About

Cory Zaner is a cybersecurity leader and veteran. His day job is helping security teams line up roadmaps and architecture across governance, security operations, cloud and operational technology. Outside work, he builds things: a home lab, a small team of AI assistants that help run his projects, and the automations that hold it all together.

This blog is where those builds turn into step-by-step guides. Every post comes from something he actually set up and tested, and shows the secured end state, with no real hostnames, addresses or secrets.

Topics#

• Security: identity, access, monitoring and hardening.
• Infrastructure: networks, servers, cloud and automation.
• AI how-tos: putting AI to work on real security and IT tasks.
• Home Lab: projects from the lab.

Background#

• U.S. Air Force veteran, 2002 to 2008.
• Hands-on with Microsoft 365, Entra ID and Defender.
• Led a cloud security architecture team.
• CISSP and CISM certified.

What you’ll find here#

• Configs, commands and error messages, with real identifiers replaced by placeholders.
• The secured end state, with the steps to get there.
• Links to official docs (Microsoft Learn, Ansible docs, vendor KBs) for every claim I didn’t measure myself.

What you won’t find#

• Anything about my employer, clients or any real environment.
• Made-up numbers or scare stats.
• Sales pitches.

Get in touch#

Find me on LinkedIn, or use the contact form: Contact me.