Off the Wire: A Play by Play on Cybersecurity and Technology Issues

Building Better Partnerships: Chris Haas on Partnership, Alignment, and Preparedness.

In this Off The Wire episode, the hosts interview Chris about what makes co-ops better partners to their vendors, especially amid merger-related change and uncertainty. Chris says great members stand out by being engaged partners, coming prepared with clear outcomes and detailed requirements, and communicating early rather than at the last minute. He highlights how unclear or poorly thought-out requests drive rework, and outlines three preparation essentials: internal alignment across teams, defining the desired outcome, and setting realistic expectations about value and effort. The discussion covers how collective, multi-co-op requests gain priority, why “minor tweaks” often create cascading work, and how misalignment during major migrations can waste time and money. Chris emphasizes encouragement and respectful feedback, noting relationships can drift with turnover, and recommends strategic planning and relationship-building to strengthen partnerships.

00:00 Flip the Script

01:54 Great Co-op Partners

03:46 Costly Behaviors

05:42 Three Keys Prepared

09:27 Strategy and Buy In

10:43 Too Little Detail

13:25 Misalignment Migration

18:45 Communicate Earlier

20:10 Roadmap Priority Rules

21:37 Feedback That Matters

23:51 Toxic Feedback Lines

25:09 When Partnerships Drift

26:36 Managing Turnover Handoffs

27:42 Lightning Round Rapid Fire

29:43 Merger Reactions And Anxiety

32:17 Deeper Partnerships Post Merger

33:24 Strategy Alignment With Vendors

36:33 Wrap Up And Podcast Plug

We talk a lot about enterprise tech on this show. This week we flipped it: the tech we spend our own money on.

Anthony and Tanner each built a top 5 list plus one honorable mention, and neither of us knew what was on the other's list. Real-time reactions, real gear, and a price range that runs from $36 to a few thousand dollars. Anthony's list ran cheap and practical. Tanner's ran toward infrastructure. Somehow we ended up at opposite ends of the spectrum on almost every single pick.

ANTHONY'S LIST

5. Anker 65W charger bricks

4. Wyze camera system

HM. AliExpress soldering station with heat gun

3. Bambu Lab P1S 3D printer

2. CM3588 flash-based NAS

1. OpenClaw AI agent server

TANNER'S LIST

5. Segway Navimow robot mower

4. Tempest home weather station

HM. Password manager (family plan)

3. EcoFlow battery and solar

2. Lutron Caseta smart switches

1. Ubiquiti network gear

CHAPTERS

00:00 Intro and the rules

03:55 Anthony #5: Anker chargers

05:40 Tanner #5: Robot mower

09:15 Anthony #4: Wyze cameras

10:40 Tanner #4: Tempest weather station

14:15 Why co-op people are obsessed with weather

15:20 Anthony honorable mention: Soldering station

17:30 Tanner honorable mention: Password manager

19:55 Anthony #3: Bambu Lab 3D printer

22:30 Tanner #3: EcoFlow batteries

26:45 Anthony #2: Flash NAS build

29:20 Tanner #2: Lutron Caseta and the Wife Approval Factor

32:20 Anthony #1: Running your own AI agent

35:30 Tanner #1: Ubiquiti

41:00 Wrap up

What's your number one piece of personal tech? Drop it in the comments. Got an episode idea, a question, or want to come on the show? Reach out on LinkedIn or email show@offthewirepodcast.com. Off the Wire covers cybersecurity, IT leadership, and technology for electric cooperatives and small business IT teams. Subscribe so you don't miss an episode.

Manage Yourself, Not Just the Work: IT Leadership Principles - Part 2 | Off The Wire

In this Part 2 philosophical episode of Off The Wire, Tanner and Anthony discuss internal leadership temperament: adopting a “duck” mindset to let criticism and setbacks roll off, and a “bison” mindset to face hard situations head-on rather than avoiding them. They explore staying slightly unsatisfied as a leader while still enjoying wins, avoiding judgment of others’ intent without context, and remembering your roots by staying humble and authentic as you advance. They emphasize the patience required for long-term decisions, including a story about a delayed promotion that ultimately made sense because the speaker wasn’t ready. The conversation shifts to bandwidth and prioritization—every “yes” means a “no,” organizations must be ready for change, leaders should speak last, and effective work requires managing energy and making time to think.

They preview an Apex Meridian Conference session on becoming better customers to vendors.

00:00 philosophy part 2

01:01 Be the duck: letting things roll off

03:05 Tattoo Versus Bruise

03:05 CLIP: Tattoo Versus Bruise

04:14 Be the bison: walk into the storm

05:04 Bison Into The Storm

05:10 CLIP: Bison Into The Storm

05:49 CLIP: Embrace The Suck

05:51 Embrace The Suck

05:58 Staying unsatisfied without burning out

08:21 You were preceded by good leaders

08:53 Preceded By Good Leaders

10:08 Intent versus actions

11:09 Judged By Intentions

11:09 CLIP: Judged By Intentions

11:58 Don't forget your roots

12:43 Walked Down The Hall

12:43 CLIP: Walked Down The Hall

14:57 Patience, and the promotion that didn't come

15:09 CLIP: TSA Job Description

18:23 I Wasn't Ready

18:23 CLIP: I Wasn't Ready

19:02 Prioritization: every yes is a no

20:14 Silently Saying No

20:14 CLIP: Silently Saying No

22:05 Speak Last

22:05 CLIP: Speak Last

22:48 Managing energy, not just time

27:56 CLIP: Multitasking Counter

28:08 One piece of advice for pre-leader Anthony

29:17 Don't Dwell On The Past

29:17 CLIP: Don't Dwell On The Past

Leading IT Teams: People-First IT Leadership (Off The Wire, Part 1)

How do you lead an IT team well? In Part 1 of this IT leadership series, Anthony Kent and Tanner Greer get out of the tech stack and into the people side of leading IT teams: managing people, giving feedback, taking blame, sharing credit, and earning your team's trust. Topics covered: why the golden rule fails at work and what to do instead, why a performance review should never contain a surprise, how to make IT's work visible to executives and the board, taking responsibility when things go wrong and passing credit when things go right, hiring people smarter than you and getting out of their way, and why recognition has to happen before you ask your team for extra effort. Off The Wire is a podcast for IT leaders, IT managers, and directors at electric cooperatives and small-to-midsize businesses. Real talk on IT leadership, cybersecurity, and strategy from two operators who do this work every day.

Chapters:

00:00 Cold open: a leader takes the blame

00:28 Intro and episode framing

01:54 Why IT leaders avoid people topics

02:49 IT is getting a seat at the table

05:40 Treating people how they want to be treated

07:57 Reading people and figuring out what they need

09:01 Asking directly how someone wants to be led

12:17 Performance reviews should never surprise anyone

20:11 Defining the direction for your team

20:31 Taking blame when things fail, giving credit for wins

22:55 Making IT work visible to the rest of the organization

26:02 Get out of your team's way: hire people smarter than you

27:38 Do what you ask your team to do

29:52 The cardboard box story: character is always visible

30:49 Recognition: find something genuine for everyone

34:00 Replenishing the cup: earning the right to make demands

Part 2 drops soon. Subscribe so you don't miss it. #ITLeadership #Leadership #TechLeadership

Business Continuity Plans: Why They’re Hard, Why They Matter, and How to Build One

Tanner and Anthony discuss why business continuity plans (BCPs) are often one of the last cybersecurity “baseline” goals organizations complete, largely due to documentation burdens and the fear of committing to recovery metrics. They clarify how a BCP differs from an incident response plan, emphasizing that BCPs define how to maintain or restore operations after major disruptions using recovery time objectives and acceptable data loss. They outline practical ways to build a plan using NIST guidance, peers, and industry templates, and cover key components including defined roles with backups, tiering critical systems, backup/retention details, known alternatives, recovery strategies with dependencies and workarounds, communication plans with update cadence and message templates, and regular testing and review. They also note tailoring plans to each organization and avoiding unnecessary separate documents.

00:00 Intro & Why Business Continuity Planning Matters
01:59 Recovery Time Objectives and Metrics
03:56 Why Put Metrics on Paper: Fears and Benefits
06:07 Why Build a BCP: Reasons, Structure, and Tiers Overview
13:17 Risk Assessment and Incident Levels
16:10 Defining System Criticality Tiers
26:55 Building Known Alternatives into Each Tier
36:14 Wrap-up

ABOUT OFF THE WIRE

Off the Wire is a podcast on cybersecurity and IT leadership for the electric cooperative and small business world. Real operations, real tradeoffs, and the decisions that actually keep the lights on. Hosted by Anthony Kent and Tanner.

Subscribe for new episodes, and if this was useful, leave a comment with how your team handles continuity planning.

#BusinessContinuity #ElectricCooperative #ITLeadership #Cybersecurity #DisasterRecovery

How to Get an IT Headcount Proposal Approved: Speak in Risk, Value, and Data

The hosts discuss how IT leaders can successfully propose adding staff when teams are overextended and work keeps piling up. They emphasize starting with the real problem—unmet business value, security/compliance risk, cyber insurance requirements, ticket backlogs, and burnout/retention risk—then backing the request with data such as project lists, vulnerability and compliance gaps, device and ticket growth, peer staffing comparisons, and feedback from other departments. They advise focusing on responsibilities and business impact rather than job titles, researching comparable organizations carefully, and presenting alternatives like contractors, interns, or part-time roles with true fully loaded costs. The conversation also covers delivery tactics: have an in-person sit-down, be confident and prepared, time the meeting well, seed the narrative in advance, rehearse tough questions (including via AI role-play), and keep a tiered fallback plan with follow-ups if the answer is no.

00:00 Intro
02:04 Keep the List
05:10 Start With the Problem
08:00 Do Your Research
10:19 Responsibilities Over Titles
13:40 Weigh the Alternatives
17:16 The Real Cost of a Hire
18:24 Delivering the Proposal
20:52 Timing the Ask
22:20 Plant the Seeds Early
25:20 Rehearse It (and Use AI)
28:15 Have a Fallback Plan
31:53 Final Thoughts
33:40 Outro

Keywords: IT headcount proposal, how to justify new IT staff, IT staffing business case, getting headcount approved, building a business case for hiring, IT budget proposal, IT leadership, IT management, IT workforce planning, understaffed IT team, IT burnout and retention, cybersecurity staffing, compliance risk, cyber insurance requirements, ticket backlog, fully loaded cost of an employee, contractors vs full-time, presenting to leadership, executive buy-in, electric cooperative IT, utility IT, SMB IT, Off the Wire podcast

#ITLeadership #Cybersecurity #ITManagement #ITStaffing #ElectricCooperative #SMBIT #ITStrategy #OffTheWire

Why Hardware Prices Are Skyrocketing in 2026 (RAM, SSDs, Servers) — and What You Can Do

Hardware budgets are breaking. Quotes that were good for 30 days are now expiring in hours. That $80k workstation quote? It's $160k now. That server quote near $1M? Already $1.3M — and climbing. In this episode, Tanner and Anthony break down what's actually driving the spike in RAM, SSDs, hard drives, servers, and networking gear — and it's not just tariffs. AI data center buildouts are pulling manufacturers toward high-margin HBM memory (roughly 10x the margin of standard DRAM), leaving everything else fighting for supply. With only three major players (Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron) and factory expansions that take 2-3 years, relief isn't coming fast.

More importantly — what do you do about it right now? They cover practical steps: faster approval cycles, buying ahead, standardizing hardware, right-sizing, considering refurb and used gear, extended refresh cycles, cloud compute, and leasing. Plus how to brief leadership before the budget conversation catches you off guard.

This one's for anyone managing IT budgets at a lean organization — co-op, municipal, small enterprise. The volatility is real and it's not going away anytime soon.

00:00 Truck Price Shock Skit

01:54 Hardware Quotes Going Wild

02:46 Real World Sticker Stories

04:36 Why Memory Costs Surge

07:01 HBM vs DRAM Margins

09:08 Factories Tariffs New Normal

13:44 Beyond RAM Storage Crunch

16:53 Quotes Expire Faster Than Ever

20:23 Practical Ways To Cope

26:36 Refurb Longer Cycles Cloud

32:21 When Relief Might Come

37:01 Wrap Up Lead With Communication

Off the Wire is a cybersecurity and IT leadership podcast for practitioners at small-to-medium organizations and electric cooperatives.

The SaaSpocalypse: How AI Is Killing (and Reshaping) SaaS Tools

In this episode of Off The Wire, Anthony and Tanner discuss the “SaaSpocalypse”—how AI is disrupting and potentially replacing many SaaS products—citing examples like Figma being hit after Claude Design launched, reduced need for Canva due to AI tools, and vulnerable niche apps like Grammarly as Copilot and Google tools bake AI directly into core suites. They debate whether AI pricing is currently subsidized, noting high API, hardware, and power costs that could drive subscriptions much higher over time. They explore how AI could become the primary interface layer, reducing the need for traditional web UIs and even replacing documentation platforms by querying SharePoint-backed datasets through an agent. For IT leaders, they recommend evaluating SaaS at renewal time, starting with narrow tools, moving gradually, and prioritizing cost savings while accounting for change management and human behavior.

00:00 SaaSpocalypse Explained

00:14 Figma And Canva Wakeup Call

01:35 SaaS Vendors Racing To Add AI

02:53 Why AI Pricing Will Rise

07:25 Which Tools Are Most Vulnerable

11:20 AI As The New Interface Layer

16:47 Advice For CIOs And IT Leaders

25:10 LinkedIn And The AI Slop Problem

31:00 Final Takeaways And Wrap Up