Latest news with #Strata
Business Insider
2 days ago
- Business
- Business Insider
I landed my dream job without even applying for it. Here's how I did it and my advice for other job seekers.
Alicia Strata, 38, is a marketing creator and integrator at Alabama World Travel, a luxury travel agency based in Montgomery, Alabama. In July, Business Insider wrote about how Strata and seven other Americans who graduated in the Great Recession navigated early career challenges — and what Gen Z college grads can learn from them. The following has been edited for length and clarity. I've tried to launch my career during a hiring slowdown twice — first out of college, and again last year after 10 years at home raising my children. The second time was worse — it took me over a year to get hired. But my journey ended with me landing my dream job. Joining Teach for America taught me resilience I graduated from Columbia College Chicago in May 2010, when the Great Recession had pushed the unemployment rate to nearly 10%. I had a marketing communications degree and hoped to land a role at an advertising agency. But the job market was tough, so I decided to pivot. Teaching was completely out of my area of study, but I was looking for something that felt both purposeful and possible in a shrinking job market. Teach for America offered that: a paycheck, a mission, and structure during chaos. The summer after graduation, I moved to South Dakota to begin my placement as a 4th-grade teacher. My placement was on a Native American reservation inSouth Dakota, where the closest Walmart was two hours away. Some of the kids were dealing with serious challenges at home, and it was hard to make them care about learning their multiplication tables. I had to get creative and develop real resilience. I also learned to get over my ego. If you want to find out what your insecurities are, go into a classroom of middle schoolers. Although TFA didn't directly further my marketing career, it helped me develop personally and as a leader. It gave me life experience and helped me build the resilience and adaptability I needed in future job searches. We want to hear from job seekers and people who recently landed a job. If you're open to sharing your story, please fill out one or more of the linked Google Forms. I became a stay-at-home mom when my kids were born After finishing the program in 2012, I spent a year working at an international school in South Korea, where my then-boyfriend lived. We got engaged and moved to Chicago, and I found a full-time graphic design job. But after getting married in 2013, I unexpectedly got pregnant right away. I worked through the pregnancy but left my job and became a stay-at-home mom after my child was born. I now have three kids, between the ages of six and 10. From 2015 to 2020, I did some remote, part-time marketing work for a digital advertising company, but it was very minimal — and definitely not something that looked exciting on a résumé. The gig ended in early 2020, shortly before the pandemic-induced recession, after the company was sold abruptly. I had just had my third kid and was struggling to juggle everything, so I felt it was, in some ways, good timing. Taking a part-time seasonal job and then being let go was a hit to my ego In 2021, we moved to Montgomery, Alabama, and about a year later, I found myself in a kind of sink-or-swim moment when my marriage ended. Overnight, I was navigating single parenthood, a sparse résumé, and the urgent need to rebuild my career from the ground up. At the beginning of my renewed job search, I was hopeful. I got the kids to school, started on all the online job boards, and didn't wrap up until eight hours later when it was time to pick up the kids. However, the results were extremely discouraging. I was applying constantly, managing full-time parenting, and facing rejection after rejection. In 2023, I landed a part-time seasonal job at Hobby Lobby. That hurt my ego, but I needed to get some momentum, particularly because the job market was starting to take a turn for the worse. There were plans for me to stay on after the season ended, but in early 2024, they ended up letting me go. The idea that I couldn't even keep a part-time retail job was hard to stomach, but I tried to stay resilient, pick myself back up, and start applying again. I found my dream job when I wasn't looking for it In February 2024, I applied for a job as an administrative assistant at an accounting firm, even though I couldn't be less interested in accounting. I didn't get the job, but the third-party recruiter the company worked with said there was a part-time office support job at a luxury travel agency that he thought might be a good fit for me. I was skeptical, but agreed to the interview. The morning of the interview, I sent a group text to some of my close friends, saying, "I'll let you know how the interview goes. Don't want it, so the odds are in my favor of getting it" — just being tongue-in-cheek. But when I walked into the office, it had a really good vibe. Everybody was quietly plugging away at their desks, and everyone I met was just so warm. The interviewer started by asking me basic questions, but they kept asking about marketing, which I found a little confusing since I was interviewing for the office support role. Halfway through the interview, they slid a piece of paper across the table. It was a job description for a marketing creator and integrator role — exactly the kind of job I'd hoped to find since graduating from college, but hadn't been able to secure. I literally looked around and thought, Is somebody filming this right now? Am I being pranked? It turned out, they'd been looking for a marketing person and felt I sounded like a great fit. I burst out laughing because I couldn't believe it. It was amazing to walk into the interview not even wanting the role, and walk out thinking it could be my dream career. My advice for others struggling with the job search process I started working at the company in March 2024. My initial instincts about the company have proven correct — my co-workers have become like a second family, and the working environment is great. Later on, I happened to meet the woman who had gotten the admin assistant job I didn't get at the accounting firm. She was another single mom with four boys who had been on the verge of losing her home when she landed the job. You don't often get to see what's on the other side of a job rejection; that full-circle moment has really stuck with me. My biggest advice for people struggling to find work — whether you're a recent college graduate or have been in the workforce for decades — is to be open to different opportunities and stay engaged in the process. If you're going to do something, do it wholeheartedly. While I wasn't interested in the job I thought I was interviewing for, I gave myself fully to the interview. Even if it wasn't the right role, something better at the company could've opened up later. If you don't have your foot in the door anywhere, you can't move up from anywhere.
Arab News
6 days ago
- Science
- Arab News
What We Are Reading Today: Strata
Author: Laura Poppick Laura Poppick's 'Strata' decodes the epic stories of our planet's 4.54-billion-year history that are written in strata — ages-old remnants of ancient seafloors, desert dunes, and riverbeds striping landscapes around the world. Strata allows us to observe how the planet has responded to past periods of environmental upheaval, and shows how Earth's ancient narratives could hold lessons for our present and future.
Business Wire
30-07-2025
- Business
- Business Wire
Strata Identity Named a Sample Vendor in Gartner® 'Reduce IAM Technical Debt' Report
BOULDER, Colo.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Strata Identity, the Identity Orchestration company, today announced it has been named a Sample Vendor in the 2025 Gartner report titled 'Reduce IAM Technical Debt' by Nat Krishnan and Erik Wahlstrom. We believe being mentioned as a Sample Vendor in this Gartner report demonstrates the unique value we provide for customers looking to rationalize their identity stack and unify SSO without refactoring hundreds, sometimes thousands of applications. As hybrid and multicloud environments become the norm, legacy identity systems and siloed architectures have created technical debt and operational burdens. Strata's Maverics platform enables organizations to unify IAM silos through identity orchestration and unified single sign-on (SSO), allowing enterprises to support the coexistence of multiple identity providers (IDPs) without rewriting legacy applications or disrupting business. Rationalizing IAM Without Rewriting Applications Maverics decouples identity from applications, making it possible to layer in modern protocols like SAML, OpenID Connect, and FIDO2—even in environments still running legacy WAM, LDAP, or homegrown authentication mechanisms. This enables centralized policy enforcement, federated session management, and simultaneous support for multiple IDPs to ensure IAM resilience. 'We believe being mentioned as a Sample Vendor in this Gartner report demonstrates the unique value we provide for customers looking to rationalize their identity stack and unify SSO without refactoring hundreds, sometimes thousands of applications,' said Eric Olden, CEO of Strata Identity. 'IAM technical debt has quietly become one of the biggest roadblocks to cloud transformation. Strata's Maverics platform helps enterprises modernize at their own pace, unify siloed systems, and secure access without disrupting legacy infrastructure.' Reducing IAM Technical Debt with Orchestration The Gartner report cites five top contributors to technical debt: custom and siloed IAM tools, nonstandard and legacy enterprise applications, incomplete discovery process, poor IAM hygiene, and complex and incomplete enrollment of applications and services. As the report explains, 'IAM teams must break down the applications and services into categories that are based on their type and their existing support for IAM controls. They must collaborate with application owners to pick the appropriate IAM modernization strategies and collaborate with them on a phased modernization approach. The applications must then be prioritized based on the business impact as identified by the stakeholders. Leverage orchestration, proxies and connectors where needed as an alternative to replacing and rebuilding existing legacy applications. Wider adoption of identity standards and protocols for all integrations will prevent further accumulation of technical debt going forward.' Strata helps organizations operationalize these recommendations through its identity orchestration layer that bridges incompatible identity systems, vendors, and environments—turning modernization into an iterative, low-risk process. By abstracting identity logic from individual applications, Maverics enables seamless policy enforcement, failover, and user authentication across hybrid and multicloud environments without rewriting apps or disrupting user experiences. Gartner Attribution and Disclaimer Gartner, 'Reduce IAM Technical Debt,' by Nat Krishnan and Erik Wahlstrom, 23 June 2025. Gartner is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product, or service depicted in its research publications and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. About Strata Identity Strata Identity enables organizations to orchestrate and modernize identity without disrupting existing infrastructure while maintaining a frictionless user experience. By decoupling identity from applications, Strata's Maverics platform unifies SSO, can rationalize redundant IDPs, and ensures continuous access during outages via IDP failover. It enables organizations to extend zero-trust controls across human, machine, and autonomous AI identities. Led by CEO Eric Olden—co-author of the SAML standard—Strata also created the Identity Query Language (IDQL) and open-source Hexa project to help standardize multi-cloud identity management. Learn more at and follow us on LinkedIn and YouTube.
ABC News
10-06-2025
- Business
- ABC News
Calls to boost renewables for Sydney
Samantha Donovan: It's estimated about a third of Australian households have solar panels on their roofs, but fly over a major population centre and you'll see plenty of empty roof space that could be generating power. Now there's a push for the nation's biggest city to exploit that resource. A new report by the think tank the Committee for Sydney has found 75% of the city's energy needs could be generated by putting solar panels on commercial roof space, and that power could help bring down prices for renters and those who live in dwellings where solar systems can't be installed. Isabel Moussalli has more. Isabel Moussalli: Sydney resident Noah Fowler used to work for a solar company, but renting an apartment means rooftop solar is out of reach for him. So you can imagine the frustration with getting high electricity bills. Noah Fowler: I know it's a no-brainer, but when it comes to landlords or it comes to Strata, there's just so many different hurdles that pop up. Also, lack of real estate doesn't make it a simple solution. So, yeah, it's kind of a trickier one when you're coming from an industry where you're telling people to do it, but coming home and not being able to have it, I'm just like, ugh. Isabel Moussalli: Boosting that access is the goal of a new report by think tank Committee for Sydney, which was developed with local energy distributors and consultants. Sam Kernaghan: Sydney has massive renewable energy potential that's virtually untapped. Most importantly, there's a real disconnect in terms of equity of access to that renewable energy opportunity. Isabel Moussalli: That's report author Sam Kernaghan. Sam Kernaghan: A renewable energy zone is a coordinated way of delivering new generation and transmission in regional New South Wales and across the eastern seaboard. And we took that same idea, we took that inspiration to apply to metropolitan Sydney. We think there's a real opportunity for Sydney to generate much, much more energy than it is today, and the distribution network is already in place here in Sydney. So there's an opportunity to take advantage of existing infrastructure. Isabel Moussalli: He explains about 30% of Sydney-siders have rooftop solar. With state and federal incentives, that number is growing. But the report found if every residential and industrial rooftop had solar panels, that would meet 75% of Sydney's annual energy needs. Sam Kernaghan: So that's seven times what Sydney's currently generating. We may not get there in full. 100% coverage is definitely a stretch. But this finding shows what's possible. Isabel Moussalli: It's made a range of recommendations, including improving access to community batteries and trialling new models for energy generation and storage. Sam Kernaghan: We looked at incentives, particularly for industrial landlords, to oversize their solar on rooftops because currently they only install about 10% to 20%. So things like risk underwriting mechanisms, again, to change their behaviour, we ask them to invest some of their own capital. But to get this going, we also need something as simple as an urban renewable energy roundtable, a way of bringing together all the key stakeholders. Isabel Moussalli: Tania Urmee is a professor in the School of Engineering and Energy at Murdoch University. She commends the report's focus on energy equity, like improving access for rentals, apartments and low-income households. But she says reaching this goal will require more infrastructure and boosting the workforce. Tania Urmee: I think there's a lot for our government to do, that policy is needed. And we could be the powerhouse in the world for renewable energy and we should take those opportunities as soon as we can. Samantha Donovan: Professor Tania Urmee from Murdoch Uni. That report from Isabel Moussalli.
Business Wire
29-05-2025
- Business
- Business Wire
Strata Identity Launches ‘The Identity Heroes' to Spotlight Real-World IAM Journeys
BOULDER, Colo.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Strata Identity, the Identity Orchestration company, today announced the launch of The Identity Heroes, a new video podcast (videocast) series that gives a voice to the people behind some of today's most challenging and impactful identity and access management (IAM) projects. Featuring candid, informal conversations, each episode of The Identity Heroes explores real-world stories, technical lessons, and personal reflections with CISOs, architects, and identity experts. Each 40-minute episode features a relaxed, unscripted conversation focused on each Identity Heroes' professional journey, career-defining projects, challenges and learnings, and their perspective on the road ahead. Share Hosted by Strata's identity experts—including Field CTO Aldo Pietropaolo, VP of Product and Standards Gerry Gebel, and Senior Director of Product Marketing Mark Callahan— The Identity Heroes delves into real-world experiences of some of the industry's leading practitioners and pioneers. The series aims to educate and inspire IAM professionals with actionable insights and perspectives on topics such as modernization, Zero Trust, policy, and resilience. 'No one goes to school for identity, which is why we created The Identity Heroes —to celebrate the real people solving tough problems behind the scenes,' said Aldo Pietropaolo, Field CTO of Strata Identity. 'This videocast isn't about promoting products—it's about surfacing the lessons, breakthroughs, and moments of truth that can help others in the IAM community grow their careers and navigate complex challenges.' Each 40-minute episode features a relaxed, unscripted conversation focused on each Identity Heroes' professional journey, career-defining projects, challenges and learnings, and their perspective on the road ahead. The first three episodes of Identity Heroes featuring Eve Maler, President and Founder of Venn Factory, Sebastian Rohr, CTO of GmbH and Sulohita Vaddadi, CISO of GE Corporate, are now live and available on YouTube, Spotify, and the Strata Identity website, with new episodes released every month. Watch now: About Strata Identity Strata Identity enables organizations to modernize identity providers without disrupting existing infrastructure while maintaining a frictionless user experience. By decoupling identity from applications, Strata's Maverics platform unifies SSO, supports multiple IDPs simultaneously, and ensures continuous access during outages via IDP failover. Led by CEO Eric Olden—co-author of the SAML standard— Strata also created the Identity Query Language (IDQL) and open-source Hexa project to help standardize multi-cloud identity management. Learn more at and follow us on LinkedIn and YouTube.
