Let's meet Datacenter & Network Security Team!
Today we interview Thomas Schenk, Datacenter Network & Security Team Lead.
Q: Thomas, your team just recently got team members in Riga, only few months back. Tell us, what does your team do and what is cool about it?
A: We are designing, building, and operating networks to get our customer services connected and keep them secure. That includes modern next-generation firewalls in our data centers as well as on-premise or the public cloud. We provide content delivery via secure proxies and enable our customers to work from home via VPN or SD-WAN. We are the first team onboarding new customers and are involved in every new service. We always have to provide up-to-date performance and security, so we get the newest technology to work with and are constantly in touch with our technology partners.
Q: What first comes to your mind when you think of your team/team members in Riga?
A: We are just starting to grow our team in Riga and we are looking forward to finding more team members in Latvia. When I was working with our Latvian colleagues from our team or others, they were highly skilled, competent, and most important always willing to help in favor of our customers.
Q: How do you ensure that German and Latvian colleagues work as one team?
A: It is still a learning process for the team as we just started 3 months ago. We are doing regular team meetings in English now and use collaboration software such as MS Teams to work together in the team. This was already established since covid and now we switched to English. We invite our Riga Team members to Hamburg at least once a year to get the team knows each other even better.
Q: How do you envision your future work with the Riga team? Here could be anything, short-term, long-term plans, new areas.
A: We are looking for more team members in Riga and would like to establish a hybrid team working together, no matter where you are. In maybe the long term we will discuss specialization in technology our tasks, but as we are still in an early phase, for now, we would like to build up at least two or three more team members in Latvia.
Q: What would you like to wish to the q.beyond Riga employees and future employees?
A: Have fun with all the technology and situations a service provider job brings you and learn a lot. You will most likely never have the opportunity to work in such a highly dynamic and interesting environment in a normal internal IT job with an enterprise employee.