Stian Øvrevåge

I'm a technical, yet business aware, person that loves to see technology work with the purpose of helping users and organizations to achieve their goals.

Have a look at my blog, stian.tech, to see a few examples of how I think and work.

I've spent both my personal and professional time on technology for the past 15 years. In the beginning my main interest was technical security and I was lucky to work within naval communications systems and later as a security analyst in Secode. I understood that effective security is as much about routines, threat assessment, strategy and risk analysis as it did about the dream of impenetrable technical security.

I then moved back to my home region Vestlandet and worked as a consultant in network and security in ErgoGroup (now Tieto Evry) for 2-3 years. The work was not that challenging and it was sometimes frustrating to see how problems were solved in a local optimum often in conflict with the organization's overall strategy and goals.

In 2010, at the age of 24, I jumped off the corporate train and started my own consultancy company. At my first client, Kvinnherad Breiband (a regional ISP), I had the responsibility of networks, servers and support systems. It had been a few years since there had been done any significant changes and upgrades causing uptime and stability to suffer. During my 8 years there I worked relentlessly to improve systems and troubleshoot problems that might arise 24/7. Old systems were taken out piece by piece. Redundancy was improved and single-points-of-failure were identified and removed. Automation and monitoring was a key strategy to allow for both a doubling of customer count, introduce new services and improve customer satisfaction, without increasing headcount in the organization. Cooperation with leadership and the entire organization was not always easy, but critical, to ensure the right prioritizations and trade-offs between technology and economy and short-term vs long-term. After 5 years of weekly visits on-site I wanted to spend less time traveling and during 2015-2017 I spent 3 days weekly on operations and onboarding of two new resources that were going to carry the torch going forward.

In 2016 I got a request about monitoring so I started setting up a small monitoring service in the cloud based on my own experience built on the best available open-source systems. The existing managed monitoring solutions were easy to start using but had a pricing structure that made it prohibitively expensive to monitor for example hundreds of servers at a sufficient interval. Further development stopped in 2017 because of new opportunities but the existing customers still use the platform.

In spring 2018 I was given the opportunity to join a very high skilled group of people in starting a product and consultancy company, K30, based in Stavanger. Being a co-founder, board member and partner allows me to shape culture and strategy of our company yet I still have the support I need to continue focusing on technical challenges and pursuing my goal of being a thought leader in the next era of computing and technology.