Weathering the storm: How we can better protect our digital infrastructure

On today’s episode of the Connected Nation Podcast, we  tackle what can be done to mitigate threats to our nation’s internet networks – during natural disasters including an increase in cyberthreats.
 
We invite on leadership from Windstream Enterprise about the unique approach the company takes to stave off bad weather and bad actors during difficult times.

Recommended Links:
Windstream's Website
Art Nichols' LinkedIn
NOAA hurricane season predictions - https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/noaa-predicts-above-normal-2024-atlantic-hurricane-season

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

Jessica Denson (00:07):

This is Connected Nation, an award-winning podcast focused on all things broadband from closing the digital divide to improving your internet speeds. We talk technology topics that impact all of us, our families, and our neighborhoods. On today's podcast, we'll tackle what can be done to mitigate threats to our nation's internet networks during natural disasters, including how to counter an increase in cyber threats. We'll talk with leadership at Windstream Enterprise about the unique approach the company takes to stave off bad weather and bad actors during difficult times. I'm Jessica Denson, and this is Connected Nation. I'm Jessica Denson, and today my guest is Art Nichols, the chief technology Officer at Windstream Enterprise. Welcome Art.

Art Nichols (00:56):

Thanks, Jessica. It's good to be with you.

Jessica Denson (00:57):

I'm excited to talk about this. When I was approached about doing something with your company, I was like, oh, this is the perfect time with hurricane season upon us. But before we get to all of that, I'd really like to give our audience a little idea of who we're talking to, not just the company. So I'd like to ask you a little bit about your background, share a little bit about your early years, where you grew up and what led you into management into technology.

Art Nichols (01:26):

Yeah, I appreciate that. I grew up here in what we call the upstate of South Carolina, the Greenville, South Carolina area. I've stopping short of giving you a whole biography. I've always been bit You're welcome. Yeah, always been a bit of an egghead or propeller head as I like to call it, even when I was young enough to still be an athlete as well. That's always been a trade amount, I guess, and growing up in a bit of a rural area, I'm sure others have had this experience as well, but our family, we never really experienced the notion of bringing in tradesmen to do jobs. If you needed a plumber or a carpenter, an electrician or a roofer or whatever the case may be, that was expected that you just would band together and figure it out. And that's always driven me, I think, to be kind of curious and try to be resourceful. I don't think I've ever lost that mentality, even as I've gone into this technology field and management in some respects of technology, always just looking to understand the bits in the bites and then try to find ways to apply that to solve the highest level problems. And yeah, again, I'm really glad to be able to be with you and talk with you.

Jessica Denson (02:40):

So what part of the country? You said you grew up in a rural area, where was that?

Art Nichols (02:44):

Yeah, it's just south of Greenville, South Carolina. After going to Clemson University, which is also in the upstate, moved back into the rural area on some family land, we're sort of out the middle of nowhere. We just got a broadband that wasn't DSL maybe two years ago. So it just gives you an idea of how rural that section is

Jessica Denson (03:11):

For a kid who was, as you called yourself, an egg header, a propeller head, which I think kind of means like you were kind of a nerd. You liked some nerdy stuff. Is that what you mean by that?

Art Nichols (03:22):

Yeah, and I still do my experience as nerds tend to get cooler as they get older.

Jessica Denson (03:28):

Yeah, I would agree.

Art Nichols (03:30):

I had to hide. Part of that maybe in my youth are be a little more multi focused, but any respect, yeah, I've always been very curious and try to feed into those aspects of my personality.

Jessica Denson (03:44):

So just from the side that you grew up in a rural area and you love this kind of thing, how important do you think it is that rural areas do have this access so that other kids can learn about technology and things? Is it a game changer?

Art Nichols (04:02):

It is a complete game changer. I'm sort of proud of the Windstream and our partner companies are sub series within this one called Kinetic. That's a major charge in mandate of the organization is to provide broadband services into rural communities. There's been a huge amount of government programs that have poured into that area. What we've seen, what we've experienced, what I personally experienced is that bridging that digital divide pays so many dividends. The difference in education, in prosperity, in general wellbeing between those that are on this side of the digital divide and those that aren't is in some respects immeasurable. So it just has such an impact socioeconomic into the communities, into individual lives. Just can't say how important that is as we as a society move from industrial sort of era into a knowledge-based economy. That's a huge part of bringing all of us along with it.

Jessica Denson (05:03):

Well, let's go back to your background a little bit too. We'll come back to that obviously during our conversation more of what Windstream is doing. But after you were at Clemson University, you landed at NuVoxx. Talk a little bit about what you did at NuVoxx and what that company does.

Art Nichols (05:18):

Yeah, so that company's the one around, it was acquired by Windstream, but yeah, it was, I think back on those days very fondly was a startup company in the sort of wild West Days, immediately after the deregulation of the telecom industry way back in 1996. And when Ma Bell, as we like to colloquially say, sort got broken up through that deregulation, just all sorts of opportunities and all sorts of startup companies emerged to try to figure out what do we do now? It was also the early days, the onset of internet. And so OX was one of those companies that really lean into establishing internet service providers, particularly for businesses. We were a bit of a forefront for some technologies like voiceover ip, which seems TRI now in some sense, but in those days was sort of cutting edge private networking, and even as things progressed, moving towards data centers and early cloud types of security. So what I enjoyed about my time at Nuva there was that both that startup kind of nature and dynamic and what that required in terms of having to wear a lot of different hats to keep all the balls in the air. So yeah, I look back on it really finely.

Jessica Denson (06:46):

And so Windstream NuVoxx was kind of morphed into Windstream or did Windstream buy vo?

Art Nichols (06:54):

Yeah, Windstream did acquire VO back in 2010. The real impetus there was to try to expand from a largely residential focused telco, providing broadband again for a lot of rural communities into more of a business to round out into business services. And so new box was, this will be a little bit of an inside baseball term probably, but what's known as a competitive exchange carrier. And so that was part of windstream's larger strategy to expand the portfolio into enterprise and business services.

Jessica Denson (07:29):

And over the time that you've been from NuVoxx on into Windstream, you've kind of moved up through the ranks, correct? You're now a chief technology officer. Talk a little bit about what that role entails and how you approach your day, your typical day.

Art Nichols (07:45):

Yeah. Well, I have spent a lot of time in a lot of different areas, but they've all had a common thread of technology related or centric, whether that's on the fulfillment, provisioning, support, engineering, planning, architecture side, or increasingly my current role has some responsibility in the product area, so product development and product management of these technologies and how we bring all those together to deliver as a solution to a wide swath of businesses that we serve. In some respects, that's a bit of a new area. I've always focused on the technology aspects. Being able to package those into everything from digital experience to competitive pricing and the entire product offering has been really challenging and fun space to play in some sense. And from a management standpoint, I do have a team, so thankfully I'm not having to do all that by myself and just exploring all the possibilities with that group and helping develop people for ways to adopt new technologies and how to introduce those in consumable ways into our preferred segments. That's sort of the focus of a day-to-day basis.

Jessica Denson (09:11):

Okay. Let's turn now to Windstream. Overall, what is the business model for the company and what makes it different in your point of view?

Art Nichols (09:19):

Yeah, that's a good question. So we're divided into three business units. We have what we call Kinetic. It's largely focused on consumer that I mentioned earlier, consumer broadband, chiefly. We have a wholesale division that the primary focus there is on large bit pipe connections. So a hundred gigabit and 400 gigabit long haul connections that service other carriers. And increasingly service hyperscalers, well, you probably shouldn't name names there, but the big cloud companies, that would be household names. And then the third is really where I spend my time in the enterprise segment, Windstream Enterprise. We have a whole suite of managed communications, cloud communications and networking and security services that we offer on a national basis. We also have maybe to a lesser degree a global set of services for companies that are multinational but that are headquartered in the us. We do leverage, I think it's an 18 state footprint where we have assets and fiber and broadband services over 150,000 route miles of fiber. So it's a little bit of best of suppose worlds. A lot of times when I'm asked this kind of question of why Windstream and what makes Windstream different, the language I like to use, I think we're sort of one of those Goldilocks size companies

(10:43):

Big enough to be scalable and meaningful and enjoy the benefits of that scale, but small enough to still be agile and to gauge our customers on their terms rather than dictate exactly how they should interact with us. So that's in a nutshell, kind of our aim is to make it simpler, to make it easy to do business with us for really all the products and the services that we're trying to take to market.

Jessica Denson (11:06):

Well, that's an easily understood analogy, so I appreciate that. Let's talk Protecting internet networks from threats both from human nature and mother nature, if you will. First hurricane season has kicked off, and I looked this up, the National Weather Service predicts that in 2024 there'll be an above normal hurricane season, which means 25, named storms 13 are forecast to become hurricanes and up to seven as major hurricanes. The major is a big deal there because the level of damage is high. How can we plan to strengthen an IT infrastructure for network continuity, eliminating downtime for customers, employees? That seems like a daunting task. However, your team did say, Hey, we have some ideas and solutions for this kind of thing. So yeah, how would you answer that question?

Art Nichols (12:02):

Yeah, again, really great question. I think we do have some solutions and some answers here largely because we try to think about what our customers, how to solve actual business problems rather than just sort of take solutions into the market. Being in the southeast myself and you're not too far away, we are keenly aware of all that hurricane activity. So it's something that is sort of top of mind for us, particularly this time of year. I think the extreme weather events are increasing in frequency, they're increasing in unpredictability in some sense, and in terms of how much damage they do when they do happen. So all of that for me just means we have to put a premium on business continuity planning on ensuring the critical functions of the enterprises that we serve and indeed our network have a hundred percent availability, that all the avenues that can be exercised are for ensuring uptime and for ensuring availability.

(13:03):

I think it's true for organizations even that haven't been in ourselves in kind of disaster prong areas. I think the climate change and the things that are going on in the world are expanding sort of the footprint of where we see disaster prone events or disaster pro areas. So regardless of the size of the business or where it's located, it seems to be an increasingly applicable exercise in conversation to go at. You threw a stat at me with the NOAA folks. I'll throw one back at you. The ITIC in a recent study I think found that the cost of a single hour of unplanned network downtime could be upwards of $300,000 for an average enterprise. So this is big business. This is important for not only the customers that they serve, but for the viability of these businesses. It's really critical sort of continuity planning.

(14:01):

So when these events do happen, if you hadn't done all the appropriate things, productivity can be dramatically impacted. Customers revenue is lost. It's just a huge, huge risk at large. So what do we do? It's not a hand sort of event. I think the biggest thing to do in terms of preparation is focusing on, and here's where I think Windstream comes to the table, focusing on the resilience of your network and of your communications and what your critical applications are. From my seat, that's I think where the conversation starts and given enterprise really defining what are my critical applications. Most businesses I feel like have taken that step to, whether it's a point of sale application or some uc, unified communications application or whatever the case may be that's important to their particular line of business, making sure that's well understood across the organization and across their partners and their service providers and cloud providers and the like.

(15:09):

And then once you've defined it, what are the things that are critical for business continuity? Really developing a solid plan for the quick term here is BCDR or business continuity disaster recovery. That includes all the stakeholders, internal, external, the full supply chain of stakeholders to understand, have a plan in place that you know what to do in the event that not maybe if, but when these sorts of things are going to happen and not only have a plan but practice it. A plan is just that until it's put into effect. And so practice is sort of the only way to discover what the flaws and the weak points and the poor assumptions are in that plan could be table talk top kind of exercise for practicing or executing the plan, or it could mean after hours trying to engage some sort of maintenance activities that would simulate disaster events and business continuity, sort of failover functions and these sort of things. But until you've defined what's important, drawn out a plan and exercised it, you'll have to assume you're in a really weak position where these sort of disaster events are concerned.

Jessica Denson (16:19):

So not giving away any of your proprietary information obviously, but can you give an example of something that maybe a response or a plan or say, we know that this part of the network mate is prone to go down, or do you plan to have some redundancies there, or what are some solutions that are offered or sometimes put on the table, even if it's just a vague example, would be fine. I obviously don't want you to give away any trade secrets, but if are there some things that you would offer some solutions?

Art Nichols (16:53):

Yeah, I'm happy to talk about it. This is what we get to talk about with our customers. So if it's kind of exciting for, again, but heads from a network provider network standpoint, we pay a lot of attention to the large corollaries of our network and making sure that they're both diverse and redundant and are protected. And those terms may sound like synonyms. They're actually not diverse in the terms of they have different paths that connect maybe two locations protected meaning hey, traffic automatically fails over from one to the other or is low balanced and automatically has resiliency built into the protocols and the schemes that enable applications to remain up.

(17:45):

And there's a lot of technologies and techniques, I don't want to get too in weeds there with you, but things like from a product and a services standpoint, things like SD-WAN have really sort of just taken over in terms of enabling that resiliency and protection, particularly that's application aware for the most critical applications of an enterprise to automatically fail over and to define them, whether that's over multiple links. Oftentimes what we kind of define as best practice and what we see a lot of success in for these types of events are the weakest point typically is what we talk about is the last mile, the last set of last sort of connection from the edge of the provider network into the enterprises facility. That's where you have the least fiber diversity. It's where you may have the most backhoes kind of traversing. So that's when you think about and talk about where are the weak points, the last mile and the access network is really, distribution network is another way to play it to say it is really where the weakness tends to come in. And so one of the best practices to care for that weak point typically is to diversify in terms of a terrestrial and a wireless connection into those facilities, have a 4G 5G connection, have a fiber, even a consumer grade broadband connection, and then use techniques like SD-WAN to automatically fail over critical traffic in the event that there is an issue with either.

Jessica Denson (19:23):

When Puerto Rico was hit hard a few years ago, I talked with a lot of family stateside who couldn't get in touch with people on the island mostly because their internet was down and that's how they would communicate. I can imagine during these times that communication is really critical. What are some of the newest unified communication tools for collaboration during these kind of weather events?

Art Nichols (19:48):

Yeah. Well, I mean some of these are obvious, right? Some of the ones I would mention are probably self-evident, but the first one is you got to pay attention to where this gear is. If you've got a phone system in a closet or even in a data center that's local to the subscribers and the individuals of the business or the customers that are consuming that service, it's vulnerable. Hurricanes are going to come through tornadoes, earthquakes, whatever the case may be, and being tied to physical locations, physical systems that aren't geographically diverse and in large part cloud-based represents a huge vulnerability and a huge risk. So the first thing to point to is having a cloud-based uc sort of solution. And there's certainly no shortage of those and a lot that we of course provide here at Windstream, as you think about beyond just the kind of core infrastructure being cloud-based, you also need to have the users be able to consume the uc in multiple a multimodal sort approach, whether that's from smartphones and tablets, laptops, being able to forward to other numbers and engage in a kind traditional telephony approach and multimodal in the sense of voice video or messaging.

(21:16):

I am text having all of those channels available, really critical in terms of ensuring availability of communications and then having real simple things like call forwarding policies that can be automatically engaged when these sort of events happen and failover, and I don't know if you're at home right now, Jessica or not, but remote working is kind of a thing now. Oh, I am.

Jessica Denson (21:41):

I'm home. Yeah, remote working right now. Yeah, me

Art Nichols (21:45):

Too. So having these caring for remote workforce scenarios is typically a big part of the plan. Even if it's a call center where folks have always gone into a call center, being able to sort of in times of need, being able to shift that in a highly automated, highly prescriptive predefined motion is really, there's no other way to approach that. You have to have that plan and executed when it's needed. So that's maybe the kind of core best practices I would point to you in terms of those sort of things.

Jessica Denson (22:22):

So what I'm taking from you so far, when it comes to natural disasters, whether it's an earthquake, a flood, tornado, whatever it may be, it's really important to go ahead and look at things now when things are calm rather than in the center of the storm and then try to figure it out. You need these redundancies set up and you need to identify your points, your pain points to say so to speak to in advance, not now, don't wait. I mean, don't wait, do it now kind of thing.

Art Nichols (22:54):

Yeah, the worst time to try to figure something out is when you can't talk to anybody to figure it out.

Jessica Denson (22:58):

Yeah, that's true. So let's move on from Mother Nature to the threat of human nature, DC, I'm county doing the two sides of things, this whole podcast. I'm very proud of that by the way. And by that I mean cyber attacks. What is Windstream doing to counter those? Can be, you can see an opportunistic increase in that during disasters of course, but anytime really cyber threats are a big deal right now. So what is Windstream do to mitigate that kind of thing?

Art Nichols (23:36):

Yeah, well, first thing maybe I'd say is just if the storm is analogous or an analog to the black hat, the cyber criminal here, when cyber criminals see periods of vulnerability, they're prone to strike, right? They're looking to be opportunistic and severe weather events are absolutely periods like that. So be aware it should be a period of heightened awareness and concern from a cybersec standpoint when these types of events, whether the event affected you or not, if you're in the path of it, you're suddenly in the crosshairs of a lot of these cybersec organization. So that's maybe one thing to comment on. What can we do? What should customers be doing where this is concerned? Well, a lot of the same themes will apply here as what we talked about with uc. If you've got a firewall sitting in your branch location or your data center and you've sort of taken the age old approach of I'm going to pull all my critical and secure things into a location and put strong controls around it in the form of physical firewalls, I would say you're potentially in for a bad day.

(24:59):

You're going to have a hard time trying to constrain that and protect all of those critical assets, whether that's data or connections or applications, trying to place a perimeter around something that's increasingly distributed. One in terms of the consumers and the users of those applications. And increasingly cloud-based in a traditional kind of firewall approach is approaching ineffective and maybe inadvisable at this point. So really it's shifting from that kind of securing the perimeter and placing a fence around everything mindset to more of a user aware, device aware, behavioral aware, application level security that can exist on any device. And regardless of whether the application is in the cloud or on the prem, Windstream has been kind of privileged, is the way I think about it as a technologist to be sort of on the forefront of some of those emerging trends from a cloud-based networking and security standpoint.

(26:05):

Some of the terms like our analyst friends at Gardner term, this coin SASS E, our Secure Access Service Edge, well as FSE, security Service Edge, both of which there's some complexity in how to think about those and the definition that maybe we don't have time to get into, but they really are just attempts to try to pull together security and networking for in a zero trust kind of manner. Zero trust, meaning I'm going to by default not allow any applications, not allow any outside parties to engage in any of my data applications until I've authenticated them, their device, the user, the application. And so it's really a holistic defense sort of strategy and built from the cloud for the cloud as an alternative to these kind of on-premise applications or appliance based approaches. And that's one of the big areas of opportunities I referenced to forensic at Gardner.

(27:09):

One of the other things they kind of put out in terms of adoption here, their estimates are that 80% of businesses will adopt kind of this unified strategy across cloud services and private applications into a single vendor kind of SSE security service edge approach. And I think they're right, and I think we're seeing that in the market trend, and I think we're seeing that in our customer interactions really adopting and building things that are more cloud-based and more cloud-centric with an expectation that the workforce is going to be distributed and the users and the consumption is going to be distributed. That's really the way to approach security writ large. And then that only becomes sort of a strong point when these types of disaster events come through because in some sense, you're already set up for that dynamism, you're already set up for the users in the consumption to be spread out as the event takes place.

Jessica Denson (28:05):

Yeah, we're actually doing a lot of that at our company now. So we're with training and everything so that we each understand how handle it better, what's next for Windstream Enterprise, any big plans in the coming year and down the road.

Art Nichols (28:24):

So you'll see us continue to invest in security and connectivity. Those are, I'd say foundational cornerstones of our product strategy as well as our kind of business unit strategy. So those are areas that we see enterprises grappling with having need for. There's seldom a board conversation that doesn't have a security breakout or committee talks about it. It's an increasingly funded budget area and enterprises. So we recognize that both the opportunity and the need, and we'll continue to invest heavily in there. I don't know if you've seen any of this in the news, but we recently announced a merger with a company called Unity that sort of brings back together in some sense a lot of fiber assets. So you'll see us continue to take advantage of that sort of convergence there and putting all those resources for use for our customers. And

Jessica Denson (29:23):

You merged with who? With Unity?

Art Nichols (29:26):

Yeah. Unity is also a nationwide, they're more of an infrastructure provider, so they have tons of fiber assets and real estate assets, and that represents a really strong partnership and coupling with the services that Windstream provides.

Jessica Denson (29:42):

And I have to ask because lately it's the big conversation, ai, how does Windstream view AI from a security lens? And as for something to develop great things down the road or some of the dangers of it, how do you guys view AI right now?

Art Nichols (30:01):

Oh gosh, yeah. You can't have a conversation with the CTO and not ask about ai, right?

Jessica Denson (30:05):

Exactly.

Art Nichols (30:07):

Yeah. My typical tagline here when asked about AI to start with is I sort of reference, you may be familiar with this thing called Tomorrow's law, and it's an old one, but it states that we tend as a society really to overestimate technology's impacts in the near term and underestimate 'em in the long term. I think that's exactly the case for ai. What I've come to learn is other than guys like Ray Swell or somebody maybe another inside baseball comment there, but predicting the future in technology is a bit of a fool's errand. So AI obviously, and Gene AI most recently obviously is going to have massive impacts already, is having massive impacts across so many areas of our everyday life, and as organizations and companies continue to evolve, but trying to predict what's the next big thing again, I think is a bit of a fool there.

(31:08):

And more important to me and more important I think to Windstream is how we react to that maintaining a level of agility, and maybe it's even fair to say plasticity in order to react to the ever evolving landscape. I think it's the more important sort of approach and strategy than having and maintaining a crystal ball and placing bid bets on what's going to be next. In terms of big innovation, obviously Gene AI has represented just a giant stair step for all of us. I think the exercise in front of us, in front of so many is really that will continue. I'm sure as we move from a thousand order a thousand transformers into tens of thousands of G PT transformers, then new things will emerge and Sentt and all these kind of crazy stuff will continue to dominate the technology conversations. But for us, it's really more about integrating all that into our business systems and processes and people, and in a word, the focus for ai, for us and for arguably all businesses at this point, if you're not a hyperscaler, it's one word, it's efficiency. How do you take the power of gen AI and apply it into making your organizations more efficient? I think when people hear folks say something, things like that, the kind of guttural reaction is, oh my gosh, I was going to replace my job.

(32:41):

AL'S going to come do all the things for me. And maybe for some functions that's true, I guess. But if you're working in a call center, maybe there's a concern in the near term where that's concern. But I think for most of the knowledge workers today, and this isn't my observation or certainly not my quote, but it's one that resonates for me, but the risk isn't that AI is going to replace our job so much As someone who's using and knows how to use AI well may replace your job. So we make sure that we all understand and are adopting and adapting to the environment. That's the critical piece. The other piece of our focus is not only enabling our businesses processes and systems for ai, but embedding them within our products, virtual agents to help guide administrators and users of how to consume the services and troubleshoot them and interact with our products and services in a natural way rather than looking through manuals to figure out how to set a call forward, as I described earlier. So that's a real obvious area of opportunity that we see and are really trying to make quick strides for. Our recent Office Suite product we just announced and launched a gen AI based virtual agent to help along those lines. Exactly. So you'll see us continue to do that across the board. And maybe one last quick comment I'd make in the ai, and I could probably talk, we could probably do another of the podcast on the ai.

Jessica Denson (34:13):

We probably could. Yeah, actually I should probably arrange an AI podcast that I bring bunch of experts together. That actually is a great idea. I love

Art Nichols (34:24):

You get Rick swell on that would be. But the other piece that tends to go a little bit beneath the scenes in the enterprise world, there's this belief or sort of the emotion that gene AI can drive all this efficiency and drive all this goodness in a kind of an easy button sort approach. But the thing to really focus on or be aware of, AI trained on something, it's trained on the data. And these things like Chap, GPT and Claude and Gronk and all these others that we use as consumers, those are trained on the internet as a large populace, but enterprises typically are fine tuning what's called fine tuning on their own data sets because they want to get information from whatever in their particular area, whether that's medical records or transactions with their customers or whatever the case may be. And so what we've seen, and I've seen a huge press push towards this is not all that data is perfect.

(35:33):

The integrity of a lot of those data sets, even if it is really strong, is not always normalized to match up with really disparate sets of data. We've spent a lot of time, the telco industry as an example, is continual m and a. When you do m and a mergers and acquisitions and bring companies together, what you're quickly going to realize is they've modeled their data differently and normalizing that and exposing it for sort of a gen AI agent is a non-trivial task. And if you don't normalize it, which you end up with potentially some hallucinations and things that aren't accurate appropriate, you may make the wrong business decision because the AI kind of made it up where it wasn't obvious. And so just this notion that having gone through so much emphasis for the last decade on digital transformation, we see an increased focus on a data transformation in order to really unlock the power of gen AI across a lot of business segments.

Jessica Denson (36:34):

Okay. Well, that's well said. Data transformation versus digital transformation. Any final takeaways from today? What would you like the audience to remember from our conversation about Windstream?

Art Nichols (36:47):

Oh yeah. Well, number one, I should have mentioned upfront that the Clemson Tigers are the best football program in college football. I

Jessica Denson (36:55):

Think that's what, oh, I'm an OU fan, so

Art Nichols (37:00):

I want everybody understand. No, seriously, that's great for a wide range of businesses and verticals, from retail to healthcare, and the potential cost of disruptions from natural disasters is far too high to ignore and irrespective of the size of the organization and in large part, the geography of the organization, I would say I would just encourage, whether they work with Windstream or others, I would encourage folks out there to really pay attention and to prepare to the earlier theme we talked about really well, that average impact on large enterprises being so high, that's not to be pushed aside or underestimated. We're always available to help. This is what we do on a daily basis. This is what we enjoy doing, helping businesses kind of strategically plan and be prepared for the unknown. So I really do feel strongly about that. Well,

Jessica Denson (37:59):

Art, it's been nice talking to you. Definitely reach out if you guys have some new things you're up to. I'd love to talk to you again in the future and follow up.

Art Nichols (38:08):

Thanks, Jessica. Been a lot of fun.

Jessica Denson (38:10):

Thanks. Thank you. Again. My guest today has been Art Nichols, the Chief Technology Officer at Windstream Enterprise. I'll include a link to the company and the description of this podcast. I'm Jessica Sen. Thanks for listening to Connected Nation. If you like our show and want to know more about us, head to connected nation.org or look for the latest episodes on iTunes, iHeartRadio, Google Podcast, Pandora, or Spotify.