Stephen Fisher, COO at Allstream - Mission-Critical Business Solutions

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:03) Hello, my friends. Today we're talking to Steven, the COO at Allstream, and we discuss interesting use cases enabled by fiber optic technology.

(Steven at 00:00:30) Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:31) This is the Modern CTO podcast.

(Steven at 00:00:42) Yeah. So I started in technology in the early nineties and worked at the University of San Francisco in their telecom communications department. And if you think back to those days, this is the days when a T1 of internet was cool and cost about $12,000 a month. So, you know, certainly have progressed from there. I got my first sort of job into competitive telecom in the early 2000s, 2003 specifically, with a company called Integra Telecom. This was a competitive telephone company that was just coming to be a phone company and a data communications provider out of the Telecom Act of 1996, which allowed for competitive telephone companies. You know, we were all into telephone at the time, right? Because the internet was barely a thing. Right? We still cared about our phone calls differently than we cared about our internet. And, you know, similar to you, right, as a young guy, you know, working in a competitive telephone company in the new age of competitive telephone and internet, you know, worked through and so I've done most things within a phone company, within a communications provider throughout my career. Started in, you know, managing a repair organization that led to managing engineering organizations, leading network architecture, leading network operation centers that manage big networks, and build fiber networks. And then over time, I started working for a company that we acquired called Electric Lightwave that built big fiber networks across the West Coast of the United States that had big long haul fiber networks that we built, you know, terabit wavelength systems for big content providers and hauling traffic all around the western US.

(Steven at 00:02:54) And, you know, my passion had always been still really focused on that sort of enterprise customer and that multi-service application of that enterprise customer. I did a journey through Zayo, who is an infrastructure provider who was entering into enterprise communications. I was the CTO for Zayo Enterprise Networks, and then came back, came to Allstream as the CTO originally, and now I'm the COO of Allstream.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:31) Very cool. So how did you meet the executive team at Allstream originally and decide to join?

(Steven at 00:03:36) Yeah. So I ended up at Allstream through my journey through Zayo. So Zayo had purchased Allstream, which was at that time just a Canadian-based company, and Allstream and many of the executives at Allstream were partly on the Zayo side and partly running Allstream. I came from a company called Electric Lightwave that was purchased by Zayo also, and Zayo is really focused in the underlying infrastructure, big, big, big bandwidth communications infrastructure. And Allstream is a combination of the Allstream company of Canada and the Electric Lightwave company that I came from. It's a combination of those two companies coming together for the medium, small business enterprise voice and managed services components.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:35) Got it. Yeah. That's interesting how industries get so small when you look at all the connections between all the companies.

(Steven at 00:04:42) Acquisitions certainly change the dynamics, right? And certainly are interesting in how these companies all come together and we all, right, float between them as things change. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:54) So you mentioned that throughout your career, your passion has been focused around the enterprise uses of these technologies. Is that the focus of Allstream today?

(Steven at 00:05:06) And that is the focus of Allstream today. So let me describe that a little bit more. So I've always been passionate about how do we take the technologies that are available and make them meaningful for business. And I've always been on the business side, right? And make them meaningful to empower businesses, simplify businesses to, you know, achieve their fundamental goals for their businesses. And there's a dynamic in there that's interesting, right? You have different verticals and businesses have different requirements. So how do you make the technologies meaningful to multiple verticals? And at Allstream and throughout my career, I've always been focused on making sure we have sets of products that we take care of, how they integrate together, right? So you can go buy internet from anyone. You can go buy voice service from anyone. You can go buy WAN services from anyone, but making them all integrate together for businesses and making sure that businesses don't have to have that expertise to be able to take those technologies, integrate them, and make them meaningful. That, you know, that's where I've always enjoyed sort of the technology and how you put those pieces together and solve those business problems for companies.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:30) That's cool. So you kind of are able to manage all the different providers?

(Steven at 00:06:37) Manage all the providers, manage all the interactions of the different service types, right? Give people the ability to layer on services or subtract services as their business changes or as technology changes, right? All companies, you know, they all have a focus of moving their technology forward, but everyone's on a different timeline, right? So how do you make that easy? How do you make that so that, you know, one company, you know, a school district who is going to be a little slower in what they need sometimes, right, may have, you know, so their needs are different, right, than, you know, a technology company who's moving at lightning speed and needs to be able to integrate, migrate, and modify as their business grows, you know, at a different scale than a school district, right? And so having products that allow for both to happen, that's always been a big piece of my passion, right? Very interesting to think through. How do you organize and, you know, put these technologies together so that they can scale and that they can subtract, change, modify in an easy way for end users?

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:51) Yeah. Well, those school districts got a little taste of what it's like being a tech company.

(Steven at 00:07:56) It really did change for them in the last couple of years, didn't it?

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:01) Yeah. So what was it like on your side being kind of the support layer as so many companies, schools, and everything had to go through such drastic change so fast in the past couple years?

(Steven at 00:08:15) It certainly changed that dynamic, right? I mean, certainly before a pandemic hit and we had so many people working from home, that change from a user perspective and where they were changed significantly, and what that business location was, right, and is, and who is there changed dramatically. In some ways, it was no different than what we've seen in cloud migrations, right? People's data centers moving to the cloud. It was now just the users moving to being very diverse and still needing access to, you know, the servers, the information, the security components of both the cloud environment and what was the equipment that was still sitting at this premise that nobody was looking at or was at any longer. So the dynamic was quite interesting. And, you know, depending on what environment you're in, you know, some users' volumes changed in their business dramatically. Others increased dramatically, right? And now their voice communications was a whole different level of volume if they were hospitals or if they were, you know, government agencies receiving calls during pandemic time to figure out where vaccines, we had the whole host of mass, mass change of what was going on in the environment and still is, right? And certainly what is that infrastructure that sits in a building that is an office space changed dramatically.

(Steven at 00:09:48) And we certainly saw more people moving to the cloud faster, having to deal with remote users from, you know, how are they going to get access to secure environments from a VPN perspective, or how are those dynamics going to change? We certainly also saw that because the home network became so much more important to a business environment, that, you know, there has been a change with cable companies and ILECs starting to use their home-based network infrastructures for business applications, right? So the business application of a broadband fiber connection or a coax-based connection has started to take root. And when you have lots of people moving to home for their business communications, now the quality of services for those networks changed dramatically, right? Call centers that needed voice calls that had shifted to these, you know, sort of lower quality of service networks, right, certainly had changes in what they needed from a quality of service and a fiber-based service. So that as, you know, many more users are at home, many more students are at home, the daytime of home environments was much different than it was two years ago when people were at work and people were at school.

(Steven at 00:11:27) And so a daytime environment now didn't have the same congestion. So we spent a lot of time, you know, and Allstream's always been focused on a dedicated fiber product. Certainly we'll use multiple providers and bring in whatever the solution is for a business, but we've seen a lot more of the fiber-based services or dedicated fiber-based services become a much more meaningful thing now that we have a whole different dynamic going on from the pandemic of how networks are used and what a home user is and how those home user networks get used versus these dedicated fiber networks.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:05) So you're talking about dedicated fiber service for enterprise. How is that different from a residential fiber connection?

(Steven at 00:12:16) Right. So if you think of a residential fiber connection, a residential fiber connection is generally something called GPON. And what GPON does is it takes a fiber and it splits that fiber into multiple accesses to customers. So it splits that multiple ways. So when you're a home user, you don't get a dedicated fiber or dedicated service. You're oversubscribing that service to all of the homes in that neighborhood. When you have a dedicated connection, that connection is dedicated to you all the way back to sort of the core network of the service provider. So it's really about what are the oversubscription rates in those networks and, you know, how many users and how much bandwidth is oversubscribed.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:12) So that's like splitting the fiber in too many directions?

(Steven at 00:13:16) Right. It just splits it in more directions. They're betting on not all users are going to use it at the same time, right? And in general, that works great, right? When you, if you look at, you know, the way bandwidth is really consumed, we all look at bandwidth like, oh, you know, I've got a one gig connection. I'm great, right? But bandwidth isn't consumed like you suck one gig down because you have it. It's very bursty, right? You suck it down for even when you're watching, right, internet TV, right, it's very bursty. It sucks down, right? So you use a bunch of bandwidth and then you don't for a little bit, and then you use a bunch of bandwidth and you don't for a little bit. So in general, right, oversubscribing networks is fine because it's betting on that you're not all going to use it at the same time. But when you all start using it at the same time—

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:07) Right.

(Steven at 00:14:07) That becomes a problem. And so that is the dynamic change that COVID brought to many of those networks. There's a lot more people at home, yeah, and a lot more home going on. So the oversubscription rates certainly get looked at differently, right? And that's where, you know, having dedicated fiber and a dedicated connection for an enterprise, right, or for business can come into play to minimize those oversubscription rates, to minimize the pain points you would have in those scenarios, right? So if you think in today's world, right, we put a lot over those data connections, right? Voice services, internet services, video calls. And, you know, when we're all using them all at the same time and you don't have a dedicated connection for that, it can cause problems. It can cause, you know, your video calls to cut out or your voice to cut out. And in business, that's a big deal. That is time and money.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:08) Yeah. Yeah. I didn't realize what a hard problem that is to solve specifically using too much bandwidth in residential until when we were doing all these remote interviews for the podcast. And where, for example, we interviewed the CTO of Dropbox, and we figured, alright, he's the CTO of Dropbox—

(Steven at 00:15:29) He's got to have—

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:31) He's got to have plenty of bandwidth. And middle of the interview, he froze up and he's like, yeah, sorry, my son's playing Xbox. And, like, wow. I didn't realize that that would affect even you, you know? Right. But it affects everyone. And that's really nuts. So what's the solution for that when everybody's on at the same time?

(Steven at 00:15:53) So, I mean, there's a couple of solutions, right? The one that we tend to, that we gravitate towards at Allstream, right, to solve that business problem is a dedicated fiber-based service where you have a dedicated solution. And then there's a couple of technical things that you do on top of that, right? So when you're buying just a basic internet service for your home, you get a basic internet service. There's no quality of service on it. So you can't prioritize, you can't prioritize what your neighbors are doing. You can't prioritize, well, right, what your son is doing with his Xbox. But we bring to the table prioritizing that traffic across those links so that, right, the traffic that you want to make through, you make sure makes through, and it's prioritized over the traffic that doesn't have to make it through at the same. And if you think about it, right, not all consumption that you use is created equal, right? A voice call has to make it through, right? It has to make it through not only from a bandwidth perspective, but any hardware queuing that goes on, and it has to make it through in real time. You can't queue it, right? Because that's when you get choppiness in your voice, or that's when those things go on. Same thing applies, right? Video is a little bit, you know, less temperamental, but it still, you know, can only queue a bit, right? And then you go farther down, right? If you're just browsing the web, who cares, right? If it takes a couple hundred milliseconds more, nobody notices, right? If you're watching Netflix, it doesn't really matter, right? Because it queues that and it buffers it so that you don't have, you know, your video chop out. So it really depends on what the applications are, what they are, and it really comes down to how do you queue the traffic and how do you prioritize that traffic across those networks? So those are the mechanisms we use to really help businesses get the performance they need to really manage their business effectively and manage what is the priority.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:07) Gotcha. So does Allstream lay the fiber cable yourselves?

(Steven at 00:18:12) So we don't. We have partners. Allstream is a subsidiary of Zayo Group. So Zayo has, owns all of the fiber, and we have access to that fiber. Oh, awesome.

(Steven at 00:18:25) So we don't lay it in the ground, but we have access to it, and we use the Zayo fiber to access buildings and data centers and the like to light that fiber to provide that service to our end users. We do light that fiber ourselves, so it is our own electronics that we put on there to light the fiber and manage the connectivity end to end. And then we certainly use other partners for other connectivities to meet whatever the business requirement is of the enterprise that we're working with to meet their needs. And we certainly use those shared networks for them.

(Steven at 00:19:06) Right? And I'm not telling you those shared networks are bad in any way. They just have a different set of requirements for a different set of needs. If you think about branch offices, right?

(Steven at 00:19:16) A branch office with a couple of users certainly doesn't have the same requirements than a headquarters that has servers and has a bunch of cloud connectivity and has those kinds of users that are doing those tasks. Right? And so, you know, mixing all of that together is really a value we bring. Right? It's how do we mix and match and make the best solution for what is the requirements of that business.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:45) So are there any cool use cases of some of your customers that you're allowed to talk about?

(Steven at 00:19:51) Sure. I mean, I think some really interesting use cases we've worked on recently are we manage some networks for some regional banks, and they're moving to where they don't have tellers anymore. Right? The teller is all a virtual teller.

(Steven at 00:20:15) So the tellers all sit in a call center, and when you walk up into the bank, you see a video screen of the teller. And you are interacting with a live person, but you're not in the same room. But you still go into the bank, and you still interact with them. But, you know, that's a really interesting use case where you need to make sure that the quality of that interaction feels as real time and as good as a communication with a live person.

(Steven at 00:20:51) And yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:52) No. I mean, that's the whole point. People even go to banks anymore.

(Steven at 00:20:55) Right. Right. So that's an interesting change. It's certainly, and COVID was really exciting to see because now you didn't have that exposure in the same way. Right? And you could have that same communication in what felt like the same experience versus just being on the phone and calling into a big call center.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:17) Yeah. That's a really smart way to try and make things safer. That's really cool.

(Steven at 00:21:23) Yeah. So those kinds of things are fun. We're also seeing, you know, certainly we're seeing some change that are interesting in the whole migration to the cloud. Right? Brings a whole new set of use cases. And, you know, I would say they're not as exciting as watching a video call, but the dynamic of that, right, because most businesses don't migrate 100% to the cloud. Right?

(Steven at 00:21:55) They're in a hybrid environment. Yeah. And that brings its own set of challenges. Right? Because now you've got lots of your servers and applications sitting in a cloud environment, and you have a lot of activity that's going on in a prem-based environment or in a data center, and helping them bridge those two environments in a secure way.

(Steven at 00:22:20) Right? Because security becomes really interesting and really important as you start moving traffic between cloud environments and prem-based environments. Those are some, you know, those are interesting use cases to solve for people also as they're making that migration. Right? How do they keep the current environments all working as they're shifting to the cloud, as they're shifting, and making sure that they don't break things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:49) Yeah. Exactly. One thing, I feel like the low latency of fiber in particular, probably pretty interesting use case in esports because, um, I was just thinking about it because a little while ago we had on this guy that, um, he is a chief evangelist for a huge data center company. And he was really hype about how the role that he gets to play in supporting esports, especially as their viewership is starting to eclipse traditional sport viewership. And that the tech just wouldn't have been there to even have some of these massive millions of viewers tournaments take place, um, because the competitors couldn't even play with the latency that used to happen.

(Steven at 00:23:38) Well, I think you have lots of interesting things going on just even in physical sports where they're becoming more e-sport. You know, they're becoming more digitally enabled, where the ball is digitally enabled and broadcasting information out. Right? And so there's lots of movements there that are really, it'll be interesting to see what happens in the next couple years around how do those things bridge together. Right?

(Steven at 00:24:05) And how does that physical sport really now rely on technology in a holistically different way because they're starting to bring in, right, you know, tracking live video feeds and tracking your digital, you know, online experience with what's really going on because the shoes are enabled to, I mean, there's lots of weird stuff going on in those ways that drive, you know, a whole other layer of bandwidth consumption. And certainly, as you say, a whole other layer of requirements for networks around latency and what can be a latency requirement associated with that, so that, you know, that huge amount of data that's moving around can get processed fast enough to be real time in how you're interacting both digitally and in live form.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:03) Yeah. I mean, a little off topic, but I've played fantasy football for, like, six years. And it's been really fun every season because I play on ESPN's app, and they apparently have a partnership with IBM. And every year you just see more and more integration of Watson. And now live during the games that are happening, there's, like, live calculations running that show you your percentage chance of winning.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:32) Right. Um, at that given second, and it keeps changing. And, yeah, I didn't think of that in the context of how that has definitely been improving, not just because of improvements on the AI side, but because of improvements on the network and the latency involved. That's really cool.

(Steven at 00:25:51) Yeah. It's interesting as those things come together. Right. And, you know, we even see in areas like manufacturing where, you know, the robotic manufacturing is changing the manufacturing environment, and the data that is processing some of those robotic environments right now need to be integrated networks with the actual manufacturing facility and the data center that's providing the horsepower for that manufacturing.

(Steven at 00:26:24) Right? And, you know, what are the latency requirements of that and how do those networks get built? Because now you bring in things like AI and, you know, that analytics. You need lots of compute power and resource to do those things. Well, you're not well equipped to sit those in the manufacturing facility.

(Steven at 00:26:43) So those are sitting in data centers and cloud environments, but the networks that then control and the reliability that needs to go on to be able to interact your robotic manufacturing with the data center environments that are managing them, those are, you know, really interesting to watch, you know, how technology evolves and how, you know, just business evolves and how we do things evolve and how we rely on those networks that interact with them, not only the compute, but then the network that is part of how the compute gets the data back and forth between those locations.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:18) Yeah. So one thing that I'm curious about is, so obviously over a fiber connection, the limiting factor of the speed is the speed of light. Right? So I can't really imagine that would hinder much, but I know that tech is more advanced than I usually imagine. So where are some areas where the speed of light is actually limiting things?

(Steven at 00:27:43) Yeah. So, so what you need to think about, like, I'll give you an example. And you see this in, you know, sort of where we're going with 5G networks and some of those things. Certainly fiber has a play in all of that also, but just think about your autonomous vehicle driving. Right? And the amount of processing to drive those and the amount of communications that goes on, it's not all just stored in a, you know, in a tiny little computer within the car itself as we move forward in time. Right?

(Steven at 00:28:15) Some of those things that, you know, people are thinking about and doing those things are part of networks that communicate. Well, you certainly don't want, you know, if you think about something like driving, right, you certainly can't have, you know, a millisecond makes a difference.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:30) Yeah.

(Steven at 00:28:31) Right? And so where data infrastructures are and how you get them, you know, how you start pushing that cloud further and further out into the edge and the data center becomes, you know, a more edge-based approach is really because that latency requirement, depending on what those applications are, become absolutely critical to that. Where you think about, you know, remote surgeries. Right? You certainly don't want somebody doing surgery on you and have a latency requirement of, of doing surgery, right, in real time.

(Steven at 00:29:04) You would certainly want those, you know, you can think of applications like that that the delay is critical. Right? And, you know, if you look at things like voice networks, right, we used to think that the voice delay was something we cared about. Right? 127 milliseconds was sort of the maximum delay before you, in your ear, could hear that delay.

(Steven at 00:29:28) Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:29) Well, a—

(Steven at 00:29:29) 127 milliseconds is a really long time in today's environment. Right? What your ear can pick up is, you know, not really that important anymore. Right?

(Steven at 00:29:40) I mean, you think about some of these applications we're talking about, right? You know, a few milliseconds is meaningful. And so where those networks are and how they sit and how fiber routes and, you know, any delay latency that gets picked up in the, you know, digital to optical conversions or in the electronics themselves, those become really important to how do you minimize, you know, all of the delay, right, that can be out there, not only the speed of light, which is not that fast when you're going across long distances.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:19) Yeah. On the topic of applying it to driving, I saw recently that some of the rideshare companies are testing out a model where they have remote drivers drive the cars when no one is in them to get them from location to location. And then when you order your car, so a remote driver will drive it to you, and then an empty car shows up and you get in and drive it to where you're gonna go.

(Steven at 00:30:46) But—

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:47) When I saw that, I immediately thought of the latency because like you said, a millisecond is big and, um, like, I feel like at that point I would trust an onboard computer more than even the best remote pilot of this car, you know, that's in a different location. I just, yeah. How would that work?

(Steven at 00:31:12) I mean, technologies are working to solve those things. Right? And that's the exciting part about, you know, working on them. Right? And seeing, you know, how do we solve those problems. Right? And what are, you know, the best part is, I think, in working in technology and working on things like that is to see the problems start to exist. Right? And then people have to solve them. Right?

(Steven at 00:31:35) And, you know, we're at the cusp of some of those, right, where, you know, we know latency becomes a bigger and bigger issue. Right? But, you know, there's lots of people working on solving those problems. Right? Whether or not that's pushing compute further and further into networks or whether or not that is, you know, taking as much latency out or changing the way that we process things.

(Steven at 00:31:59) You know, it's fun to watch those things happen and fun to watch the problems start to exist. Right? Because, you know, human nature will solve those problems. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:09) And I mean, not just fun to watch. Like, you're a part of it, dude. You're part of solving it too. But, um, so what are some areas that you're personally really excited about for the future of what you're working on at Allstream?

(Steven at 00:32:26) Yeah. So I think the thing that always has excited me, as we said, is, you know, how we bring technology and integrate that technology. And I would take that a couple of steps further. Technology is technology. It's great when it works. It's great when we can make it work so that, you know, it's effortless in how we put those pieces together. But the reality is that it doesn't always work perfectly. The reality is that it takes smart people to make it work and to evolve to the business needs. Those are the things that get me up every day, are how we take technology and how we take the people and processes that implement, manage, and drive change to that technology. That's what excites me every day. It's not easy. Right?

(Steven at 00:33:25) People are people. Technology is sometimes complicated. But bringing those things with process together so that, right, people not only have great technology that we deliver, but they have great people behind that technology so that when they need help, right, when it isn't working as they thought it should, or when their business is changing, that we can help them evolve that technology for their needs. Right. That's the part that really is actually the fun part, is how you bring those pieces together.

(Steven at 00:33:59) Right? The technology is exciting. It's only one piece of really making it all work. Right? And making that all work in an easy, effortless way that really moves the businesses we support forward, right, to meet their business objectives, that's the part that is really exciting to be a part of.

(Steven at 00:34:19) And really, you know, at Allstream, we put a lot of effort into, you know, who are the people that we have that support those things so that it's not just about the technology we provide, but it's also about how we support the technology and the businesses that we support.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:37) Right. Yeah. That's, um, the focus back on people is a trend that I've been hearing a lot and that I really like because there's like a tendency in technology to just get really hype about the tech and kind of forget that the tech is there for the people. And you don't wanna leave that behind.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:00) And now because we've just had a couple of episodes with some cybersecurity people recently on the show talking about how we've kind of solved a lot of the technology problems in security, and now the biggest attack vectors are the people. Right. Like, we had on this company called HelpSystems, which they're a very large company that they do a lot of cool IT automation stuff and transformation solutions. But the guy we had on, Steph, was talking about this one tool they have that integrates with email and kind of, it is able to analyze what you're sending and advise whether or not you're sending sensitive information. It acts like a little security buddy on your shoulder.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:45) And I just thought that long digression, but I just thought that that was like a cool, interesting solution to the human side of security in this specific use case. And I don't know. I'm curious. How do you think about the human side of security at Allstream? I know, um, like, security's gotta be baked into everything you do. Right?

(Steven at 00:36:09) Security has to be baked into everything you do. And, right, you're 100% correct. We have lots of tools, lots of security tools, lots of ways in which we can mitigate events and see events. And, but it always comes down to, right, the people. And that human nature is lazy. And so it, I mean, you know, there's, um, you attack it on a million different ways. Right?

(Steven at 00:36:45) You attack it by implementing technology at one layer to make sure that you have all of your protections in place and that you test and that you understand where attacks come from, where the vectors are, how when you implement new things, change. Right? Because change is constant. When you institute change, that you're making sure that you've scanned and that you understand that your change didn't introduce some layer of risk.

(Steven at 00:37:17) But then it is about training and then about training and about training and about training. Right? Because people are people, and they do things sometimes that make their life, you know, their click easier. Right? And it isn't easy.

(Steven at 00:37:40) Right? And so we continually have training programs. We try things. Right. We implement new ways to sort of test them to make sure they're paying attention.

(Steven at 00:37:55) Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:55) Yeah.

(Steven at 00:37:56) And it isn't easy, right? The office clerk that comes in or the guy that brings in coffee, and making sure that those people are as important to the security of the organization as a big firewall that's blocking things. Right? And you have to remember that. Right? And you have to remember policy around who you open a door for versus who you don't is important. Right? And so we spend a lot of time in that. Right? How do you make sure that you not only have the technology to look for those things and protect against yourself, but that you're training the population, that you have good policies and procedures in place so that the human component of that risk is mitigated as best you can.

(Steven at 00:38:43) But humans are humans.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:47) I'm curious. Are you able to share what any of those tests look like, or would it spoil it?

(Steven at 00:38:52) Oh, no. I mean, we don't probably do anything more than most. I mean, just simple

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:58) Yeah. Right?

(Steven at 00:38:58) I mean, lots of, you know, big things today are just phishing attacks are still a big thing. Right? Those emails you get from the CEO of the company that wants you to go do something that isn't really the request that you should be fulfilling. Right? So we test with synthetic emails like that to see who clicks on something they shouldn't click on and who gets engaged with something that seems like it's coming from a bad IP address or coming from a bad username. Right? They misspell one letter. Right? Who's not paying attention to those kinds of things so that they would then act. Right?

(Steven at 00:39:47) And, you know, we get lots of those. Right? And like all businesses, right? I mean, the amount of activity coming from actors to just enter into your environments by impersonating that they're someone else. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:04) Yeah.

(Steven at 00:40:05) That's a big thing to watch out for. Right? So we test to make sure that people are paying attention. Right? And, you know, you can only put so many tools in place. You still have people that need to pay attention. Right?

(Steven at 00:40:14) And, you know, we run big call centers. Right? And call centers have people that call them. Right? And can they impersonate. Right? And so making sure that we take pride in protecting our customers' data and their environments. And so making sure that we have good practices in place to make sure that people are not impersonating one of our customers.

(Steven at 00:40:40) Right? And

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:41) Yeah.

(Steven at 00:40:41) That they're validating who they are and how those happen. Right? But there's, yeah. That's across all of those things, right, in all of those areas you gotta pay attention to.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:52) For sure. That's one thing my co-host, Joel, who founded our company, he's been really active about educating everyone at the company about phishing emails and stuff because he tends to get them more than most because he is the CEO.

(Steven at 00:41:08) Sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:08) And so he'll forward on the screenshot every couple of months when he gets an email that says it's from himself. And they're like, you can see as I'm emailing you from my address that I have access to your accounts, and I know what you do online. And it's like, what do I do online? And, um, but, yeah, that's, uh, I've also gotten those.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:33) I don't think he's tested us yet as we have less than 10 employees, but I have gotten emails from my CEO.

(Steven at 00:41:40) Right. I'll send him a note that he should test you to see what you click on.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:45) I'd hope that I'm pretty good at, as a large part of my job is to have these discussions.

(Steven at 00:41:52) It's hard, though. I mean, you know, people, right? I mean, in business environments, and you probably get them too. There's lots of email that floats around. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:03) Yep.

(Steven at 00:42:03) You know, sometimes you just, it just happens. Right? And so

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:07) You said it before, humans are humans.

(Steven at 00:42:09) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:11) Well, before we wrap up, I do wanna get into some leadership questions with you. Is that cool?

(Steven at 00:42:17) Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:19) So one thing that has been on my mind a little bit recently is how it's really important to celebrate the wins at a company and just make people feel appreciated because then, you know, take more pride in your work, work harder, do better work. So how do you celebrate the wins with your employees at Allstream?

(Steven at 00:42:39) So we've recently just gone through this same, like, as leaders of companies, sometimes we all get caught up in here's the things that aren't going right, because we're fixers. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:51) Yeah.

(Steven at 00:42:51) And at the senior leadership of Allstream, we've started this weekly. We all bring the top win in our organization into the leadership organization, and then disseminate those through the whole organization. Because you're entirely right. Right? I mean, it is, I would say, probably the biggest thing as an executive in a company where you get stuck, right? Because you're a problem solver and we all have problems to solve. Right?

(Steven at 00:43:17) And so you get stuck in problems every single day. And sometimes it does, you know, small wins are wins. Right? And there are, um, and, you know, keeping those wins top of mind because the business is doing well and is making wins every single day. Right? And making sure we communicate those to the entire organization so that everybody remembers where we're winning and what winning looks like is something that we've focused on. So we've been doing this for a while, but we bring those up, then we communicate them out to the entire organization, kind of the top wins of the week. Right?

(Steven at 00:43:59) Which, you know, has been really successful in just, you know, I think probably more successful at the executive leadership level to remember about the little wins that are wins. Right? But it does help sort of in the entire organization to remember, we work on problems every single day. And those problems, when we successfully execute on those, those are wins in the organization, and those move the business forward. And so we've tried to do a great job in that. And we try to cascade that down to the entire management staff at Allstream to make sure that we're focusing on how are we encouraging and recognizing those wins that come. Right? And, you know, employee recognition is a big piece of that.

(Steven at 00:44:49) Right? Because employees are the lifeblood of the company. And, you know, we need, we continually wanna make sure that we're recognizing good work and good leadership and successes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:04) Absolutely. So what would you say is the most impactful leadership advice you've ever received?

(Steven at 00:45:12) The most impactful leadership advice I've ever received, I think, is to remember that my role as a leader is to bring the leaders up in the organization to the people that work for me to bring that, to make every single one of them a leader and to continually focus on the leadership qualities of everyone in the organization and encouraging everyone in the organization to be a leader. And I don't mean that they, you know, hopefully we're clear the differentiation between a manager and a leader. And really embracing leadership and empowering people to be leaders in the organization at whatever layer or level they are in the organization. And I think that is, for me, one of the most impactful things. Right? Because there are frontline workers that we have that are leaders in the organization because every single day they're bringing their colleagues along, they're leading their colleagues to do what is right for a customer, do what is right for the business, and really, you know, empowering them to be those kinds of leaders that do that is, you know, really makes things come.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:31) Yeah. Absolutely. I think that's something that can be a little bit discounted, especially like the frontline employees. Like, people on sales, they have to have strong leadership qualities for, like, leading the customer through a process where they have to be the source of all the education that the customer needs to be successful and everything. Like, it's important to, yeah. Just at every level. That's really cool advice. Thanks for sharing that.

(Steven at 00:47:03) Yeah. And we service customer base that, you know, is from a medium-size enterprise customer to fairly large Fortune 500 enterprises and that range, right? And you think that small enterprise, maybe a five, ten location pizza shop, right? Their understanding of technology and how to use that technology to solve their business problems is very, very different than the Fortune 500 who has a CTO and a large, you know, so the dynamic nature of, you know, how a salesperson or a delivery technician or an engineer in the organization can help people solve their business problems with the technology we provide, right?

(Steven at 00:47:55) They can lead customers through that experience in meaningful ways. Right? And in very different ways to the five location, 10 location pizza shop who needs someone to really be their technology leader because they don't have anything to someone who is a Fortune 500, who has a whole different set of needs.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:19) Yes, absolutely. You said that much better than me. Thank you. All right. So, uh, I got one more question for you. What are you learning right now? What's challenging

(Steven at 00:48:31) you? So what's challenging me right now from a technology perspective is really the bridge of how do we take the technology that we have and the people that we have and bring our processes to make us move faster. Right? And there's a lot in that. Right? Because we take lots of dynamics from a technology perspective from what we offer from a communications perspective. Right? A pretty large, you know, differing variations of what we bring to the table. Right? Everything from, you know, voice communications and unified communications to data networks and managed services in between.

(Steven at 00:49:08) And, you know, the people that support those and evolve those and that technology, right? It really is the process that brings those two together to make sure that we are evolving those technologies for our customers as fast as we can. And that's where I've spent, you know, a fair amount of my most interesting learning today is what is the right process to bring those two things together to move that stuff forward faster. Right? Because, you know, as a technology company that's been around in the telecommunication space for many, many years, and we have been around for decades, moving that technology forward, moving fast so that we can bring our development process quickly through to evolve products and services. Right? The faster we can evolve, the better we are.

(Steven at 00:50:32) And that really is where the fun is for me today is how do you build those processes to make it go faster and faster and faster? And a lot of it is there's technology that you have to implement to make the humans work faster, and then there's human processes that you have to work on to make them move faster. And that's where I spend my time in trying to figure out, you know, what are the pieces that we need to bring together? And what is, you know, how do we do that? And how do we make that evolve quickly?

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:05) That's awesome, man. Well, I'll give you some time back to work on that challenging stuff here. Before we wrap up, is there anything that we didn't touch on that we wanna make sure to get out there? Um, so I guess if companies are out there thinking like, man, my network setup could be better, how do they get in touch with you?

(Steven at 00:51:24) Yeah. So at Allstream, right, it's good to just say who is Allstream and what do we do? So at Allstream, we provide a wide range of telecommunications, data services, and managed services. We bring those together for people. And, you know, we are, we have this philosophy, right, that we're big enough to deliver, but we're small enough to care. Right? And that really we bring together in that philosophy. So if you're out there looking for a provider of communication services, networking, and you want someone who actually cares about what you do from a business and can help you take that technology and use the technology that we have to meet your business objectives, we're the guy to call. And we certainly are there to sort of bring those two worlds together, technology and people, to help you execute on your business objectives.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:30) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you would like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.