb so far. A lot of businesses just don't care. And it's. Th they don't wanna be bothered with any of the cybersecurity stuff. I won't tell you the number of businesses that I've talked with that use the same password everywhere, or multiple people have domain administrator because it just works.

It just things like that. So I'm, what I try to do, and I've talked to like my local chamber, gave a presentation there earlier in the year. Like what are some real easy things to do that do not interrupt your normal workflow? So getting things like a password manager just helps a huge amount enabling MFA I was joking earlier, I lose a half a second of my life getting this stupid code.

Yeah, that's worth it because what does that half second cost you when, not if, when your email gets popped and you are starting to send out messages asking for ransomware and stuff like that, and you don't even realize you're sending them that's pretty dangerous. And when you start reframing the cybersecurity questions into something that your average business owner.

Understands, they start seeing the value in it and will start making the better decisions better. As far as what we are concerned with.

[00:36:05] Mikey Pruitt: What is that? What are those things that they understand? Like when you say key phrases and you see their eyes are like, oh, I get it. What are they?

[00:36:14] Kevin Dutkiewicz: I use a lot of analogies.

It's one word, and this is where having a lot of years of experience and just a lot of life experience really helps. I had a client that for some reason did not trust SSDs. This was a number of years ago, so I get it. At some point. They caught this news article, how SSDs will burn out after, just a couple months of using them and that's not quite how this works.

But you start framing it like if you wanna keep using your old hard drives. And I am not gonna give the whole spiel, but I use this desk and filing cabinet analogy. And you compare a hard drive to an old fashioned 1920s desk with a filing cabinet on the other side of the building, and there's an elevator, and the dude has to press the button for you to go up and down the elevator, and you have to sit there and talk with Janie as she goes by.

And it's see how slow that process is. And now let's talk about SSDs. Oh, it already happened. What does that, yeah, like it already happened. And when you can frame it even more in the business sense. Alright. If you're so cheap and you don't wanna buy these SSDs, every single one of your employees is going to wait five minutes for their computers to boot up.

Every morning guaranteed they're waiting five minutes. You have 20 employees, 20 times five is a hundred. You wasted a hundred minutes of time. Please go tell me how much of that costs you. And when you can frame it like that, they suddenly like, oh, I never thought of it. That way they understand it. So when you start making those analogies and just bring it down to a level they understand.

Then it's oh, you can actually get some forward traction on a better path for everyone.

[00:38:04] Mikey Pruitt: I actually heard a guest on the show actually was using an analogy to describe cybersecurity as like a car safety feature. So there's like front and rear crumple zones, there's, side impact airbags and the, the airbag from the front and seat belts and all this stuff and all of it together working.

Unison is what keeps you safe. And that's a good way to understand it. It does not force, it does not put them in the place where they want to do it. I think, the people I know, like in my normal life, like the PA password management using two fa properly, like not through SMS with now there's like those new pass keys like you have to use that stuff and people, they just won't do it.

Until it's too late. Change is

[00:38:53] Kevin Dutkiewicz: hard.

[00:38:53] Mikey Pruitt: And we've seen like breaches all over the place. Like I think I just saw a breach from Plex, like 10,000 people got breached from Plex. I'm probably one of them. And it was especially bad because. Got like social security numbers, like they got everything that Plex had.

Oh,

[00:39:11] Kevin Dutkiewicz: I didn't think it was that bad.

[00:39:11] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah, I saw somewhere those like social security numbers and I was thinking, I don't think I've ever given them my social security number. So I don't know how they got that. But yeah. And then we've seen supply chain attacks like MPM got a package, a pretty popular package.

And MPM got someone. I clicked the link in a phishing email. One of the, one of the developers, one of the contributors that had repo access for, I believe it was chalk, is the name of the package. And make, makes your terminal look nice and pretty such a frivolous package. But I think a lot of people use it because it is nice developer experience.

So those things were code was injected in there. Any type of crypto addresses that came across the network were intercepted and then rerouted to the bad guys. Crypto wallets like the, like these breaches keep happening. Look up. Go into Google and type cyber breach and do like your timeframe as one week, and you'll probably see 20 or 30 things in there.

This is not stopping. Like it's scary.

[00:40:13] Kevin Dutkiewicz: Yeah. That's actually something I tell all the people I meet, like it's. You can always argue, you're too small, you don't matter. No one's gonna target you. And I'm like, no. You are still absolutely a target. The only difference between you and a big business is you are too small to make the news, so you're just gonna.

Fizzle way in. No one's gonna notice except you. You're gonna be there suffering and no one can help you. No one's going to help you. No one knows you had a problem to begin with. So it's again, it's one of those reframing it in a way that they can understand and can come up with a, oh, maybe you're right and I should come up with a better plan to deal with this.

[00:40:57] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah, those are hard conversations to have and I think they're, they don't seem to be getting better. But I hope the continuation of the news cycle starts getting people in more of a mindset to accept the trade-offs of inconvenience, slight inconvenience, like it's not that hard.

[00:41:17] Kevin Dutkiewicz: And honestly, it doesn't even have to be that much of an inconvenience.

I use the Microsoft Authenticator for the bulk of my MFA and I absolutely love the push notification. Duo does the same thing, where something just pops up and Yes, this is me. Yes. Was that tough? No, it wasn't. Just don't get in the habit of blindly clicking it all the time and actually read it.

Which is again, why I like the Microsoft one. It actually forces you to read the screen and put the numbers in. Google does the same thing.

[00:41:47] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah, we have one like that. It's does your face scan and you can have to, is it a 90 or a 17 or a 45? So you kinda have a little bit of, a little extra. And just those simple things can prevent a lot of a lot of breaches.

[00:42:00] Kevin Dutkiewicz: Even getting into the YubiKey for a while I was demoing YubiKey for one of my clients at the time, and it's like I can actually configure the MFA to work on a touch on a little YubiKey. So I just left in a USB port that was, route pretty accessible. And anytime I needed to authenticate, I would just tap it.

That's it. That's all it took. It took nothing. Like, why is this so tough? Why are we having this conversation?

[00:42:27] Mikey Pruitt: So maybe the regulation is coming not because the MSPs are bad, which is, some of them are. But anyway, it's more that people are unwilling to, to, for the trade off.

[00:42:40] Kevin Dutkiewicz: Yeah, it, there's a slider and this is another one of the things I talk about when I talk to businesses about cybersecurity, security and convenience.

There are opposite ends. So where do you want the slider to be? Do you want it to be all the way on the security side? I promise you that is inconvenient as hell and you will hate everything. Now you flip it the other way if it's super convenient. Yeah, you could get your stuff done, but anyone else can either.

Exactly. Yeah. So you gotta find that compromise and that's where becoming the, a real partner to your businesses and having those conversations is so important. Just making sure they understand where they wanna be on that slider and coming up with the solutions that meet them there.

And then usually pushing a little bit more too towards security. Yeah,

[00:43:28] Mikey Pruitt: you gotta nudge them a little. Kevin, thank you so much for joining me today. People want to find you online. Where should they look first?

[00:43:36] Kevin Dutkiewicz: LinkedIn is probably the best place to find me. There's not too many Kevin Dutkiewicz out there, so I'm pretty easy to find.

I don't think I, my picture there has my hat. It might though

[00:43:46] Mikey Pruitt: way. Does

[00:43:46] Kevin Dutkiewicz: it?

[00:43:46] Mikey Pruitt: It does. It's got the hat.

[00:43:48] Kevin Dutkiewicz: Oh, it does? Okay. You'll recognize it. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. You should recognize me there.

[00:43:52] Mikey Pruitt: Thank you so much for chatting with me and look forward to seeing you at the next conference.

[00:43:57] Kevin Dutkiewicz: Cool.