Latest / Buying Local Podcast / Smarter IT and Cybersecurity with Jared Humiston | Buying Local #70

Transcript

Smarter IT and Cybersecurity with Jared Humiston | Buying Local #70 · Buying Local Podcast

• 0:00
  Welcome buying local. Welcome everyone to buying
• 0:03
  local. I'm Mike Nelson from Pod Towers
• 0:05
  Media here with Jared Hudson from Adirondack.
• 0:09
  So I was thinking about this on the way over.
• 0:11
  Are you still Adirondack technical solutions or are you
• 0:16
  just 80 key techs or you kind of run both?
• 0:18
  That's the legal name. That's the legal name.
• 0:20
  OK, Yeah, I did. Re shorten it down 80K tax just
• 0:23
  because you know 20 years ago we started the business with it.
• 0:26
  I realize that when you ask the phone.
• 0:28
  Thank you for calling Adirondack Capital solutions.
• 0:30
  Yes, that's all. He plays as 80 key pass.
• 0:33
  At this point, we've. Been rounded as etiquette.
• 0:36
  That's for, you know, better part of all 1012 years now,
• 0:39
  maybe even longer. Yeah, it's wow, 20 years, man.
• 0:42
  You said that to me the other day when I bumped in you here.
• 0:44
  By the way, we're at Jared's new location over by accident 17 off
• 0:50
  the highway. I don't know, are you next to
• 0:52
  Stinky's Coffee or a Stinky Coffee next to you?
• 0:55
  I. Bet removed in sample, so I
• 0:56
  guess we're. Next, you're next to Stinky's.
• 0:58
  OK, well, we're next to Stinky's Coffee.
• 1:00
  If you haven't checked out Stinky's, go ahead.
• 1:03
  I'm having one of their lattes as we speak here.
• 1:06
  But you said that when I bumped in yet?
• 1:07
  20 years. Yep, 21.
• 1:09
  We're starting at 21st year, so we're completed 20 and 21.
• 1:12
  That's why how time plus. It does.
• 1:15
  We're old men. We are.
• 1:18
  The Grand. Problem.
• 1:19
  We call those wisdom highlights, Derek, wisdom highlights.
• 1:23
  So I, you know, you said that and I was like, Oh my God, we
• 1:26
  got to talk because I want to, I want to hear about the last 20
• 1:31
  years. Your business has changed,
• 1:33
  obviously for the better time gotten better the last 20 years.
• 1:37
  So many people don't even make it 5 years.
• 1:38
  You know, that's a big mouse known for a lot.
• 1:40
  This is let alone making it 1. So I'm not even sure where to
• 1:45
  begin, but let's start with how did you end up starting the ADK
• 1:49
  tax 20 years ago? Well, I guess it started with
• 1:55
  just like wasting the way the industry was, you know, when it
• 1:58
  first started out. I mean, I think like IT was not
• 2:01
  really customer centric, right? It was more of like you had to
• 2:06
  have it, right. That was, as you know, you get
• 2:08
  to the, you know, you know, late night.
• 2:10
  It was early 2000s as technology was emerging.
• 2:14
  Yeah. You know, that was where it was
• 2:16
  just starting to kind of be looked at as like something to
• 2:19
  enhance your business. There was still paper processes
• 2:22
  in place. And then you just made some
• 2:23
  efficiencies with computers. And so, you know, you're, you
• 2:29
  know, I guess it came from going from the big, you know,
• 2:32
  mainframes. And now that was going in the
• 2:34
  personal computers and servers in every office.
• 2:38
  And, you know, you kind of go through these cycles, right.
• 2:40
  And you're now headed through another one of these cycles
• 2:42
  where you went from big mainframe personal computers,
• 2:45
  then the servers kind of hybrid that now we're going back to the
• 2:48
  mainframes out in the cloud, you know, and I go to big super data
• 2:51
  centers and then you're going back to individual devices that
• 2:56
  access stuff in the cloud. So it's just kind of going back
• 2:58
  and forth, you know, but it's been where we started was, you
• 3:05
  know, kind of filling that a lot of project based work, you know,
• 3:08
  get setting up desktops, running cable building, kind of like a
• 3:13
  private cloud, right? We're putting a server in every
• 3:15
  business. We're installing an Exchange
• 3:17
  Server. We're figuring that to connect
• 3:19
  to their cell phones. The cell phones were emerging.
• 3:22
  People had their websites hosted in their, you know, website on
• 3:25
  their own server. So, you know, we used to have a
• 3:31
  client makeup of all these little clouds inside of their
• 3:34
  video inside of their networks. We had to protect them all as
• 3:40
  things changed, right? You know, the pace of the world
• 3:43
  picked up. Everybody wants everything now,
• 3:47
  want to be agile as a business, want to be able to do business
• 3:50
  from everywhere. That kind of model became, you
• 3:53
  know, a little bit more expensive, right?
• 3:54
  So you're still have to maintain all these servers, had to grow
• 3:57
  different servers for security reasons.
• 3:59
  So you had to start parsing off, you know, servers for different
• 4:02
  roles. And then that, like I said, that
• 4:05
  became taking up real estate inside of the business.
• 4:08
  It's consuming a lot of power. You know, everybody had those
• 4:10
  old server rooms right in their office that with all the racks,
• 4:13
  that stuff. And so, but then the attack
• 4:15
  started going against the business.
• 4:17
  And so that's really loud computing comes in, we get to
• 4:21
  kind of offload some of those things.
• 4:22
  You're still susceptible to those same, you know, attacks
• 4:24
  and things like that, but now you have different tools that
• 4:27
  can protect them. You don't have a whole separate,
• 4:29
  you know, area in your office up for this anymore, smaller
• 4:33
  footprint, you know, maximizing what you have and also making it
• 4:38
  more agile, right? Power out goes in this building.
• 4:40
  We can all go work from home, we can go work anywhere.
• 4:43
  You know, we have cell phones, you know, we can work from cell
• 4:46
  phones. So we don't really have to.
• 4:49
  We're more agile, we're, you know, more functional, we're
• 4:52
  cheaper, you know, it's able to, you know, deliver the same
• 4:56
  results for a smaller pops. For a lot, yeah.
• 4:59
  It's, you know, it's funny too, because I weirdly, I unwatched
• 5:03
  the original Tron movie. I don't know if you've ever seen
• 5:05
  that movie or not. Oh my God.
• 5:08
  So I watched the original Tron movie last night and I was
• 5:11
  laughing about like, you look at that movie that was on the maybe
• 5:16
  late 70s, early 80s compared to what the movies are today and
• 5:21
  just how much technology has changed.
• 5:23
  It is So what is so wow. Yeah.
• 5:25
  So, Matt, well, as you said earlier, we're, I guess we're
• 5:27
  we're old men now. Some of the science fiction
• 5:30
  stuff is, you know, you watch Star Trek, you know, they're
• 5:33
  flipping that over there, talking to it.
• 5:34
  You know, it's like was literally holding the fall into
• 5:37
  their head, talking to everybody throughout the world.
• 5:38
  Yeah, changing messages, you know, very quick.
• 5:41
  So, you know, we we become so old that science fiction is now
• 5:45
  real. Is now the reality, Yeah.
• 5:47
  And information on demand and people on demand, right.
• 5:50
  Everybody's accessible instantly these days.
• 5:53
  It is absolutely wild. I.
• 5:56
  You know, so you, you kind of got into a little bit about how
• 6:00
  your business model has changed over time.
• 6:02
  And we we were chatting about it before we officially started the
• 6:05
  episode. But you know, one of the things
• 6:09
  that businesses struggle with is the pivot, right?
• 6:13
  The changes that you have to make is stay ahead of your
• 6:17
  industry and be on top of things and the people that don't fit it
• 6:21
  over time and the getting left behind going out of yours,
• 6:23
  right? So obviously technology's
• 6:28
  changing at an ever increasing rate.
• 6:32
  You've had to keep up with this over time and kind of stay at
• 6:34
  the front side of that wave. I how does it look like?
• 6:38
  How do you do that as a business, right?
• 6:39
  Like if you're going to tell someone like, hey, this is what
• 6:43
  you got to do and stay ahead of your industry, Like what, what
• 6:45
  do you do? How do you do it, especially
• 6:46
  your industry that moves so fast?
• 6:48
  Well, human beings inherently don't like change, right?
• 6:51
  We've kind of learned that in this industry, right?
• 6:53
  Yeah, that's we thrive on it because we like technology, we
• 6:57
  like change, we like the, you know, when a new iOS comes out,
• 7:00
  we love that when new product comes out and they serve, you
• 7:02
  know, new cloud service, new, you know, hardware, whatever it
• 7:05
  is, we like that. But other, you know, for the
• 7:08
  most part business like standards, right.
• 7:12
  So one of the ways that we've, we've pivoted and that we went
• 7:15
  from kind of like the, I wouldn't really call organized
• 7:18
  chaos. Like the oldest way of doing IT
• 7:20
  was like generally it was like a fire drift.
• 7:23
  All this person needs that over here might be send three people
• 7:25
  over there and just take care of that.
• 7:26
  Meanwhile, 3 other fires start and then you just rushed three
• 7:29
  other resources back in that other direction.
• 7:32
  And like that is exhausting. That's exhausting for your team
• 7:36
  that providing the support. It's exhausting for your
• 7:39
  customers just to kind of like just feel like you're just
• 7:41
  cancel, just stopping off fires and then you're going over the
• 7:44
  next one and a bunch of pops up over there and it was just
• 7:47
  chaos. And so where we pivoted was to
• 7:51
  standardize, right, the old IT models.
• 7:55
  And we've still even see it today.
• 7:57
  And I and I don't know how some people still like those
• 8:00
  environments, but it's like, you know, the Alicart like, oh,
• 8:03
  we're going to do, here's the 10 services that you offer.
• 8:06
  I want this, this, I want 5. And so that creates a dilemma of
• 8:11
  like, OK, well, they didn't want this, you know, EDR, you know,
• 8:16
  protection against malware or against ransomware.
• 8:19
  They don't want that. So what do we do when they get
• 8:21
  ransomware? Do we just let it burn?
• 8:24
  No, you know, and so. You so that creates all this
• 8:28
  communication in this non standard way of reacting because
• 8:31
  it's like I have these 14 different contract types.
• 8:35
  And so four or five years ago we just said we can't do that, Like
• 8:40
  we can't allow people to choose their protections.
• 8:46
  And that's a maybe a crude way or maybe a over direct way of
• 8:51
  saying it, like we can't allow anyone to choose that.
• 8:53
  But you're, you're, you're getting, you know, you're,
• 8:58
  you're getting to where you're not 100% sure what that
• 9:01
  protection actually gets. So we just created a program
• 9:04
  that's just like, hey, you know, from A-Z.
• 9:07
  This is just what we're going to do.
• 9:08
  We're going to just cover your desktop installations.
• 9:11
  We're going to cover the way that you monitor cybersecurity.
• 9:14
  We're going to, you know, cover your employee training for cyber
• 9:17
  security to, you know, train the human firewall.
• 9:20
  We're going all these things are going here, your risk
• 9:23
  assessments, your vulnerability assessments.
• 9:24
  We're going to do this right up to this point.
• 9:26
  Then we're going to ask her to have a pen test.
• 9:28
  They have trust and verifies what we do for you.
• 9:31
  That shows the program is in place.
• 9:32
  That's being effective. So we in Pennant.
• 9:35
  Pennant test means penetration test.
• 9:37
  So that's essentially where you purposely try to break the
• 9:40
  system to see where the vulnerabilities.
• 9:42
  Are Yep, you'll, you'll have a third party service come through
• 9:45
  and just say, OK, we're going to, you know, we're going to
• 9:48
  task, we're going to see if you bend, hopefully you don't break
• 9:50
  if there are instances is every break.
• 9:52
  Hey, is this a a vendor specific vulnerability that's not patched
• 9:56
  yet? OK, that's great.
• 9:58
  We know about that. We know it's a weakness, but
• 10:00
  what's the controls that we put in place to monitor it
• 10:03
  minimizes, you know, you know, its ability to affect our
• 10:06
  business. So we put in that full program
• 10:10
  and there's no more like it. It's IT of yesterday is here's
• 10:15
  block hours and we're going to wait till you have a problem
• 10:19
  that break and fix. Give us a call when your company
• 10:21
  is running inefficient. And to me that's never really
• 10:24
  made sense. We've strived to like kind of
• 10:26
  get to this point of like where we're proactive instead of
• 10:29
  reactive and where we want to, you know, where we're taking
• 10:32
  things is where we're going to sit down.
• 10:34
  You know, we want to sit down and, you know, do a tabletop
• 10:36
  exercises where we're like, OK, you just got ransomware, you're
• 10:40
  a payroll company. What what happens?
• 10:44
  And then we just sit back and we let their leadership team
• 10:47
  discuss that say, well, it sounds like you're missing, you
• 10:50
  know, some of this in your hands and response plan sounds like
• 10:53
  you're missing some of this. What is your return to business
• 10:55
  like how if you were had ransomware and your systems were
• 10:58
  unavailable for 48 hours, what does that look like to you?
• 11:01
  OK, you need to be back in business in 24 hours.
• 11:04
  Here's what that cost is. Do you have the business model
• 11:08
  that supports that type of profitability that gives you
• 11:11
  that return to business? You know, technology like can
• 11:15
  you restore this back? So those are all because you get
• 11:17
  some people say, oh, all my stuff is backed up in the cloud.
• 11:19
  OK, great. What happens?
• 11:21
  You need to restore, you know how fast is your Internet
• 11:24
  connection? You have 50 mic connection, but
• 11:26
  you got 3 terabytes worth of data that needs to be restored
• 11:29
  down. And when you start to do that
• 11:31
  test restore, it says, oh, it'll be restored and, you know, 36
• 11:34
  hours. Can, can you explain for our
• 11:37
  listeners explain what ransomware is?
• 11:39
  Because it is scary. And I, I, I know that a lot of
• 11:44
  people do, but I also have to assume there's people that don't
• 11:47
  know what ransomware is. So just explain that.
• 11:50
  Yeah. So ransomware is where they, you
• 11:52
  know, execute malicious code to a system or systems within your,
• 11:56
  you know, your environment and that it will encrypt the data
• 12:01
  with an encryption key that they only have reversible in which
• 12:05
  then they'll make a demand to you.
• 12:06
  So hence the ransomware. They say, hey, you give us, you
• 12:10
  know, you know, 5 Bitcoin or 1000 Bitcoin and if you give us
• 12:15
  that, we'll give you your data back and so.
• 12:19
  So they're holding your stuff hostage?
• 12:21
  They're holding you hostage until you do that unless you if
• 12:24
  you have good backups and you have good wall back procedures
• 12:28
  and things like that. If you have quick technology on
• 12:29
  your endpoints, you can use or just wall that stuff right back
• 12:32
  in a few minutes, restore your data, do all that good stuff.
• 12:35
  If you have the white, you know, protections and programs in
• 12:37
  place. If you want the Ala carte, you
• 12:40
  know, model, you're kind of just spending the.
• 12:43
  Chamber out, then you get expensive.
• 12:45
  Yeah, yeah. And then so you never want to be
• 12:47
  in the spot and we've even heard this, but I have, I have cyber
• 12:51
  jets. OK, so do you want to go through
• 12:54
  where you have to make a cyber claim and just say, OK, well, at
• 12:56
  least I'm covered for the $2,000,000 worth of data I just
• 12:58
  lost that you just built over, you know, 20 years.
• 13:02
  That's a difficult position to be in.
• 13:04
  So you don't really like your cyber insurance should be
• 13:07
  breaking, you know, you don't break this glass here emergency,
• 13:11
  right? That should be We're hoping that
• 13:13
  we could take care of that fire before.
• 13:14
  Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, it is wild.
• 13:18
  I and it's funny to you because I read.
• 13:20
  I mean, I don't know, I probably get 10 different newsletters in
• 13:23
  my inbox every morning with different industry stuff.
• 13:26
  And every single one of them always has something about
• 13:30
  somebody who has gotten hacked is had a, a ransomware, a a
• 13:35
  malware. It's like all this DDoS attacks,
• 13:38
  like all this different stuff that's out there.
• 13:40
  It is such a scary world in visual environment.
• 13:43
  Yeah, we just did a Facebook and liked impost about, you know,
• 13:48
  international conflicts, right. Obviously everybody's where you
• 13:52
  know, the conflicts that are going on right now.
• 13:54
  And then you just see, you know, three days later as we put this
• 13:57
  out. We've been doing this quite a
• 13:58
  while. We we know the trends that goes
• 14:01
  over then you have, you know, pro Iradian company or, or I, I
• 14:08
  shouldn't say a company, but you know, a group haptivists,
• 14:12
  haptivists, right? So they, they, they targeted a
• 14:16
  major US medical company and, you know, launch ransomware
• 14:21
  denial service tax and, and targeted it was hard that even
• 14:26
  really they, they took over some endpoints and just deleted data.
• 14:30
  This was more of a Melissa stack later.
• 14:31
  So some of your hacktivists will do the ransomware, make some
• 14:35
  money out of it. Someone just go in there capture
• 14:37
  flag, just say hey that we get it and others are looking to be
• 14:40
  malicious and they're just deleting data and just say hey,
• 14:42
  we captured the backups, we got the data as well, We're just
• 14:45
  going to be malicious we're. Burning your stuff right around.
• 14:48
  So that's your that's your unattended consequences of, you
• 14:52
  know, you know, the international conflicts.
• 14:54
  And sometimes it doesn't even involve our own country.
• 14:57
  It's just that we're a wealthy nation.
• 15:00
  And so you are a target for ransomware and if you make that
• 15:04
  ransom low enough and you're like, hey, well, you know, for
• 15:06
  $10,000 I can just be done with this.
• 15:10
  That's $3,000,000 worth of data. I'll pay the $10,000.
• 15:14
  And some of those groups are very nice.
• 15:15
  They, they give you the encryption key.
• 15:17
  They give you the encryption key and every, you know, that's the
• 15:20
  purpose of having a program like this in place, so that you have
• 15:23
  the resource of place to properly handle Manson.
• 15:26
  You don't just give them full $10,000.
• 15:28
  If you were in that unfortunate state that you had to pay the
• 15:31
  ransom, you would say, OK, we're going to give you a 2500.
• 15:35
  Now you show us that you actually have our data and
• 15:38
  you're, you could ask for proof of that and maybe even hopefully
• 15:41
  do that. Forget the point 500 as well.
• 15:43
  Show a proof. And they usually do they,
• 15:45
  they're generally very nice. They'll leave a nice text file
• 15:48
  behind that says that we have this data and here's the data
• 15:50
  that we have. And sometimes they leave a
• 15:52
  little folder with the data that they've captured and, and you
• 15:55
  know, uploaded. The other times they just tell
• 15:58
  you and then they can show you and then you say, OK, now give
• 16:02
  us all this and then we'll do. And then you got to have, you
• 16:04
  got to hire lawyers, you got to hire people that specialize in
• 16:06
  and that's where your cyber insurance comes in to handle all
• 16:11
  that expensive stuff. But then most of the time you're
• 16:14
  a big enough organization or you're kind of a mid sized
• 16:16
  organization, you might have the proper coverage with us.
• 16:19
  So that's that's we're going through the exercises and going
• 16:23
  through the stuff that we talk about.
• 16:24
  Yeah, from some stuff. Tell me I, you know, it's almost
• 16:29
  being becoming cliche right now to talk about AI and every
• 16:32
  single business conversation, but it's in every single
• 16:37
  business conversation and that and I'm very curious how
• 16:40
  everyone is reacting or responding to AI and how it
• 16:43
  using it and afraid of it, love it, implementing it.
• 16:50
  Are do you guys see AI impacting your industry and are you making
• 16:54
  pivots because of the AI and what it's offering and doing?
• 16:57
  So AI is still learning, right? And so it is it's obviously like
• 17:02
  one of the biggest things, you know, like every time you scroll
• 17:03
  through Facebook, you see all these ads.
• 17:06
  AI is going to create more jobs or is there create more
• 17:08
  millionaires in the next, you know, six months than the last
• 17:12
  20 years has a bubble, blah. Some truth to that.
• 17:16
  Some, you know, you know, oversells marketing to that as
• 17:19
  well. But AI is not something to be
• 17:23
  feared. It's not something to be, you
• 17:26
  know, running into either. It's something to be respected,
• 17:28
  right? And so like from a cyber
• 17:30
  perspective that we look at, we talked to a lot of our customers
• 17:35
  about, you know, hey, make sure you have like an AI policy in
• 17:38
  place first because like right now, people are, you know,
• 17:43
  businesses right now. So you're familiar with the term
• 17:46
  like shadow IT and where people would, you know, bring in
• 17:49
  technology into your business and connect them to your, you
• 17:51
  know, network and they could be, you know, creating threats, shit
• 17:54
  of AI is that same type of that or, you know, so right now
• 17:57
  you're getting where people are like, you know what, I'm going
• 17:59
  to make my job easier. I'm going to take this financial
• 18:01
  spreadsheet here. I'm going to drop it into
• 18:03
  ChatGPT and I'm going to have to do my monthly calculations for
• 18:07
  me, and I'm going to turn that into my boss of record time.
• 18:11
  You just taught AI what's yours? You know, what's your, you know,
• 18:14
  statement looks like? And if you're not in a paid
• 18:17
  subscription where the confidentiality and things like
• 18:20
  that, that data has been learned, that data can be
• 18:22
  disseminated, you know, search. Yeah, it can be uploaded into
• 18:26
  the chat engine. It's what?
• 18:29
  And so you're saying, you know, businesses should standardize,
• 18:33
  standardize on AI workflow, just like you know what we talked
• 18:35
  about, we standardize on the computers that we put in place.
• 18:38
  So the firewalls that we use, you know, the cyber, you know,
• 18:41
  training materials that you everything standardized.
• 18:43
  Businesses should be looking to standardize or AI practices and
• 18:47
  what they're using, what engines they're using it for, if that
• 18:50
  data is being, you know, protected, if it's, you know,
• 18:53
  vulnerable, because now, you know, the hackers are using AI
• 18:57
  to learn about businesses and all the information that is in
• 19:00
  the engines that record speed, right?
• 19:02
  So whatever you're free to get into the machine is learning and
• 19:06
  it's, you know, can be parsed, you know, learning to be
• 19:08
  searched and to be used and so used.
• 19:10
  Against you. For that used.
• 19:12
  Against you and so you got to be careful what you're teaching and
• 19:15
  you got to make sure that you have you know close
• 19:18
  subscriptions that are to your business and then everybody
• 19:20
  looks at it and this is you're going right back to where we
• 19:23
  were you know 10 years ago in IT when someone's like well I don't
• 19:26
  want to buy a copilot license for $35 per user per month OK
• 19:31
  here's the free versions and just put all your information
• 19:33
  out there let's help research it and then take $300,000 a year
• 19:36
  because they you know learned to bring a bunch of business and
• 19:41
  you see it on social media what was the Elena's saying that they
• 19:44
  just had where they had the character created and it would
• 19:46
  show like you know your diploma to show what you do for a living
• 19:50
  that'll show your dog there what kind of dog you have so that
• 19:53
  picture was worth 1000 words everybody's went through created
• 19:57
  that and they're like those trends are created to garner
• 20:01
  information about you so it could be socially.
• 20:04
  Engineered now they know your daughter Bud's name.
• 20:06
  They know where you went to college.
• 20:07
  Got me your birthday when? You, your profession, you know.
• 20:11
  Yeah, it's it's like those social media posts where it's
• 20:14
  like 10 questions, right? Like what's your favorite color?
• 20:17
  You know all those. Where security questions when
• 20:19
  you log into your bank, where did you meet your spouse?
• 20:22
  That's right in the I was like, you're put it.
• 20:24
  So your secret questions is a social media trap and people
• 20:28
  don't realize it. That's the same thing.
• 20:29
  The AI stuff that's just, hey, show me your AI character.
• 20:32
  Oh, I guess everybody else is doing it.
• 20:35
  That's being done is wild. And so.
• 20:38
  Yeah. I know I've been reading a lot
• 20:40
  about Claude bots and like AI agentic equity AI agents that
• 20:48
  people are putting on their laptop to do all and you can get
• 20:50
  it full autonomy and it's like sending emails like you do
• 20:53
  different stuff and it's like. Yeah, but that's to be right now
• 20:57
  at the stage that it's at is wild because so like we're like
• 21:03
  I said, I'd be lying up. I said I don't use AI.
• 21:05
  We use, we use it a lot. We use it a lot, but that's
• 21:09
  foundational stuff that in my opinion, technology should
• 21:11
  enhance your you know, you're you're, you know, given there it
• 21:15
  is, right? And AI is really good for
• 21:19
  creating the foundation of what you're trying to create.
• 21:23
  Story. You know, we still would like to
• 21:25
  see people, you know, retain their creativity, right?
• 21:28
  Yeah. Use the AI to speed up that
• 21:30
  creativity. Absolutely embrace that, right?
• 21:33
  Use that to create a better product, a better endpoint, to
• 21:36
  shorten the time frame that it takes you to get to a business
• 21:39
  outcome. Right.
• 21:40
  And that's what we're really, you know, trying to help our
• 21:42
  customers with is like, let's not be scared of it.
• 21:45
  You know, let's use it responsibly and then let's use
• 21:48
  it not to, you know, limit your team's natural given abilities
• 21:55
  and creativity. And you know, AII use I would
• 22:00
  use very prickly for a lot of you know, customer things.
• 22:02
  I I will feed dated. We have a private closed, you
• 22:05
  know, a copilot subscription that is based to our Microsoft
• 22:09
  tenancy. It is not publicly accessible
• 22:13
  and we were used up there where we were well feed in some
• 22:16
  analytics and say OK, we need these reports for these meetings
• 22:19
  and so on like that. We build that.
• 22:21
  We still have to review it. AI is still being taught by us.
• 22:24
  All you do, it gets more accurate every time we do this.
• 22:27
  And it does help, you know, put together and help us see trends
• 22:31
  quicker. Yeah, it does help us see
• 22:33
  network events quicker. So it is very, very good.
• 22:38
  But we've also done this very responsibly over the last, you
• 22:41
  know, 12 to 18 months. It's not something I would just
• 22:43
  say, hey, just start taking these, let's start throwing it
• 22:46
  in there and hey, do our job for us.
• 22:48
  Because then that that becomes we're, we're hands off and then
• 22:52
  we're not driving any valley. And so you still want the human
• 22:55
  to interpret and say, I, you know, these are some things that
• 22:57
  we need to do. Yeah, I agree fully.
• 23:00
  I mean, I, I can easily say that I spent four or five hours a day
• 23:06
  using AI for different activities in our business and
• 23:10
  the, there's not a single conversation I had.
• 23:13
  I, I primarily use Quad and there's not a single
• 23:16
  conversation that I have with Quad where I don't have I, I'm
• 23:19
  looking at what flaw is giving me and I have to say, hey, that
• 23:23
  doesn't seem right to me. Can you please cross reference
• 23:26
  that against these other things and it comes back, oh, you're
• 23:28
  right, I missed this I and it makes they all make mistakes.
• 23:32
  So it's it's certainly is not that.
• 23:35
  Yes. Without without error.
• 23:37
  For AI to be it's most effective, you, you have to
• 23:40
  train and you have to correct it.
• 23:42
  Then you have to make sure that what you're putting in isn't
• 23:46
  given, you know, especially from a business perspective.
• 23:48
  If you're if you're an inexperienced business owner and
• 23:50
  you're letting AI give you projections, there might be some
• 23:54
  things that AI hasn't learned yet.
• 23:56
  Same thing with cybersecurity. Like, you know, I see all these
• 23:58
  things where it's like, oh, we have a cyber, you know, engine
• 24:01
  in the background. It's like, yeah, but you should
• 24:02
  still have something really smart looking over that.
• 24:06
  He should still, you know, have a human being that has 20 years
• 24:09
  of experience as AI doesn't have 20 years of experience yet.
• 24:11
  That's right. Now, the beauty of AI is that
• 24:13
  you have a lot of people feeding the information.
• 24:15
  So we can close that gap pretty quick and they'll get there, you
• 24:19
  know, with with it has some its accuracies.
• 24:21
  That's and that's you know what? What It is artificial for a
• 24:24
  reason. Yeah.
• 24:25
  Well, that's like with the new workflow automation stuff that
• 24:28
  we're doing, AI is helping us with solution design to get
• 24:33
  there a lot faster. However, we still need to have
• 24:35
  our software engineer reviewing that solution to make sure that
• 24:39
  it is accurate and is not like on a couple of instances we're
• 24:44
  getting back a solution design and so horribly complicated and
• 24:48
  has bits and parts and things that's like that doesn't even be
• 24:51
  in there. And so let's, we can remove that
• 24:53
  whole thing from this. And if you were just trusting AI
• 24:57
  fully with what it's giving you and then just acting on it, you
• 24:59
  might be making some bad decisions.
• 25:00
  Yeah, we have, we have a full time position that that's all
• 25:02
  they do. So anything that goes into our
• 25:05
  cyber ranches, anything that goes to our security operation
• 25:08
  center, any of those alerts that is still you know looked at by
• 25:11
  first by a unit. Yes.
• 25:13
  Looking for those areas just just one thing that AI is not
• 25:15
  really good at detecting at times is some of the false
• 25:18
  positives. Now, as we train that it's
• 25:21
  better, you know, but because some of these, you know, some of
• 25:26
  these engines, you look for impossible travel, right?
• 25:27
  And impossible travel is essentially can I log in from
• 25:30
  multiple places in a without a certain amount of time and that
• 25:35
  be a valid log. Now, you know, so if, if you're
• 25:39
  logging in from New York, New Jersey and Miami, FL 3 times in
• 25:44
  18 minutes, that's, that's a possible travel right there.
• 25:48
  There isn't anything known to, you know, the man that can get
• 25:51
  you from New York and New Jersey to Miami in 18 minutes.
• 25:55
  Yeah. Well, we have that too with we
• 25:57
  had multiple team members that have to log in the systems and
• 26:00
  they're like, let's just say it's a Google e-mail address and
• 26:03
  I've got four different people that are logging into that
• 26:05
  e-mail address are different reasons.
• 26:07
  And they're all a a good like impossible and would not be able
• 26:12
  to cover that distance in the two minutes difference.
• 26:15
  Right. So those are what we either call
• 26:16
  white noise or false positives. And then so that person will
• 26:19
  say, hey, these events right here, those are we have
• 26:23
  customers that when they access data on their mobile device,
• 26:26
  they use an anonymizer or use, you know, VPN technologies.
• 26:30
  And it's like, well, OK, when you're using an anonymizer
• 26:32
  that's showing you're coming from IP address in London and
• 26:35
  that's, that's an impossible travel.
• 26:38
  So we have to, you know, start curbing people's behaviors of
• 26:41
  and even accessibility. We've brought that to a lot of
• 26:44
  customers. You don't you want these people
• 26:46
  to have access to this is when they're accessing their data.
• 26:50
  So on one hand, you have AI, you know, tools that are analyzing
• 26:56
  all the about launch, which is very good, right?
• 26:58
  That's very tough for humans to go through and look across to
• 27:01
  your customer base and say, hey, these people are logging in over
• 27:04
  here and send them an alert. So that's a good part of AI bad
• 27:07
  part there is it's not smarting off the knowing times.
• 27:09
  If that's a, you know, if that's an anonymizer, that's not really
• 27:14
  impossible travel that's coming from here.
• 27:17
  So we just we tune that and how many, how, how many files they
• 27:22
  delete. We, we message for or, or we, we
• 27:24
  monitor for mass file deletion, mass file uploads, because that
• 27:27
  shows criminal, you know, provential, you know, criminal
• 27:30
  activity, right? We're we're taking data.
• 27:33
  However, people have their phones linked to their OneDrive.
• 27:37
  If you're an engineering company or you're a construction
• 27:39
  company, you might be taking pictures of a house that you
• 27:42
  just finished and a eyes more. Oh, there was just all these
• 27:45
  files just uploaded. Well, you just took 30 pictures
• 27:48
  of a house that you're going to sell or or you're going to put
• 27:51
  on your website for the marketing.
• 27:53
  So AI good told us that there is a mass file upload wasn't smart
• 28:01
  enough to know that they're a construction company.
• 28:02
  So train those behaviors. We, you know, do that.
• 28:06
  That's how currently you should be handling your Pro Sega.
• 28:12
  You know, it's every day I piss and moan about having this two
• 28:20
  factor authentication stuff pop up in my phone because my team
• 28:24
  is accessing something. I'm going to stop pissing and
• 28:26
  moaning about it now that you've told me about the impossible
• 28:28
  travel. I thought it was just the system
• 28:30
  being a pain in my ass, not realizing that what it's
• 28:33
  actually doing is saying like, hey, you've got a login in
• 28:36
  Clifton Park, a login in Schenectady, a login in
• 28:39
  Queensbury, a login in Ballston Spa, Greenfield, You know, like
• 28:43
  it's all these different geographies around the area and
• 28:45
  it's actually flagging that. I never knew that.
• 28:48
  Even MFA to be defeated, right? You know, you can get you get a
• 28:51
  session token, you can get in between that and you have a
• 28:54
  limited time to login. But if that does happen, that's
• 28:57
  still going to tell you that like, hey, if that person is
• 29:00
  monitoring, yeah, because it was just, you know, code that's on
• 29:02
  here. And then they're going to launch
• 29:03
  it from, you know, play a data center that they have in, you
• 29:08
  know, Los Angeles that's still good.
• 29:10
  Let's get along that if possible, travel.
• 29:11
  So you're still have that looking for them, the ITDI,
• 29:14
  right? So you're able to look at all
• 29:18
  these events going across multiple platforms.
• 29:20
  So right now our monitoring, we look at, you know, not only
• 29:24
  e-mail, cloud and the endpoint so that all those events are
• 29:29
  correlated. So it's called seams system or
• 29:32
  system identity and alerts and management, right?
• 29:34
  So it'll look through all these systems, all these alerts across
• 29:38
  firewalls, across, you know, across desktops, across your
• 29:42
  cloud one it'll, it'll take all those events, correlate that and
• 29:47
  say something doesn't add up here.
• 29:50
  And then that also keeps timestamps, right?
• 29:52
  If you have, if you have an event and you have to provide
• 29:56
  forensics in your type of industry, we have the time
• 29:59
  stamps that go across where all the stuff happened, how it
• 30:02
  exactly how it happened. So you know, The Who, why,
• 30:04
  where, why, how of that. So that should save you some
• 30:07
  money on your forensics, you know all those, you know, all
• 30:10
  those types of events. So AI is good in those aspects.
• 30:14
  It can do all those things now very cheaply versus, you know,
• 30:17
  back in the days working with the banks, we used to have the
• 30:20
  train, you know, same solutions for months, if not for years,
• 30:25
  going through logs manually. Now AI is doing that on the fly.
• 30:29
  In minutes. Right.
• 30:30
  And alerting you it's parsing white noise from.
• 30:35
  These are actionable activities that need that need human
• 30:40
  interaction. And then you go through and.
• 30:43
  So it's like any cool, right? Like a, you know, a hammer.
• 30:45
  You can build a house with a hammer.
• 30:47
  You can also hit somebody over the head and with it, right?
• 30:48
  Like so. Yeah.
• 30:51
  So it can be, you know, to be productive, working short.
• 30:54
  Yeah, or destructive. Yeah, so, so I know we're
• 30:57
  getting short on time, but I, I do want to spend a couple
• 31:00
  minutes talking about this amazing new office that you're
• 31:03
  in, right. This place is really cool,
• 31:07
  beautiful fun. Obviously you got a coffee shop
• 31:11
  next door, so that helps with productivity.
• 31:13
  But tell me about the new location and about what what the
• 31:17
  new location is doing for you as business.
• 31:19
  Yeah, I mean, so this, the dream of this business has never been
• 31:25
  about making money. It's always been about, you
• 31:27
  know, people and outcomes. I I, I generally, I like helping
• 31:30
  people. Skill set I had was technology.
• 31:34
  I used to love going in and fixing problems that people
• 31:37
  couldn't figure out, right. I love the needle in the
• 31:40
  haystack and finding that and, and getting the bottom of it.
• 31:43
  And, you know, we existed it in Washington County for for a
• 31:47
  long, long time where I grew up. I'm a third generation raised in
• 31:50
  the 4th generation there and always wanted to do it there.
• 31:54
  I've always had my eye on this building.
• 31:57
  I've inquired about it a number of times over the years.
• 32:00
  And I and I wanted to build a corporate headquarters in
• 32:01
  Washington County. And just on the card right now,
• 32:04
  we don't have the infrastructure to do the things that we need to
• 32:06
  do to make that dream a reality. So I said when I was talking to
• 32:09
  somebody else, I said, sometimes you get the, you know, create
• 32:12
  the dream and sometimes you get to join somebody's dream.
• 32:15
  So when Brian and Ben, I saw their, you know, their article,
• 32:20
  you know, and saw them, you know, say, hey, the place has
• 32:23
  been bought and they're going through stop out here and talk
• 32:26
  to him and, and went through, you know, kind of, you know,
• 32:29
  walked through the building with Brian and Brock.
• 32:32
  He does most of the, you know, he's more part of a creative
• 32:35
  process around here. And I still know the building.
• 32:38
  So he and I walked you. We started exchanging some ideas
• 32:40
  and we're going, yeah, you could do this, you do that, you could
• 32:42
  do this. And and we're like, you know,
• 32:47
  this is the tie. You know, we, we, we look at
• 32:50
  everything as it goes. You know, this is more central
• 32:54
  to our customers. This is puts us 15 minutes
• 32:59
  closer to 300,000 people in the, you know, our talent pool.
• 33:02
  It's bigger. Open us up to a nice short drive
• 33:04
  to go to the park area, Albany area shorter, you know, drives
• 33:08
  to our customers. So from a business perspective
• 33:12
  that works well, right? The dream that we wanted to
• 33:16
  create was a mixed-use building where we had other businesses
• 33:20
  that would be synergetic to our employees and create a good
• 33:23
  environment for them. And this this place created that
• 33:28
  right? You know, having Stinky's coffee
• 33:30
  next door and having, you know, you can get your haircuts here.
• 33:32
  You can, you know, and then there's some other stuff.
• 33:34
  I'll guess Brian probably would want me to yell some other
• 33:36
  things that are coming in here. I'll leave that can't.
• 33:38
  Talk about it. He can't talk about that.
• 33:39
  But they're just, you know, it's good culture based off and as
• 33:43
  you, you asked earlier like what have we been doing to this
• 33:46
  business? It was really pivoted, right.
• 33:49
  So in that discussion we kind of just talked about the customer
• 33:53
  outcome base basing that we did. But one of the other things that
• 33:56
  we've addressed of the company in the last three or four years,
• 33:58
  five years is culture. Culture is one of the most
• 34:04
  important things to successful client outcomes.
• 34:07
  Our employee retention is, I mean, right now we only have one
• 34:11
  person on the staff that's been here less than a year and I
• 34:14
  think that'll be up in like 10 days.
• 34:15
  Everybody else has been here for three or four or five years, six
• 34:19
  years. And that's familiar faces for
• 34:22
  our customers. That's good tribal knowledge.
• 34:24
  We know where everything is and our customers.
• 34:26
  But that speaks a lot to the culture that we've created here.
• 34:29
  We're, we're looking for great human beings first.
• 34:32
  And we'll train the skills. We will use our tools to enhance
• 34:37
  their skills. We will train them.
• 34:38
  We will get that better. This allows us to do that right.
• 34:41
  This gives our team more, you know, food choices closer to,
• 34:45
  you know, get your car washed right next door.
• 34:47
  You know, gas is right across the street.
• 34:49
  Time is a form of currency. And that dream was to do that,
• 34:55
  which provided an experience for our team to just hey, during my
• 34:58
  lunch break, I'm going to get my haircut and I don't have to do
• 35:00
  that after work. I could go spend more time with
• 35:02
  my kids. I could get to the ball game
• 35:03
  quicker. I could, you know, grab food
• 35:05
  right here. I can have food doordashed here.
• 35:06
  I can have Instacart right here, put in my car, drive home,
• 35:10
  Grabble Timmy, grabble Jane, right?
• 35:12
  And you know, time is a form of currency now.
• 35:15
  People want everything yesterday.
• 35:18
  This puts us closer to our customers so we can serve them
• 35:20
  faster. This puts us into a more
• 35:22
  centralized location for our team to have a better experience
• 35:25
  for them to get here quicker and, you know, get to some
• 35:29
  ancillary things that they want a little quicker.
• 35:31
  So Ben and Brian, I can't, you know, tip the ass of them.
• 35:35
  They did a great job, amazing job.
• 35:37
  They were very accommodating to, you know, if you ask Brian, he
• 35:40
  might not have to now he we all along well, but I'll say, but
• 35:43
  we, we hey, can we do this? Can we do that on the ceiling?
• 35:47
  I want to they did a perfect job of accommodating this and making
• 35:51
  sure that we're going to be successful here and everybody's
• 35:53
  going to love the space and the team loves the space.
• 35:56
  And we've had so much traffic coming into this building from
• 35:59
  people going into stinkies and these guys have been great.
• 36:04
  You know, the salon next door was there great people, the, you
• 36:06
  know, Barber shop down the way. They're great people.
• 36:10
  So that's, that's been, that's been awesome.
• 36:12
  And we, we really love the space and we, we love the exposure.
• 36:17
  So we we could be happier with the decision, you know, even
• 36:20
  though there was some reservations of, you know,
• 36:23
  leaving the hometown and the home counting, but I I think
• 36:28
  more business respective it was. Right, make a lot of status.
• 36:31
  Well, it it's amazing location and again at, you know, car
• 36:36
  count out there, I mean there's got to be thousands of cars go
• 36:39
  down that road every day. I think the the traffic study
• 36:42
  day was 32. 1032 thousand a day whole I mean this whole corridor
• 36:47
  has become really like yeah busy and happening you.
• 36:52
  Know, well, and that's what you're talking about, right,
• 36:53
  from an economic standpoint, economic development standpoint,
• 36:56
  right They, they built the you know, sewer water down through
• 36:59
  here a few years ago and now you're starting to see all the
• 37:01
  newer buildings pop up and it's just that's just something
• 37:04
  that's that was really the the the determining factor for us.
• 37:09
  And like I said, we looked at this building for 10 years and
• 37:12
  when you see what the job that they were doing, well, they were
• 37:14
  like, yeah, yeah, we, we need to be here.
• 37:16
  Oh, and it's, they do, like I said, I've done a great job.
• 37:18
  And we're looking forward to the, you know, the last 7
• 37:21
  tendencies, you know, get built out here and adding even more
• 37:25
  value, you know, to our team and to this, you know, to the, this
• 37:27
  community that's really welcomed us, you know, so, you know, it's
• 37:33
  the, the local chambers have been really accommodating and,
• 37:36
  you know, you know, we're really welcoming, you know, to our, to
• 37:39
  our new move. So that's been great as well.
• 37:41
  So. Yeah, and plans for Fitzgerald
• 37:44
  Brothers here for Saint Patrick's Day on Tuesday.
• 37:47
  I mean, it's a stone's throw down the road for corned beef
• 37:51
  Blue Boris. Yeah, yeah.
• 37:54
  With the corned beef. With the corned beef we got.
• 37:55
  Those corned beef series of gear.
• 37:58
  Well, listen, I really appreciate taking the time.
• 38:00
  I know you got a lot going on, so taking an hour out to talk to
• 38:02
  us. Appreciate your time as well.
• 38:05
  I mean, it was only. No, it's, I'll tell you, you
• 38:08
  know, I mean, we've known each other a long time, but watching
• 38:10
  your business and what it's done over the last 20 years is
• 38:13
  amazing. And it's pretty much every
• 38:15
  business owner's dream as far as I'm aware.
• 38:17
  So, you know, being able to grow and go and provide for families
• 38:21
  and people and team and community and you know, that's
• 38:24
  what it's all about. That's that's the main thing,
• 38:26
  right, you know, being able to, you know, get back as much as
• 38:28
  you can't help. So that take a lot of pride in,
• 38:31
  you know, making sure our team is taken care of at, you know,
• 38:34
  and that we go everywhere that we absolutely can.
• 38:37
  So yeah, they said we've known each other for a long time.
• 38:40
  You know, you've, you've evolved a few different.
• 38:43
  We all knew s s and that's so. And that's a good thing about
• 38:46
  getting to be old men, right? You have to look back at.
• 38:50
  It yeah, we know the path, we know this tribal and it's and
• 38:54
  your podcast is great. You know, I've Ross a lot of it
• 38:56
  online and then get to see you guys, you know, have other
• 39:01
  people tell their story, right, Because it's amazing how many of
• 39:04
  us have been small business owners and have very different
• 39:09
  but very similar past. And I think it's a very good
• 39:12
  educational piece that you guys do to say, hey, this is what the
• 39:16
  everyday American goes through every day.
• 39:18
  You know, business owner goes through.
• 39:19
  When there's so much cannon fodder on the national news, you
• 39:22
  get a good local source there where you guys go through and
• 39:25
  it's like, Hey, I know you look at all this nonsense over here,
• 39:28
  but these are real people go really real things, real
• 39:31
  struggles, and they're still doing everything they can to
• 39:33
  help each other out and doing those things.
• 39:36
  I think it people get to focus more on this type of stuff, this
• 39:40
  type of content, build the the greater good of everybody and
• 39:44
  not red or blue type stuff. That's that's awesome.
• 39:48
  And so I've been glad to watch you guys, you know, bring some
• 39:51
  real good quality content about real people doing real things
• 39:55
  with real struggles with real results.
• 39:57
  Yeah, I, you know, it's like was just on with Jacques Equie the
• 40:01
  other day and you know, I was saying that I, I truly believe
• 40:05
  that if we all just focused on making our local communities
• 40:09
  great, if everybody did that, then every community would be
• 40:12
  great. And what a world we learn in.
• 40:14
  So I like, I really believe you're the news.
• 40:16
  Right off homeless, homeless on on your your level group and
• 40:20
  just that's it. You know what I mean?
• 40:22
  And I'm not saying like national things aren't things to be
• 40:26
  worried about, but as what I'm saying for the halls part, I
• 40:28
  mean, if you focus it on your circle and you're, you know,
• 40:32
  helping your local people, yeah, it's it seems like things are a
• 40:36
  lot brighter. Help your neighbor, help your
• 40:38
  community, buy from local businesses makes everybody.
• 40:41
  Well, it's doom and gloom. More ridiculous.
• 40:43
  More uplifting. Right up her downwards, you
• 40:46
  know? So, lover.
• 40:47
  Thank you. I appreciate it.
• 40:48
  Yeah. Appreciate you appreciate
• 40:50
  everybody of course, for listening and watching.
• 40:52
  You know, you can find all of our episodes of buying local dot
• 40:55
  US podcasts on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Rumble and YouTube.
• 41:00
  Please like, subscribe, leave a five star review like those lots
• 41:04
  and thanks everybody for listening and you'll hear from
• 41:07
  us next week.