Latest / Identity at the Center / #247 - Big Areas of Identity to Solve with Matt Caulfield of Cisco
Transcript
- 0:05This is identity at the center. If it has anything to do with
- 0:10IAM, this is the go to podcast now your hosts Jim McDonald and
- 0:17Jeff Stedman. Welcome to the Identity at the
- 0:23Center podcast. I'm Jeff and that's Jim.
- 0:25Hey, Jim. Hey, Jeff.
- 0:27How are you? Oh, not so bad.
- 0:28Yourself doing great. I think today's going to be a
- 0:31big day for banter because, you know, I always usually have one
- 0:36idea that I want to go off on, but today I've decided that
- 0:40they're actually 4 things I wanted to go off on or at least
- 0:43mention. So the first thing is our
- 0:46YouTube channel. You know, props to you because
- 0:50you've used technology to get all of our past episodes
- 0:54uploaded onto YouTube and now YouTube must realize that I'm a
- 0:58fan of the show. I'm subscribed to the show and
- 1:01it's letting me know about all these great past episodes that
- 1:03are out there on YouTube. So, you know, for us, I think
- 1:08you know, props to you. But also I would say to all of
- 1:11our, you know, regular listeners, please go out there
- 1:14and subscribe to our YouTube so more people can find it.
- 1:19And I think YouTube does really good job of like pushing content
- 1:23at people, right. I mean, that's kind of what
- 1:25Google's good at, is knowing your.
- 1:27Preferences, yeah, you're at, you're in the algorithm
- 1:30somewhere, somewhere you you must watch a lot of identity
- 1:34stuff as an identity nerd like I am.
- 1:36But yeah, it's been the way it works is basically three per
- 1:40day. So we're not like killing feeds
- 1:42and stuff like that. It'll catch up and then it'll
- 1:44become, you know, one a week or so based on how or often.
- 1:48However, often we record an episode, but that's, that's it.
- 1:52Yeah, I'd like to put the word out there also for you know
- 1:55folks who are in the industry maybe on the marketing side like
- 2:00use YouTube, get content out there.
- 2:03I, you know, I worked with, I probably shouldn't name the
- 2:08vendor, but it let's just call it a legacy.
- 2:10I am vendor. I worked pretty heavily with
- 2:12that with their technology, like 10 years ago.
- 2:15And I was meeting with a client earlier this week talking about
- 2:18that technology. I'm like, hey, let me brush up
- 2:20and go out there to the YouTube channel and all the videos were
- 2:23like uploaded 10 years ago. I'm like, these are the ones
- 2:26that was pushing me. I was like, man, that's really,
- 2:29really bad. So, yeah, yeah, make that
- 2:33investment, folks. Yeah, it's some content is
- 2:37timeless and some is not. It's probably the best way to
- 2:40say it, yeah. Demos are demos are not
- 2:43timeless. So topic #2, Thanksgiving is,
- 2:49you know, right upon us. It's a great time to get a
- 2:51break, especially from the road. I mean, it's probably going to
- 2:54be the first week you haven't traveled in months, maybe the
- 2:57only week you don't travel until, you know Christmas time,
- 3:01right? Yeah, let's see.
- 3:03I'm recording right now from a hotel room in Minneapolis area,
- 3:07and the Wi-Fi sucks, so I'm hopeful that this comes through.
- 3:12OK, so far so good. We'll see how it lasts, but.
- 3:16Yeah, I think this is my either 12th or 13th week.
- 3:18I think on the road going somewhere, got a break next week
- 3:22for Thanksgiving. So today is November 14th as
- 3:25we're recording this. And then let's see.
- 3:27And then, yeah, I'm going to New York City and for December 1st
- 3:33event that we're going to talk about here in a second, yeah,
- 3:36Yeah. So that's going to be something
- 3:38that's also on my list. But #3.
- 3:42So a client mentioned to me today like, hey, it found that
- 3:47you do a podcast and I've been listening to podcasts and that's
- 3:51awesome to hear. Of course, you know, new people
- 3:54are finding the podcast all the time.
- 3:56And that's why we spend such a a large amount of our effort
- 4:00focused on, you know, getting the word out there or making
- 4:03sure that we show up in all the algorithms and because there's
- 4:08new people looking for this type of content all the time.
- 4:10So please go out there, you know, and like I don't want to
- 4:15like shill for, you know, likes and subscribes and all that.
- 4:19But that's unfortunately. Unfortunately, that's how it
- 4:23works. Hit that button, Smash that like
- 4:25button. Yeah, terrible.
- 4:28But also I talked to this client today and I mentioned, you know,
- 4:33we're going to have Matt on the show.
- 4:34We're recording with him later today and he's one of those big
- 4:38brains in the industry and because this person is not like,
- 4:42you know, necessarily directly in our industry, he he didn't
- 4:49know Matt. Matt does a great job of, you
- 4:52know, getting his name out there.
- 4:53But I said look, you know, he's going to be a fantastic guest.
- 4:56Make sure you listen to this episode.
- 4:59So these, this episode is going to be one of those really good
- 5:03ones. And then the last thing I wanted
- 5:05to bring up was just, you know, one of the things I've got a lot
- 5:10of gratitude in my mind for, you know, the company we work for,
- 5:14RSM sending us to all the conferences over the past year.
- 5:18Because I realized like I'll be talking to clients and bringing
- 5:22up things from a conference perspective and like what's hot
- 5:25and like what You know, really when you go to these
- 5:28conferences, you're being exposed to the cutting edge and
- 5:31you're being exposed to what's happening in the industry,
- 5:34what's happening next. And when you talk about those
- 5:37things and folks who aren't going aren't on the IEM
- 5:40conference circuit, they're not aware of those things sometimes.
- 5:43So you know, it's it's a major benefit to be able to go to
- 5:49those conferences and play a part and hear those things more
- 5:52than one time a year because that's really where our
- 5:56industry's heading. Yeah, I mean, it's a good, it's
- 5:59a good time to, you know, learn more what the industry's doing,
- 6:01I think. You know, I spent the 1st 12
- 6:04years of my career in Identity, you know, working for two
- 6:06companies. And you'll really learn how
- 6:09Identity works at the company that you're at.
- 6:11And going to conference is a great way to see how other
- 6:13people are doing it and try to get those ideas and, you know,
- 6:15stay current. I think that's the challenge
- 6:17that most organizations have, is staying even just current with
- 6:21where things are at. You know, there's a lot of
- 6:24legacy thinking still out there. I still see a lot of, oh, we
- 6:27change our passwords every 90 days.
- 6:29OK, well. That was cool.
- 6:31Like four years ago. Hasn't been a standard or even
- 6:35recommended by like NIST for the last like three or four years.
- 6:38I think it is so, but there's still a lot of people just
- 6:40haven't gotten that word out there.
- 6:41So definitely a good way to like learn stuff.
- 6:43And I think that's a good segue into where I'm going to be on
- 6:46December 1st. Is it OK if I bring that up?
- 6:50Yeah, go for it, man. I'm I'm through my list now.
- 6:52I Those are my my random topics of the day.
- 6:56All right. So I'm going to be in New York
- 6:59City on December 1st. Identiverse is hosting regional
- 7:03events December in New York and Chicago.
- 7:05If you're not familiar with Identiverse, it's one of the
- 7:07best identity conferences of the year.
- 7:09And what they've started to do is the smaller kind of regional
- 7:11events. So hopefully if you're in New
- 7:13York, you'll see me, I don't know, walking around the
- 7:18whatever, whatever the venue is. I have not been one of these
- 7:20before. So I'm interested to see how it
- 7:21kind of turns out. But it'll be Friday, December
- 7:241st in New York. And then there's another one in
- 7:26Chicago that I will not be at. So you can like just join
- 7:29yourselves, I guess, on Tuesday, December 5th.
- 7:33So they have kind of things coming back up right around the
- 7:35time I started looking at the speaker's list.
- 7:38So like, Andy Hindle's going to be there.
- 7:39Who's been on the show a couple times.
- 7:41They got some other cool folks who are going to be there.
- 7:42So it seems like kind of a cool little thing.
- 7:44And the best part is that it's actually free.
- 7:46So it's a free conference. It's in New York City.
- 7:50It's in Chicago. Space is pretty limited though,
- 7:52so you want to make sure you get registered.
- 7:54And we of course have a link that we can share with folks.
- 7:56It's a Bitly link, which I'll be honest, I'm not a fan of because
- 7:59you never know what's behind the Bitly link.
- 8:02But I don't know if this, you know, I assure you there's
- 8:05nothing nefarious back there. But yeah, I should take my word
- 8:07for it, but it's a bit dot LY slash ID VR23-ID A/C.
- 8:14I know it just rolls right off the tongue, so I'll have a link
- 8:17in our show notes so people can kind of check that out.
- 8:20It includes breakfast, so score there.
- 8:22And for people who are scrambling at the last minute
- 8:24for any like CPE credits, you actually get 3 credits for
- 8:28attending. So pretty pretty cool option
- 8:31there for people who are interested.
- 8:33I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to New York, but I'm
- 8:35going to try to get out there for the first.
- 8:37The same goes. There's no such thing as a free
- 8:39lunch, but apparently there is no such thing as a free
- 8:43breakfast. You know, I think it makes more
- 8:45sense for local people because I started book hotels today and Oh
- 8:49my gosh, they are crazy right now.
- 8:52So fortunately I have a couple of client meetings and things
- 8:56like that to kind of tie it all together.
- 8:59But the money that you save on your registration maybe goes
- 9:03towards, I don't know, cab, train, air, hotel fare, whatever
- 9:08it may be. Yeah.
- 9:10I think there's there's two benefits.
- 9:12One is the benefit you get yourself, but also if you're in
- 9:15the area like support this kind of thing, you know, I I think
- 9:21it's great that identivers is reaching out and starting to do
- 9:24regional events and I hope there are more of them in the future.
- 9:29If we're if this happens and they get a very poor turn out,
- 9:33they're less likely to do it again in the future.
- 9:36And I think that would be a shame.
- 9:39Oh yeah, for sure. I think like I like Identiverse.
- 9:41I think it's one of my favorite. I think it's the best or one of
- 9:44the best identity conferences in the US at least.
- 9:47And I'm not aware of them doing this in the past.
- 9:50And we kind of find out found out about this kind of late in
- 9:52the game. You know we're only a couple
- 9:53weeks really since you know till the first one.
- 9:55So I I don't know if it was primitive for because I hadn't
- 9:58heard of it until what, a couple days ago.
- 10:01I think when you know they reached out, you know, asking if
- 10:03we'd help get the word out, so. I'm curious to see what it'll,
- 10:07you know, what kind of environment it'll be and kind of
- 10:09who shows up and kind of things like that.
- 10:10But yeah, it'd be interesting to see how it goes.
- 10:13I'm sure it'll go well, like the the speaker list is great.
- 10:16The people who are presenting are all good speakers and
- 10:19usually have pretty good content.
- 10:20So I'm not concerned about the content.
- 10:22I think it's more right now just kind of awareness is probably
- 10:25the the struggle like anything, right.
- 10:27People are still discovering identity and this podcast and
- 10:30other things like that. OK.
- 10:33Why don't we turn to our guests, cuz you kind of teased them
- 10:35already. Let me introduce Matt Caulfield.
- 10:38He's the founder and CEO of Oort, which is now part of
- 10:40Cisco. Welcome to the show, Matt.
- 10:43Thank you, Jeff. Happy to be here.
- 10:44Thanks for having me. Yeah.
- 10:46Thank you so much for taking the time.
- 10:47And I feel like I've we've seen each other a couple conferences
- 10:50earlier this year and it's like hey, glad to go finally get this
- 10:54conversation going. One of the first, one of the
- 10:57first things we do when we have someone out for the first time
- 10:59is kind of talk about identity, backgrounds and.
- 11:01How people got into the space? How did you get into identity?
- 11:04Is it something that you chose or did it choose you?
- 11:08I've kind of fell backwards into identity.
- 11:11I'm a networking guy. That's my background networking,
- 11:14distributed systems, cloud, virtual networking.
- 11:17I I started ORT in order to solve this problem of
- 11:23distributed access and when we started talking to Chief
- 11:27Security officers about how they secure remote access.
- 11:30And actually accomplish zero trust.
- 11:33Everything kept pointing back to identity as the linchpin, as the
- 11:38foundation. And it turns out, like getting
- 11:41packets to the front door of an application or a resource is a
- 11:46lot easier than this big hairy problem, which is identity.
- 11:51And so, me as an entrepreneur and my Co founder Didi, we
- 11:56gravitate towards these big audacious problems that we need
- 11:59to solve. And I suddenly transformed over
- 12:03the course of the past few years from a networking person to the
- 12:06identity guy. How much does that networking
- 12:08background help you on the Identity side?
- 12:12I think it gives me an outside perspective.
- 12:15Like I see identity today as where networking was maybe 20 or
- 12:2130 years ago, where there's a realization that, oh shoot, if
- 12:25someone gets into your network, you're screwed as a business.
- 12:29And now we're having the same conversation all over again,
- 12:32except we don't have all the tools that networking has built
- 12:34up over the past 20 years or all of the discipline and regimented
- 12:40concepts of like network topology and network architects
- 12:43like we do in networking where there's like this plethora of
- 12:48training around. I think people now are realizing
- 12:51like, no, this is like a true discipline in in the enterprise
- 12:55world and we need to give it just as much, if not more
- 12:58attention. In terms of identity security,
- 13:00as we've put into network security, Amen.
- 13:04Yeah, preach on, brother. This is an easy crowd.
- 13:09Yeah, you're you're talking to a very friendly audience of this.
- 13:12I I imagine people listening to, you know, are in the space right
- 13:15there come from all walks of life.
- 13:17And I think I think the it's sometimes easy to draw the
- 13:21parallel like I can see the direct connection right between
- 13:23like networking and identity. But sometimes there's
- 13:26backgrounds we come across as like, oh, I didn't really kind
- 13:28of think about that. I mean, customer service, you
- 13:31know, waiting tables, bartending.
- 13:33I have a lot of background on that.
- 13:34You know, that a lot of that goes to program management and,
- 13:36you know, making sure we understand, you know,
- 13:38psychologies of people and things like that.
- 13:40So it's very cool to kind of hear those backgrounds.
- 13:42I'm very curious about the ORT name because the Ort Cloud is
- 13:46theorized to be a vast cloud of icy plantacism surrounding the
- 13:50sun. The concept of such a cloud was
- 13:52proposed in 1950 by the Dutch astronomer Jan Ort.
- 13:55And that's why this is named After that he proposed that the
- 14:00bodies in this cloud sort of replenish and keep constant the
- 14:04number of comets that are entering this inner solar system
- 14:08where they get eventually consumed and destroyed by the
- 14:11sun. So that's me being very clever
- 14:14and pulling things from Wikipedia.
- 14:15I'm not that smart normally. How did the name war come about?
- 14:18Is there anything any relation to there or is it something
- 14:20different? That level of detail, we have
- 14:23not got it. We've gotten all kinds of
- 14:27questions on the name, like how do you pronounce it?
- 14:29Is it an acronym for something? But no, you are 100% correct.
- 14:34We are named after the Ort Cloud, which is in turn named
- 14:38after Yan Van Ort, Dutch astronomer.
- 14:40It's pretty interesting guy reading about him, the things
- 14:43that he accomplished and discovered.
- 14:46But the reason why we're named ORT and after the Ort Cloud.
- 14:50Is because you can think of that or cloud of these kind of comets
- 14:53and asteroids and tiny planets orbiting the solar system.
- 14:57In the same way you think about all of the identities that orbit
- 15:01the typical enterprise organization.
- 15:03And the fact that if you knock any single one of those
- 15:07identities off course, you can send it hurdling on a collision
- 15:11course with the inner solar system, with your data and your
- 15:14applications, and you know the rest of your user base.
- 15:16Like that's where that analogy comes from.
- 15:20I wonder if Yan Hort thought that you know however many
- 15:24years, 50 years later there would be a company made after
- 15:27him around identity. I feel like this is a question
- 15:30we should always ask. You know any of the any of the
- 15:32technology vendors we have like I'm always fascinated to hear
- 15:34like where names come from, from the company perspective and you
- 15:38guys got acquired by Cisco. Can you describe your role at
- 15:41Cisco and how has your, I don't know, day-to-day changed with
- 15:44that transition? Yeah.
- 15:46So Cisco's an incredible acquirer.
- 15:49They they've done over 250 acquisitions.
- 15:53They know what they're doing and we're really happy with the
- 15:56outcome to be part of Cisco. My role has evolved from being
- 15:59founder and CEO of ORT, which is sort of an all-encompassing role
- 16:04where I need to worry about setting the vision and hiring
- 16:07the team. And not running out of cash and
- 16:10pursuing investors to being enabled to just get focused on
- 16:15where the market and identity is going.
- 16:18And the reason for Cisco acquiring Wart is the same
- 16:22reason that I fell into identity in the 1st place, which is that
- 16:26there's a realization that identity is new perimeter, but
- 16:30it's a horrible perimeter. It's it's not even chain link
- 16:33fence. I was talking to one of the
- 16:35executives at. And the security group here is
- 16:38like, yeah, identity as a perimeter today is like a a
- 16:41string of rose petals across a lawn.
- 16:43That's where we're at today in terms of defending the identity
- 16:47perimeter. And Cisco is a security company
- 16:50and as a networking company realizes that they have a pretty
- 16:53important role in the market to. Bring together an identity story
- 16:59that works with security and that works with networking.
- 17:02It's like that's the reason for the acquisition and my role
- 17:05within Cisco now as AVP of product within the security
- 17:09business group is to help realize that identity first
- 17:13security vision inside of Cisco and help bring that power to our
- 17:18customers. And Matt I started off in the
- 17:21call calling you one of the big brains and you know I not to not
- 17:27to make your head big or anything, but you know we're
- 17:29we're prepping for the show and obviously knowing that the
- 17:33background of art was it was a ITDR play if you will.
- 17:39And so my mind was tuned to let's talk about ITDR and and I
- 17:45do want to talk about ITDR because I still think it's one
- 17:48of the biggest advancements in the past five years in our
- 17:53space. But I want to talk about all
- 17:56these other subjects as well. But maybe we just do start with
- 18:00ITDR. Can you, before you kind of go
- 18:03deep, just stay real shallow and give us a, you know, what is
- 18:07ITDR and is it the same thing for everybody?
- 18:11Right. But what is ITDR?
- 18:13And then why do you think it's going to be like, what was your
- 18:17mentality that like this is what we're going to focus on because
- 18:21this is the game changer? Yes.
- 18:23So ITDR is near and dear to my heart as an acronym just because
- 18:28we built our business around it. That was the wedge that we used
- 18:31to become successful in the market.
- 18:34That's a lot of the reason why a company like Cisco invested in
- 18:37US and eventually acquired the company was because of all this
- 18:41momentum about this four letter acronym.
- 18:45ITDR to me is like one piece of the identity security puzzle.
- 18:50And so I usually start top down. So I appreciate you saying the
- 18:53big brain comment, I don't know if that's good or not.
- 18:56But I I think in terms of like top down first principles, we
- 19:00need to build an identity security pillar in enterprise
- 19:04security just as much as we have e-mail security, network
- 19:07security, device security, endpoint security, we need an
- 19:11identity security pillar and what is that pillar made-up of?
- 19:15There are three. Sub colors.
- 19:18I often say Legs of the Stool and identity security and I'll
- 19:23get to itdr. I'm not forgetting that the
- 19:25first leg, though, is just the identity attack, Surface
- 19:28discovery, the ability to see what are your identities?
- 19:32What do they have access to? What are they doing with that
- 19:34access? That visibility is the first leg
- 19:37of the stool. The second leg of the stool is
- 19:39this other new acronym that a few startups are talking about
- 19:42that nobody's quite claimed yet. Which is identity security,
- 19:46posture management, this idea that and there's everything has
- 19:51security posture management, You have data cloud, whatever.
- 19:54Now we have identity security, posture management.
- 19:56That's the second leg. And that's more of the proactive
- 19:59part of finding vulnerable identities and fixing them.
- 20:03And then the third like the stool which is sort of a catch
- 20:05all if you don't have great visibility and you don't have
- 20:09great kind of posture management for your identities at the very
- 20:12least. You can do identity threat
- 20:15detection and response ITDR, and the reason for that is even if
- 20:20things get through, you can catch them by looking for
- 20:22specific patterns. And so the reason why ITDR is
- 20:25popular is a few reasons. One is because UEBA got sort of
- 20:30a bad name for itself over the past few years as being a very
- 20:33noisy way to detect user anomalies like that's one
- 20:37reason. The other reason is that with
- 20:40the pandemic and everybody moving to working from home
- 20:44suddenly this phrase identity is new perimeter became a reality
- 20:48overnight. And then the third is that there
- 20:51were a slew of acquisitions last year with with a TiVo for
- 20:58example and pre EMPT before that that kind of kicked off this new
- 21:02wave of identity threat detection that caused Gartner
- 21:07again last year I think around February or March to say that
- 21:10ITDR identity threat detection and response would be one of the
- 21:16major security trends in 2022 and now in 2023.
- 21:21So that's that's kind of all the background.
- 21:23The reason why we got into it was actually from the posture
- 21:26angle. We started with hey, how do we
- 21:28help our customers detect inactive accounts.
- 21:30Remember I got into this from zero trust networking.
- 21:33So how do we help a customer become zero trust ready?
- 21:36It's by cleaning up their vulnerable identities so that
- 21:39when somebody authenticates, they can trust that that
- 21:42identity is truly who they say they are.
- 21:44And you can get the policy to do zero trust from there.
- 21:48We evolved from posture management into ITDR at the same
- 21:52time that ITDR was taking off as a category and it just for
- 21:57whatever reason is a way more interesting starting use case
- 22:01for security teams than the posture management thing.
- 22:05It's posture management is hygiene.
- 22:07It's like brushing your teeth. It's not that exciting.
- 22:09The ITDR piece is really what gets people excited.
- 22:12It's looking at attackers. It's looking at their patterns
- 22:15in a way that we haven't before. So I'm really glad that you
- 22:18brought up the UEBA kind of, you know, to use that Gartner term,
- 22:23the through of disillusionment because it felt like, oh, this
- 22:27is this is potential. And like when Jeff and I thought
- 22:31about identity at the center, UEBA was a big part of that
- 22:35picture where it's like it's going to.
- 22:38Detect the anomalies and then I don't know.
- 22:42So to me that was where the UEBA, the disillusionment was
- 22:47and then it's going to what, throw it on dashboard.
- 22:50But I feel like you tied the lineage of ITDR back to UEBA.
- 22:56But the ITDR, the R is very important, right?
- 22:59The R is like, now we can answer that question, what are we going
- 23:03to do? Or at least we have a way to
- 23:06configure it to do something. Because to me it's like, oh, now
- 23:10we spotted some anomaly. Now we can disable an account,
- 23:15kill off a session, things like that.
- 23:18That's a really important observation.
- 23:19UEBA, user endpoint, behavior analytics, I guess if you're
- 23:23doing analytics like So what like what are you going to do
- 23:26with that? Just stare at a dashboard all
- 23:28day? To your point, ITDR kind of
- 23:30builds in this concept of both the detection and the response
- 23:34and that's something that at ORG we got really good at was was
- 23:37doing the combination of high fidelity detections that were
- 23:40not noisy and really clear recommended response actions
- 23:45including actions like quarantining an account, killing
- 23:49active sessions, opening tickets.
- 23:52Things like this become really natural once you have that R in
- 23:56the ITDR. Yeah, they are so important, I
- 23:59kind of feel like. At the core of identity is about
- 24:02trust, right? And if you have somebody coming
- 24:05in and they can present the credentials and you let them in,
- 24:10it's missing an element. Or the trust gets destroyed when
- 24:13someone can do that or some machine can do that, and there's
- 24:18nothing realizing like, OK, this is a machine.
- 24:21So to keep things simple, I kind of think of the ITDR.
- 24:27Especially around authentication systems because I think that use
- 24:31case just makes sense to people. In other words, oh, I have the
- 24:34headless browser coming in or have something where it's like
- 24:38the IP address just changed or something that is like a very
- 24:42clear indicator. The reason I also think about
- 24:46that use case is I was just at the Octa conference and I've
- 24:49talked about this on the podcast quite a few times.
- 24:52You know, this is something that Okta said, oh, well, we're going
- 24:56to right now they have Threat Insights and they're moving to
- 25:00identity, Threat protection. It's going to be a new feature
- 25:04and they as much as made the statement, you will not need an
- 25:08additional ITDR system. Our system's going to have it
- 25:12built in. So is that, is that what we're
- 25:16going to see more and more or? Is, is there still that use case
- 25:20out there that people should be investing in ITDR?
- 25:25It's a great question. So First off, yes,
- 25:28authentication systems are a really good choke point to do
- 25:32detection and response like 100%.
- 25:35It's kind of like the the gateway, the network gateway, to
- 25:38use that analogy, 20 to 30 years ago is like a good point place
- 25:42to put your firewall because all the traffic's going through it.
- 25:45Now that perimeter is the identity.
- 25:48And so putting ITDR around the authentication, looking at the
- 25:52telemetry makes a whole lot of sense.
- 25:55Now will the IAM platform providers like Okta and
- 26:00Microsoft just make ITDRA feature of the platform.
- 26:06I think they need table stakes capabilities to check that box
- 26:09and that's really important. And we have a great relationship
- 26:12with the teams at Microsoft and at Okta, and we respect them a
- 26:15lot. I don't think that security
- 26:20teams are going to necessarily trust those vendors to secure
- 26:24themselves 100% of the time. So you might buy an Apple
- 26:29MacBook, you might buy a Lenovo Windows machine, and you might
- 26:37trust to some extent like Windows Defender, maybe for a
- 26:41small business up until a certain point.
- 26:42But a lot of companies will go and invest in Crowd Strike, have
- 26:45something else that's looking at these different systems and just
- 26:48getting a different view into whether there are endpoint
- 26:52problems, threats. Same thing is true in Identity,
- 26:57where you might invest in a whole slew of different identity
- 27:02tools in your architecture. You might have like work day
- 27:05where identities are born and then Cell Point copying them
- 27:08into Active Directory and then from there they're picked up by
- 27:11your SSO system like an Octa. No single IAM system has really
- 27:17become that top of stack and that's where ITERA good ITDR
- 27:22solution can really help beyond the built in capabilities that
- 27:28like Microsoft's risky users feature might have beyond what
- 27:32Octa might be doing with threat detection.
- 27:34A good ITDR can take all of those risk signals and create a
- 27:38kind of a lower noise, truer or higher fidelity signal out of
- 27:44them, so you have a lower rate of false positives.
- 27:47And so as we are preparing for this episode, you know, going
- 27:51beyond itdr, you started to bring up some of the areas that
- 27:55you know you feel are like these are the the main things
- 27:59identity, digital identity, industry that the industry needs
- 28:03to solve. You brought up one that hasn't
- 28:06been on the tip of my tongue anyway.
- 28:09So it was data plane side of identity, the data plane side of
- 28:13identity. So explain for us what that is.
- 28:18Yes, again, my my network background is kind of leaking
- 28:21into how I think about identity. So in the networking world, we
- 28:25think about the data plane, the control plane, the management
- 28:29plane, the analytics plane or policy plane.
- 28:31Like these planes of existence loosely tie into this idea that
- 28:36everything is just layers like the OSI model in the TCPIP
- 28:40stack. So when I say data plane of
- 28:42identity, what I'm really referring to is the actual
- 28:46protocols that make authentication authorization
- 28:48work. I think there's a realization
- 28:50right now that the lack of kind of continuous trusted access and
- 28:55the lack of, you know, continuous access evaluation is
- 28:59leading to this whole new pedigree of threats around
- 29:04session hijacking And a whole lot of ways to pull that off
- 29:07where we need to start rethinking how that data plane,
- 29:10the fundamentals of those protocols are actually
- 29:13implemented to support more of a continuous trust model rather
- 29:17than a one time authentication model.
- 29:19Two things you said there really trigger me, which is the session
- 29:23hijacking, which is very real, right?
- 29:25I mean, we've seen in the news very recently and it's.
- 29:31Something that needs to be addressed and the continuous,
- 29:35which I think kind of like you know that that champions the
- 29:39ITDR because a hijack session should be something that you
- 29:45pick up that hey, the person, the device that started this
- 29:49session is no longer the device that's trying to use the
- 29:53session. That should be a major red flag
- 29:55and immediately caused some kind of re authentication.
- 29:59And then the continuous authentication.
- 30:01And I just feel like we need a grounding of everybody agreeing
- 30:05on what's the definition of continuous authentication.
- 30:09So I've seen some really cool technologies where like you go
- 30:13up to a computer when somebody leaves the room and your
- 30:16keystroke cadence kind of like. That the the system realizes
- 30:21that's not the same person or if you look at like the improvata
- 30:25solution with the prox cards, log in, log out based on your
- 30:29proximity. I mean that's certainly
- 30:32continuous authentication. And then there's kind of like
- 30:35the risk based authentication. You're moving from you know, one
- 30:39risk level to another or you're increasing your own risk and
- 30:44therefore you're triggering a re authentication.
- 30:46So it's more of a. A simplistic model, but you know
- 30:50are the are, is that really both continuous authentication?
- 30:54Because they're they're quite different, right?
- 30:57So I think that one model that makes sense to mitigate this
- 31:01risk of session hijacking is the first thing you describe.
- 31:04Which is all right if we're not going to fix it at the data
- 31:06plane layer. Let's fix it at the analytics
- 31:09layer by using ITDR to detect when we see a session being used
- 31:14from two places, two devices at the same time, and then using
- 31:18that to trigger some action. Whether that's quarantining the
- 31:22user or just killing all their active sessions so they're
- 31:25forced to re authenticate. I think that that is a good
- 31:29catch all solution because no matter how many features we add
- 31:34to the the underlying protocols to the data plane, there's
- 31:37always going to be some new novel way that someone will get
- 31:40around them. So having a catch all like an
- 31:42ITDR that can find and fix problems is important.
- 31:45Now that to me as a Band-Aid I think we need to fix the
- 31:49underlying protocols themselves to not just.
- 31:53I guess continuous authentication kind of implies
- 31:56that you still have this kind of a session.
- 31:57We really need to stitch this whole thing end to end from
- 32:02authentication into the back end application and how it manages
- 32:06sessions in order to be successful.
- 32:08Because if we're continuously authenticating but whatever
- 32:12Slack or your e-mail client is just continuing to use Long live
- 32:15session tokens, it doesn't really do much good.
- 32:17The whole thing needs to work together.
- 32:19Absolutely. So the next topic you brought
- 32:22up, which really resonated with me was around machine identity.
- 32:27You kind of talk about where your brain is in in terms of
- 32:31machine identity. So honestly I'm trying to wrap
- 32:34my head around this space. Machine identity is a bit of an
- 32:38enigma to me. So I break it down into the
- 32:42device identity and workload identity.
- 32:44Those to me are kind of this two subcategories within the the
- 32:49taxonomy here and device identity has become pretty clear
- 32:53like how we handle device authentication.
- 32:56If that device is tied to a user, we know how to use, you
- 33:00know, hardware modules, TPMS, etcetera, to develop device
- 33:04trust and to work that into how the user is authenticated tied
- 33:10to a device. I'm not saying that most
- 33:12organizations have successfully successfully rolled that out.
- 33:15I think there's a lot of work to do to operationalize that in
- 33:20most environments, but I think the solutions are pretty well,
- 33:23well known there. Where it gets murky for me is
- 33:27more on the, you know, workload identity side of the world.
- 33:31How we manage the identity of processes and containers and
- 33:36virtual machines and servers and Lambda functions and all these
- 33:40fun things is whether or not there's really a need to
- 33:43centralized IAM for those types of identities, like we've
- 33:47centralized identity for humans and devices.
- 33:53Is it necessary in the workload world?
- 33:55Is there actually a buyer for a solution like that?
- 33:58Or is it really just the domain of developers and the CTO to
- 34:02manage workload identities and I don't know the Chief security
- 34:06officer and the security team offloaded to them and make it
- 34:10part of the security development life cycle.
- 34:12That to me, is is is murky. But I do see a slew of startups
- 34:17in this space starting to tackle machine identity and managing
- 34:21workload Identity. That means there might be
- 34:24something there. There's good validation when you
- 34:26see multiple companies going after something that there might
- 34:29be a problem to solve, and I've no doubt there's a problem to
- 34:31solve. The only question in my mind is
- 34:33whether there's going to be a big successful Unicorn of a
- 34:38machine identity company five years from now.
- 34:41I don't know. So many ideas here.
- 34:44First off, you're taking on a problem that has not been
- 34:49solved. The problem is there, and I can
- 34:51tell you that every organization tries to deal with it, the the
- 34:55management of human identities has been solved.
- 34:59That doesn't mean everybody's doing it perfectly or anything
- 35:02like that. But you know, we we get the feed
- 35:04from an authoritative source. You have good governance around
- 35:08who works here with those authoritative sources, and then
- 35:11you map identities to accounts. The problem is, is you look at
- 35:16the Active Directory, almost everybody has an Active
- 35:19Directory, and there's way more accounts than there are people.
- 35:24What the heck is going on? Well, there's all these machine
- 35:26accounts and there's all these machine accounts and all the
- 35:29other places in your network. And by the way, I want to make
- 35:32draw the difference between an account and an identity.
- 35:36They're not one in the same. So that's what I think you know,
- 35:40as much as we talk about machine identities like we have. 50,000
- 35:44machine identity accounts, that doesn't mean we have 50,000
- 35:48machine identities. That that's my perspective.
- 35:51Now, you know, what does that really mean?
- 35:54I don't think this has been solved, but I do think that the
- 35:57answer is that these are are very difficult for humans to
- 36:03manage. I think there's going to be some
- 36:05element of artificial intelligence that's going to be
- 36:09required for for the management of the identities.
- 36:13But ultimately, the machines have to be drawn back to a
- 36:17human, and the AI has to be able to inform the human on how the
- 36:22account is being used. The identity is the human.
- 36:28This is what I mean. There is a machine and it uses a
- 36:32bunch of accounts. I just don't know if like, there
- 36:35really is a machine identity per Southeast.
- 36:39Yes, yeah, my Co founder and CT. So you're brave.
- 36:44I'm not saying I'm tackling that one.
- 36:46I just think it's interesting. I think it's white space in the
- 36:48market. But my Co founder and CTODD
- 36:51would totally agree with you that every, and I think I agree
- 36:54at this point. Like every machine identity
- 36:56needs to eventually somehow be tied back to dotted line into a
- 37:01real human being who is responsible for it or a team
- 37:05that's responsible for it. So if something goes wrong, like
- 37:08you have someone to reach out to someone who can actually take
- 37:10action to do something with these identities.
- 37:13I think we've been in so many customer environments where
- 37:17service accounts outnumber human identities.
- 37:21Like, it's it's not uncommon and it's also not uncommon to, like
- 37:25you said, have many accounts that are tied back to a single
- 37:29identity, even for humans. Like we find that a single human
- 37:32can have five different accounts for different purposes within an
- 37:35organization. One of the challenges that we
- 37:38solve with orders linking those all together.
- 37:40So you can think of them as one user with one identity just
- 37:45instantiated multiple times, but actually bring all that together
- 37:49in one place. It's it's a hard problem to
- 37:51solve, but a very necessary problem to solve.
- 37:54I don't know if I agree. I'm going to take the contrarian
- 37:57view because I think you guys had me until we started talking
- 38:01about mapping. A machine identity back to a
- 38:04human and having that person somehow claim ownership over an
- 38:10account. I don't know if that is actually
- 38:14viable. I think there's a definition
- 38:17between responsible for making changes versus truly ownership
- 38:23over an account, which I think is, you know, maybe I'm maybe
- 38:27I'm not hearing it correctly, but I don't know if I agree with
- 38:28the the mapping of it back to a human.
- 38:31I can think of plenty of use cases where there's just so many
- 38:34of these little micro service accounts, machine accounts, and
- 38:39trying to map those back to humans.
- 38:41Every single one. How dare you?
- 38:43How dare you disagree with us, Chef?
- 38:45So I I think about application owners and every single
- 38:48application in most enterprise organizations goes back to
- 38:51somebody in IT who's we're a group with an IT who's
- 38:54responsible for that application.
- 38:58I I got to think that identity we need at least somebody to pin
- 39:02these things on. I agree that it's not an easy
- 39:07problem and there are usually so many of these identities that
- 39:09it's hard to imagine doing it manually.
- 39:11But I think that there is AAI driven option here where we can
- 39:17get some level of assignment, some sort of racy matrix for
- 39:21those machine identities. Yeah, you know, and.
- 39:25The way I think about it, I do want to be clear that I don't
- 39:29think it should be a hard tie. Like, hey, I've got a a Active
- 39:35Directory ID, I've got a Admin Active Directory ID, maybe I've
- 39:40got a couple more, and then when I leave the organization, you
- 39:44shut this off. That's the problem with these
- 39:47machine identities and why they proliferate is because you can't
- 39:51do that. You know, that's not sensical,
- 39:54but I I think of it more like when you have one of the
- 39:58problems, which is very common is group proliferation.
- 40:02So you might have an organization where they've got
- 40:0550,000 employees and 200,000 groups and they say this is out
- 40:10of control. You need to clean this up.
- 40:13You know, first step is like set up an Evergreen process so the
- 40:16problem stops getting worse. Then it's you go through and
- 40:20you. Start to clean up the groups and
- 40:23groups that are legitimate and need to continue on.
- 40:26You need to collect metadata. And one of those metadata is
- 40:30who's the owner of that group? Because they are the, the human
- 40:35who is going to say, yes, this list of people and the access
- 40:41that we have assigned to this group, the access control list
- 40:44or whatever is legitimate. And that's really why I say it
- 40:48has to be tied back to human. The problem is, is like if you
- 40:51have one person who now has 10,000 machine identities tied
- 40:56back to them, well, how did they, how did they really
- 40:59process whether or not that's correct?
- 41:01And that's to me, that's that AI element.
- 41:05Well, I think that's where I'm I'm struggle with this, trying
- 41:07to get back to a single human. I think it makes more sense to
- 41:09map it to. A department or a team or
- 41:12something like that. Because I think it's just, I
- 41:15think it's a fool's errand to try and say, hey, you know,
- 41:19these anywhere from 1 to 7000 machine accounts map back to
- 41:24Jeff. Well, what happens if Jeff
- 41:25leaves? Because we all know, you know,
- 41:28everything's perfect and any world and everything always
- 41:30works when people leave the organization.
- 41:33It's not like something bad will happen to those accounts through
- 41:35automation, right. So.
- 41:37I get concerned about trying to figure out that mapping.
- 41:41I think it makes more sense to send it to, you know, even if
- 41:44it's not mapped to a human, but mapped to a headless account, so
- 41:49to speak. That is, you know, owned and
- 41:51operated by a team, maybe infrastructure, maybe it's
- 41:53marketing or some other application development team.
- 41:57That kind of thing makes more sense to me.
- 41:58Yeah. Ownership, yes.
- 42:00Yeah. Kind of went down the path a
- 42:01little bit talking about this next topic.
- 42:04This was kind of the the last topic we'll hit on, which is you
- 42:08called it Entitlement entropy. What is Entitlement Entropy?
- 42:14I'm reusing the space analogies here because there's entropy in
- 42:17outer space, like things are constantly moving apart.
- 42:20So entitlement entropy, and I'm sticking with that term, is a
- 42:24really important concept in identity, where entitlements are
- 42:28always added but never really taken away.
- 42:30Maybe in small batches, but over time.
- 42:33The entitlement entropy increases in any given
- 42:36organization, the number of groups, the number of
- 42:39identities, the permissions that that group membership or
- 42:43entitlements that those bestow upon the members it's ever
- 42:47increasing. And so if you look at a graph of
- 42:50the number of entitlements an organization it it it's sort of
- 42:52exponential as that organization ages as they add more
- 42:56applications and more users and more devices the amount of
- 43:01things that. Collectively, the population has
- 43:05access to this goes up and that is a huge problem.
- 43:09And identity that's age-old and doesn't have a good solution
- 43:12today. It's like, how do you rein in
- 43:15entitlement entropy? How do you prune those
- 43:17entitlements in a way that you don't slow down the growth of
- 43:20that organization that relies on the ability to access the
- 43:24resources that they need, while at the same time reducing and?
- 43:30Maintaining a blast radius for each individual that's
- 43:33reasonable so that if their account is taken over, you don't
- 43:37have to worry about them having access to thousands of systems.
- 43:41Maybe it's limited to a handful that you can actually go through
- 43:44each one and see what damage was done, not access to, you know,
- 43:482000 different things where you could never actually go and do
- 43:52the instant response that was necessary to clean up all the
- 43:55damage that could have been caused.
- 43:57Yeah, this, this term, entitlement entropy.
- 44:00I think of like entitlement chaos.
- 44:03I think of it in two perspectives. 1 is what is the
- 44:06total basket, the total universe of entitlements.
- 44:11And I, you know, this is one of my rabbit holes, right?
- 44:14So I went down the rabbit hole on YouTube for the universe, and
- 44:19it's like only 100 years ago humanity thought the universe
- 44:23was the Milky Way. Well, then what they've realized
- 44:27using the Hubble telescope and everything is that there are
- 44:30billions of universes, which each universe is made-up of a
- 44:35billion stars. We actually don't know how big
- 44:39the universe is, and we don't know, you know, what's outside
- 44:44of the universe. I feel like sometimes for folks
- 44:50in our industry who are trying to wrap their brain around the
- 44:54entitlements, it's like there are so many hundreds of
- 44:58thousands of entitlements. The good thing is usually the
- 45:01the areas where entitlement chaos lives that I find anyway
- 45:07number one in the Active Directory, the number of groups.
- 45:12And maybe that's a a big part of because well, first Active
- 45:16Directory has been around for over 20 years.
- 45:20I remember when I get my first MCSD certification in Windows
- 45:242000, it was the first version of Active Directory.
- 45:27But so some of the groups are, I mean some organizations still
- 45:30have some of those groups that were created way back when.
- 45:35But I also think that because Active Directory becomes the IDP
- 45:41for so many other applications, it becomes the the
- 45:45centralization dumping ground for all these groups.
- 45:49The other area that I find is ERP systems.
- 45:53And because ERP systems are, we define all these nice neat
- 45:57groups. And if organizations get into
- 45:59the habit of everybody gets ad hoc access, you know,
- 46:03everybody's a snowflake in terms of that.
- 46:06You know their uniqueness in their access profile.
- 46:11So then the reality of it is even though you have roles, it's
- 46:15like those roles really don't tell the tell the whole story.
- 46:21So there's the the universe of entitlement entropy but then
- 46:26there's also like the individual's entitlement
- 46:29entropy. Are people over provisioned on
- 46:34what are we doing about that? And I I kind of feel like in the
- 46:38cloud space, there's at least a solution out there that's trying
- 46:42to take it on, which is the idea around CIEM systems where you
- 46:49can actually go into, you know, here's the beauty is like, OK,
- 46:54you've go ahead and put most of your eggs in a couple or just
- 46:58one cloud infrastructure or platform as a service, right.
- 47:03So it puts all of its logs in one place and you can see what
- 47:08entitlements are actually being invoked.
- 47:10And then you map that back to the person say or to the account
- 47:15and say here you're, you know, here's accounts that have access
- 47:20that they are not using over X number of days in the
- 47:24enterprise, we generally don't have the confidence to say, I'm
- 47:28going to go through an account and just start deleting the
- 47:31entitlements these people don't need because they obviously
- 47:34don't need them. They haven't used them in the
- 47:36last year. Well, do you really have the
- 47:38logs to show you that? And almost every single
- 47:41organization I've ever worked with.
- 47:43The answer to that is no, not really.
- 47:47That's the problem. I think the solution here is
- 47:50that you can be confident about removing entitlements if you
- 47:54have an easy way to get them back.
- 47:56And so that is kind of the crux of.
- 48:01To reduce entitlement entropy and have the confidence to prune
- 48:04that graph of entitlements kind of relies on making sure that
- 48:08you also have workflows in place that make it super simple and
- 48:12have just as enough friction. For people to get them back, but
- 48:15not too much friction. Whether that's having you know
- 48:18some of these newer Just in time access tools that work in Slack
- 48:22or that have nice UIS where you can easily request access to an
- 48:25application or resource when you need it for a specific time
- 48:28range. Whether it's like a next Gen.
- 48:30Pam or a next Gen. IGA solution.
- 48:33I think there are a lot of companies, especially on the
- 48:36smaller side trying to tackle that side of it And so I think
- 48:39we need to do both. We need to find a way to remove
- 48:42these unused. Entitlements, while also finding
- 48:45a really smart way to give them back when they're needed and
- 48:50when they're warranted. That's a great point.
- 48:52You know, I also think you know the discussion we get into on
- 48:56this podcast laws, like, OK, what is what's AI going to do
- 49:00for identity? And when I hear things like it's
- 49:03going to do an analysis of you have these entitlements, other
- 49:08people in your department have these entitlements, you should
- 49:12request this entitlement. I'm like, that is garbage, dude.
- 49:16That doesn't. That's not intelligence.
- 49:19That is, that's business analytics.
- 49:22I'm sorry that now if you were able to answer much more
- 49:27difficult questions like or give much more insightful advice
- 49:32like, hey, these people that work for you, now you're going
- 49:36to recertify them. You know, John Doe has these
- 49:40accesses that he hasn't used in over 2 years.
- 49:46I at least now have to have a conversation with John Doe and
- 49:48say like, do you really need this?
- 49:50You haven't used it in two years.
- 49:52But in order to do that, you have to have a certain
- 49:55confidence level that you're going to have the logs.
- 49:58So the reason we haven't gotten that, gotten the logs all
- 50:01centralized, like that's hard work.
- 50:03What if AI could actually do that hard work for you?
- 50:06Get those logs. Start making sense of them
- 50:09crunching that big data now. Now you've done something
- 50:13that's, you know, changes the game, I.
- 50:16Think we're just now at a point where some of this is possible,
- 50:19where those logs are actually exposed via AP is that are
- 50:22useful by a lot of these IAM platforms where you can have
- 50:26tools that ingest them and analyze them at scale.
- 50:30And I think like you're saying, that's a great use of.
- 50:33AI is interpreting that graph and helping communicate it to
- 50:39the managers and the end users to help them understand what the
- 50:45system is doing and how it might change.
- 50:48I think this whole thing and identity, unlike endpoint
- 50:51security, network security where you're dealing with bits and
- 50:54bytes, it's human, a lot of it is human.
- 50:58And so communicating with humans, what I've seen.
- 51:02In the LLM space and with ChatGPT, and I think is also
- 51:06very promising because it means that we now maybe have a more
- 51:10programmatic interface that we can use to communicate with
- 51:12humans in a way that they'll understand, so they can more
- 51:16naturally interface with these complex problems that identity
- 51:20presents. Well, I think you kid on
- 51:22something there that I find important in the in the stage of
- 51:25AI that we're starting to get into is the interface and people
- 51:28being able to. Not only get the information
- 51:32out, but they don't have to be, you know, technical Wizards.
- 51:35They don't have to write SSIS reports or write things like
- 51:38that to get data out. I'm looking forward to the day
- 51:41when we're like Star Trek and we just ask a question in a natural
- 51:45language and the computer just kind of figures it out and gives
- 51:47you the answer. Kind of interprets what it is
- 51:50you're really asking for. I think that'll be real
- 51:52interesting. It's not that far away.
- 51:53Yeah, I think we've collected a lot of the data.
- 51:56Yeah, I think we're getting pretty close.
- 51:57I want to ask one more question and that's I want to kind of tap
- 52:01into your entrepreneurial kind of start up, I don't know thread
- 52:07that you've got going throughout.
- 52:09If you were to build another digital identity company, where
- 52:14would you start? Would it be something along the
- 52:16lines of starting with like identity, Governance?
- 52:19Would it be something authentication based or
- 52:21privileged access or or something else like?
- 52:24Where do you see a need right now?
- 52:25It's a great question. I think we had kind of magical
- 52:28timing with ITDR when we built ORT.
- 52:31And there's a, you know, the big secret in venture capital is,
- 52:35you know, team tech and timing and you need all three of them.
- 52:39And so you couldn't recreate that magic again if we tried to
- 52:42do it. You know, today in November
- 52:442023, I wouldn't start an ITDR company as much as I like ITDRI
- 52:49think that the market is not saturated, but there's a lot of
- 52:52good ITDR start-ups. A lot of the big companies now
- 52:56have solid ITDR capabilities. There are other areas that
- 53:01really need attention that a entrepreneur could use as a
- 53:05beachhead into the identity market.
- 53:09IGA is interesting, I think. That is a really hairy problem,
- 53:14especially if you're trying to tackle sale point with their
- 53:17massive library of integrations and their network of people who
- 53:20build those integrations. They just have a massive Moat.
- 53:23And so I think some of these workflows like Just In Time
- 53:26Access are interesting. But again, that's a fairly busy
- 53:29market at this point. You know, it's been around just
- 53:31as long as ITDR. As a as an area of interest, I
- 53:36think machine identity, it's a very fragmented space and so I
- 53:40think a company could launch in machine identity but might not
- 53:44get to escape velocity because of how fragmented is.
- 53:48The area that I think is hottest right now is really.
- 53:53Yes, I am. So consumer I am and all the
- 53:55tooling around it like authorization.
- 53:58This is an area where again, we do see a lot of companies, but
- 54:01the market is just massive and still growing and there's such
- 54:05amazing innovation going on in consumer.
- 54:09I am that I think if I were to start something, that's where I
- 54:12would focus. It's still very much unsolved
- 54:14problem and a very big untapped market that there's no clear
- 54:18winner we had off 0. And All Zero is still the huge
- 54:21name in that market, but I think it's time for sort of a next
- 54:24Gen. All Zero to take the reins in in
- 54:27in CIAM. It's just you bring up off 0, I
- 54:30mean they got purchased by Okta, you know a few years back.
- 54:33Now. I think the closest probably
- 54:35competitor to them is maybe something like Ford Rock that
- 54:39has a lot of APIs. But that's been purchased by
- 54:42Ping, which it seems to me if you're on somewhere trajectories
- 54:46between like Octa and Ping, sort of.
- 54:48Having API based ways to do authentication or authorization
- 54:55because I think you're right, CIM has a lot of typically more
- 55:00of a build IT mindset versus a buy it mindset and you're really
- 55:03just kind of trying to get the infrastructure in place.
- 55:06I want to tap into again that entrepreneurial spirit to end On
- 55:12a lighter note, something not IT related.
- 55:15If you could start a business related to something with
- 55:18outdoor adventures, what would it be?
- 55:20Oh, that's a great question. So I, as we talked about when we
- 55:24prepared this show, I I love being out in nature.
- 55:26I live in the middle of the woods.
- 55:29We we're surrounded by trees and lots of land and it's it's
- 55:33really nice to get out and just walk around or you know take a
- 55:36drive and go for a hike in the in the wilderness here in
- 55:39Massachusetts. It's one of the most reforested
- 55:41states. In the country, it's something
- 55:43I've learned. It used to be all farmland up
- 55:45until the late 1800s. Anyway, what would I do with
- 55:50outdoor adventure? You know, to me it's really
- 55:53important to combine mental health and nature and I think
- 55:57like an app of some kind. Maybe it would be nonprofit,
- 55:59because I don't know how you would monetize this, but
- 56:01something that combines that idea that you should probably
- 56:04take 1/2 hour walk every day out of nature to rejuvenate
- 56:06yourself. Maybe with some kind of talk
- 56:08track or just simply a reminder to go and do that and why it's
- 56:12important is something that I could get behind.
- 56:14There truly is an app for everything at this point, right?
- 56:16Why not Jim? What about yourself?
- 56:18What would you start a business on that?
- 56:21We had a relation to outdoor adventures.
- 56:23I'm going to, I'm going to feed off of mats a little bit because
- 56:28it's an app. It's actually a marketplace.
- 56:31A marketplace would be a business like Airbnb or Uber and
- 56:40my marketplace would connect people who have outdoor themed
- 56:45rental vacations available and people can go and rent them.
- 56:50So it could be I've got AVW bus that, you know, you can just fly
- 56:57out to Oregon and seeing this VW bus for a week or I've got
- 57:03something in Alaska and you can come and but it would be focused
- 57:07on that. So we kind of like kind of like
- 57:10Airbnb, but it would be more focused for the adventure
- 57:13outdoor type. And I also think that, you know,
- 57:17I've rented things from Airbnb before and I don't want to
- 57:20disparage Airbnb, but man, you know, it's one thing when you go
- 57:24in, you see, I'd like to rent this place and it's $200.00 a
- 57:29night and three nights it should be around $600.00.
- 57:32And then it's like $850 because of all the fees that get tacked
- 57:37on. It's kind of like like it's also
- 57:41like, you know, buying tickets to events, the all the fees that
- 57:46get thrown on. And I I'd want to keep the fees
- 57:48more reasonable because I think they push people away.
- 57:53And you know, it feels like kind of like false advertising.
- 57:56So I think that's what I would do.
- 57:59I create a marketplace for outdoor adventures.
- 58:02What are you, Jeff? So I don't I, I think Airbnb is
- 58:05trying to get a handle on the fees.
- 58:06But you're totally right. It's like, yeah, it's like you
- 58:08have $500 cleaning fee like what?
- 58:10That's crazy. But that being said, what if you
- 58:14were, you know, renting AI? Don't know, like a like, I feel
- 58:17like what you described, Jim, was like unique locations to
- 58:20like stay in around the world. And it's like, OK, I want to
- 58:24stay in like a crashed air airplane in the middle of the
- 58:27Amazon. You know something like that is
- 58:29that is that kind of like along the theme while you're thinking
- 58:31oh that would be great and so yeah the the difference that one
- 58:36crash airplane the Amazon you know and and we took all the
- 58:40bodies out and we just. No, that's the cleaning fee.
- 58:44That's the cleaning fee. That's what you have cleaning
- 58:46fee. No.
- 58:47But I think the other thing is like, let's just say you were
- 58:50going to on a business trip or to a conference or something and
- 58:54you want to stay like in the beach or something and stay in
- 58:58that like camper or something like that.
- 59:01But you don't want to pack a stove.
- 59:03You don't want to pack a bunch of food.
- 59:07You just want to show up, have everything set up for you and
- 59:10basically already have your s'mores there and just start
- 59:14camping. And especially if you're only
- 59:16camping for a weekend or three days, like you don't want to
- 59:20have to go and hit Walmart, like, you know, So what I think
- 59:25this marketplace would be like is like enabling people to start
- 59:29their own businesses around creating these experiences.
- 59:33And we need like a DoorDash for campfires.
- 59:35So I can be at home. I don't need to go find wood, I
- 59:38don't need to build the fire. It's just.
- 59:40I was just thinking they just delivered the fire hot, hot, hot
- 59:42coming through. You know I am not an outdoor
- 59:46person, but my start up would be bringing the indoors outdoor.
- 59:52Or something like that. Or bringing the outdoors indoor.
- 59:55I hate bugs. I constantly am getting like
- 59:58destroyed by mosquitoes. I like being outside, but the
- 1:00:01bugs kill it for me pretty much all the time.
- 1:00:03So I'd like to have like some business where I could enjoy the
- 1:00:07outside and there are no bugs or things like that that would
- 1:00:12cause problems for me. Because I like I said, I am just
- 1:00:15a a mosquito feeding machine when I'm out there.
- 1:00:18My wife not so bad me. You just love me.
- 1:00:21I don't know. My sweet blood, I guess.
- 1:00:22Yeah, I talked about the YouTube rabbit holes.
- 1:00:24I'm not sure if you guys are have gone down this rabbit hole,
- 1:00:27but there's a whole theme of videos where people just show
- 1:00:30themselves camping. And usually it's stuff like
- 1:00:34they're camping in the winter somewhere and it's like snowing
- 1:00:38and it's really cold. And they they have like
- 1:00:41elaborate camping gear and you see these videos and they've got
- 1:00:44like 2 million, three million hit or views like.
- 1:00:49There's interest in this stuff out there, and it's a very the
- 1:00:52reason I like them is is like very, like your brain can go
- 1:00:56into like very low processing modes, like something you can
- 1:01:00watch and like, truly relax. That's that's the secret for
- 1:01:04Jeff. Just go go outside in winter,
- 1:01:06there's no bugs, right? Well, that's yeah, I lived in
- 1:01:08Chicago for 40 years so that was great.
- 1:01:09I, I, I winter doesn't bother me at all.
- 1:01:10Like the cold doesn't bother me and say, yeah, there's no bugs,
- 1:01:13nothing like that. Having moved down to the South
- 1:01:16and North Carolina, it's a little bit different story.
- 1:01:19But yeah, I don't know. I mean, I would rent like, like
- 1:01:22for me if I was going to say, hey, you're going to go camping.
- 1:01:25I just remember, like my family when we were younger, we had
- 1:01:27like this campground we'd go to in Kankakee, IL for those who
- 1:01:31are familiar. And I had, I had no desire to be
- 1:01:34outside. I just wanted to play Nintendo.
- 1:01:36So, you know, my mom would have to shoe us outside and, you
- 1:01:40know, unplug the games and take them away because I just, the
- 1:01:42outside never has never interested me.
- 1:01:45And I don't know if it if it will at some point.
- 1:01:47I think it's, I don't know, it's just not my thing.
- 1:01:50I'll go sit on the beach, I'll, you know, sit on a boardwalk or
- 1:01:53something like that. But like, I don't, I don't know,
- 1:01:55camping just doesn't do it for me.
- 1:01:57So that's a good way to have a doubter.
- 1:01:58I guess I'm taking over Jim's role as the downer of leaving
- 1:02:02stuff here. I was going to say I'm like, I'm
- 1:02:05like the positive guy in this episode this.
- 1:02:07At first, yeah. I probably stunned you.
- 1:02:09I was like, what the heck is going on over here?
- 1:02:11Why don't we go and wrap it up? Because I think we're up over an
- 1:02:13hour now. Definitely want to thank Matt
- 1:02:16for being on the show. Matt, thank you so much for
- 1:02:17taking the time. Any final thoughts before we
- 1:02:19close things out here? No, I just appreciate the time
- 1:02:21here. Jeff and Jim have been a long
- 1:02:23time listener and appreciate the opportunity here to talk about
- 1:02:26all things identity. Yeah, we appreciate that.
- 1:02:29So for folks who are listening, make sure you hit that like and
- 1:02:32subscribe button. That's the best and really the
- 1:02:34only way that you guys can support us.
- 1:02:35So we certainly appreciate that. If you're gonna be at, don't
- 1:02:39forget about the identiverse regional events that are coming
- 1:02:42up here in Chicago in New York City.
- 1:02:43So I'm planning on being at the New York City one.
- 1:02:46So if you're a listener and we happen to be in the same spot
- 1:02:48feel free to come up and say hello.
- 1:02:51Jim is usually the social butterfly and gets a lot of the,
- 1:02:53I don't know, FaceTime with with folks but I enjoy it too.
- 1:02:57So come up and say hi, we're on the web, idacpodcast.com,
- 1:03:02Twitter at IDAC podcast, Mastodon at IDAC podcast at
- 1:03:06infosec dot exchange. We'll have links in our show
- 1:03:09notes for everything we talked about including a link for the
- 1:03:11registration for the Identiverse regional events also linked to
- 1:03:15connect with Matt on LinkedIn. So that way if you got questions
- 1:03:19and also a link for ort OORT dot IO so you can learn more about
- 1:03:24what Matt's been working on and we'll go ahead and leave it
- 1:03:27there. Thanks everyone for listening
- 1:03:29and we'll talk with everyone in the next one.
- 1:03:32You've been listening to Identity at the Center.
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