Speaker Spotlight: StrategITcom's Carrie Goetz Details Chaos Engineering, STEM Education, and Inclusion

Over 40 years, Carrie Goetz has done "literally everything in this industry," as she says. Next on the list: the recent recipient of AFCOM's Lifetime Achievement Award will be the keynote speaker for our Network Resilience Boot Camp. The event will take place on Thursday, June 29, co-presented by Network Computing and Data Center Knowledge.

Carrie is the Principal and CTO at StrategITcom as well as a fractional CTO to several companies. She has 40 years of global digital infrastructure industry experience, while also serving as an international keynote speaker. With over 250 credits in publications, Carrie also thrives as an Amazon best-selling author. She will be the keynote speaker for our opening session titled "Failure Simulations: Finding the Chaos Demon Lurking in Your System." She provided us with some clarity in a video interview.

"So, I have literally done everything you can do in this industry; I've written code, I started network divisions at a couple of consulting firms when nobody knew what networking was. I've run data centers, I've been a consultant for a lot of years, I've worked for a manufacturer. So, all things related to data center design, infrastructure design, and IT departments and procurement. So, that's been the bulk of my career, and then I decided this year to pay it forward."

Before Carrie could pay it forward, she was actually paid back by AFCOM's presentation during Data Center World 2023 by being awarded the inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award last month.

"I was pretty blown away, to start with. Completely honored and kind of gobsmacked. But to me, it was just such a kindness paid forward that, you know, it totally choked me up, and the part that was really great about it was the young woman that gave me the award is one of my mentees."

When considering her upcoming keynote covering failure simulations and resiliency, we wanted to know more about why chaos engineering is more efficient than the standard security penetration test. "If somebody has no idea what your program does, they're going to poke around in different places and see if different error messages pop up, right? That's part of what chaos does, it allows you to introduce that, but in a controlled format so that chaos doesn't end up in your resume being on the street, but rather it ends up being someplace where you know you have some control. You can predict and gear up for some emergencies. Because people don't really think along the lines of every little thing that can go bad; we think of the things that can go bad that we've been exposed to."

Register for the Network Resilience Boot Camp today.