What's Up with Tech?
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With over three decades in telecom and IT, I've mastered the art of transforming social media into a dynamic platform for audience engagement, community building, and establishing thought leadership. My approach isn't about personal brand promotion but about delivering educational and informative content to cultivate a sustainable, long-term business presence. I am the leading content creator in areas like Enterprise AI, UCaaS, CPaaS, CCaaS, Cloud, Telecom, 5G and more!
What's Up with Tech?
Charting the Course of Cyber Resilience Through Machine Identity with Venify
Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com
Embark on a journey through the intricate world of cybersecurity as we sit down with Venify's CEO, Patrick Dennis, to unravel the complexities of machine identity management. Discover how Venify is taking the reins as an indispensable control plane for machines that now outnumber human identities by an astonishing 45 to 1. As the tech landscape evolves at breakneck speed, learn about the critical role of certificate lifecycle management, why ensuring customer trust is paramount, and how Venify's adaptability is shaping the future, especially with innovative integrations like Spiffy. Tune in for a compelling narrative that brings to light the importance of robust security measures, underlined by the cautionary tale of the Starlink disruption.
Join us as we delve into the vast network of Venify's partnerships, which includes top-tier brands and major cloud providers, forming an essential security ecosystem. We celebrate a culture of teamwork and customer satisfaction, a legacy of the company's CEO emeritus. With a sneak peek at the excitement building for the RSA conference and the unique machine identity management summit, this episode is a must-listen for anyone with a vested interest in the pulse of security technology. Get ready to be part of a conversation that not only enlightens but also connects the dots between advanced machine identity solutions and the protection of our digital world.
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Hey everyone, such an intriguing conversation today around machine identity management and it's a critical role in cybersecurity with the CEO at Venify, Patrick, how are you?
Speaker 2:Doing great. Evan, it's great to see you. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:Well, thanks for being here, and I'm here at Sunny and Warm in Denver today, so congratulations for that. We're going to dive into all things machine intelligence, such an interesting and important topic. Maybe, before that, introduce yourself and your mission, your kind of strategic vision at Venify.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so thank you again for having me. My name is Patrick Dennis. I'm the CEO here at Venify, super lucky to run such an amazing organization. Listen, we have a very, very small mission. Our mission is to future-proof the security of the global 5000 by delivering the most modern, connected and trusted machine identity management platform. Not that I've ever been asked that before, evan.
Speaker 1:Well, it sounds simple, but the reality is there's so much complexity behind this topic. It's around simplification of just such a complex and growing challenging environment. Talk about that transformation that you're supporting customers' journey on. It's to the cloud, it's to global operations, it's through new APIs, new endpoints, new identities, and what's your kind of mission to help simplify this challenging environment?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, let's start at the top. So if you think about security, over the years the notion of identity has always been a part of everybody's. You know security, posture, the apparatus, etc. But for a long, long time we were really focused on humans, right, you have credentials and passwords and logins and you know as your octa working right and all those types of things, and those are still super important.
Speaker 2:What a lot of people don't don't realize is that there's 45 times more machines than there are people. So, if you just think of the problem space, why did machine identity become so important? Why did you know this great company create the category? We created the category because we realized there's a second set of identities that are really important and their identities related to machines, and we realized that those identities are much larger in scale. And you know, these days and we'll probably touch on this, you know, during our conversation the rate and pace of change is so fast. Not only is it, you know, 45x, now It'll probably be 50x and, by the way, it changes really, really quickly. And so you know, this company helps try to solve for the exposure associated with all those machines, just like you would try to solve for the exposure related to your human identities, but we're doing it a scope and a scale and a speed that keeps pace with what you're seeing in the technology landscape today.
Speaker 1:And the pace is so rapid. You know, everyone in the enterprise is moving to the cloud at different speeds, but that's going to be the ultimate destination. We're seeing the rise of the API economy. What's your role in shoring this Transition to machine identity is managed? I mean, what role do you play at that? I guess you're at the control plane, if you will. Yeah.
Speaker 2:We think we play a really central role and you know you brought up, if we kind of go back through what you had just said, what you're seeing are these environments becoming more hybrid, right? So you said the ultimate destination is the cloud. That's true, and there's still plenty of people that are trying to solve for premise problems today that are in their data centers, and so you know, if you picture the arc of change over time, what does the control plane do? The Venify control plane brings you a way to unify a set of capabilities to solve Problems that you might have had in the past, problems that you have today, problems that you have in the future, in a very modular way. So you get to plug in a capability of the control plane to solve, for you know, a new problem.
Speaker 2:I'll give you an example. Just yesterday we announced that we were going to support protecting spiffy related integrations. Right, that's an example of us taking the control plane and extending it to offer spiffy support. Now, if you don't know what spiffy is, and a bunch of people probably don't, that's an example of kind of like the next thing. So what's really great about that if I, as the control plane, lets you solve a data center problem that you've had for a long time and you understand really, really well, and it's scalable enough that we can add modules and capabilities as workloads and machines change.
Speaker 1:Wow, that's really intriguing. There's a big problem, I understand, around identity as it regards to certificate life lifecycle management. You know impacts to certificate issuing and authority can, you know, interrupt operations and Create all kinds of challenges with customers and customer data, customer trust and there's just an explosion of certificates being managed and issues. What role do you play there and helping manage and maintain Certificate like across the board?
Speaker 2:Yeah, let's just maybe start for everybody's benefit. You know, certificates that's what? One of those words that gets passed around in technical circles quite a bit. A lot of people don't really know what it is. You know it's a, it's a basic contract that says, like hey, I'm trusted and I'm okay for to share data with you or to communicate with you, etc. And you know, oftentimes if you're browsing the web you'll see little certificate notifications pop up.
Speaker 2:You know, what a lot of people don't realize is you know the average company can have 250,000, 500,000 certificates. Oh, wow, we've together to create a user experience, which I know is another thing you know you're deeply interested in, right, and it only takes one of those certificates to be invalid or bad or out of date in many cases to bring an application down. And you know it's widely publicized. But even Elon Musk's Starlink went down because a certificate in one of the base stations went bad. So, oh, wow, yeah, and he's a pretty technically advanced person, right?
Speaker 2:We're talking about, you know, man that builds rockets, right? Well, no other certificate problem. So what Ventifig does for customers is it helps manage those certificates, their life cycle, meaning from the time that they're created through the time that they're revoked or they pass a date. We automate that so that if you're trying to deal with this at a 250, 500 million, multi-million scale of certificates, it's done in a way that's consistent, it's done in a way that has high integrity and efficacy. So when we talk about being modern, trusted and connected, a lot of it has to do with the fact that we can bring together those three attributes to a really large environment.
Speaker 1:That's extraordinary. It wouldn't be a tech chat if we didn't talk about AI integration, something that you've been at some time and you have a product that called Athena. That, I understand, enhances decision-making and operational efficiency, but talk about what that does, its role in this managing through this complexity.
Speaker 2:So one of the things that you and I both know that AI space is big right, I like to think we're doing some very innovative things and then we're doing some really straightforward things. Athena, I think, as an example of just taking the best of what AI has to offer, does a great job of dealing with large quantities of data that aren't particularly easily understood by human beings. We just talked about hundreds of thousands of these certificate things which are natively digital and well understood by computers. So what Athena does is it can take an environment and then you can start to ask very basic questions over time, like how many of my certificates are about to expire, and it will help you get an answer to that question. Where we see it really playing a role in the future is we'll be able to start to ask more sophisticated questions what's my? How many certificates do I have that are prepared for quantum resilience? One of the ways we think we're going to make all of these systems easier for people to use is by offering that LLM AI based interface.
Speaker 1:Wow, that's super exciting for everyone out there who has a job to get done in the security space. Everyone's overwhelmed, overworked, stressed out, so that sounds tremendous. Maybe talk a little bit about automation and scale. You can't find security analysts these days that really have hot commodity. How do you see yourself supporting automation, not just through AI but management of those machine identities? What's your environment like to help with both scale and automation?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think we really do our best work is this idea of dealing with the hybrid nature of these environments. Yes, there's still plenty of people in the world that are encryption specialists and they're doing very important work. But on the other end of the spectrum, there's a DevOps community now that's writing brand new code that's going super fast and getting deployed into customers environments. Oftentimes, security teams have a difficult time working with those application developers. Well, venify has a capability that will allow those developers to be safe and secure, but we won't get in the way and the rate and pace that they're innovating. So where I think we do our best work is we help automate tasks, we help manage the lifecycle for people that are dealing with the traditional problems, and then we're bringing much of that same thinking to these more modern new workloads and even the newer types of machines that the world is seeing.
Speaker 1:That's phenomenal. Talk a little bit about your customers. You have right on your website some amazing logos from BOA to BP and many others. Tell us to the degree you can. I know these are pretty trusted information. What are you doing with them? How are they using you? Anything else you might share about your customer base?
Speaker 2:I mean, if there's plenty of great logos on the website, if I could ever show you the internal slides, you'd be amazed. We're very fortunate to service the world's biggest and best brands. We've been doing that for a really, really long time. Just to put it in perspective, we're talking like five out of the five top airlines, five of the five top health insurers, three of the five top retailers, four of the five top US and UK banks, three out of the five top accounting firms, People that do real work, that really have security needs, trust and a-fi. We're doing the things for them that we talked about today. I'll maybe pick one of my newer favorite stories. A large retailer that I'm sure you and I have shopped at periodically has really been reworking some of their customer-facing applications. They're taking advantage of some of the sophisticated technology we just talked about to help secure those customer-facing applications. We have another large customer who you would recognize that's really moved into Kubernetes, right. So they're starting to use.
Speaker 2:Kubernetes clusters to scale and they're taking advantage of Vennify to protect those scaling Kubernetes clusters, whether it's the traditional bank use cases that we talked about, data center-oriented let's manage some certificates all the way through to people putting their primary customer experience applications out in front of customers secured by Vennify. We're doing both of those things.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Well, that's intriguing to hear. Customers, as you know, aren't looking to just deploy point solutions anymore. They need a whole raft of capabilities and really it's an ecosystem that they have to bring together. How do you collaborate with your technology partners? What does your go-to-market look like these days?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think being, if we talked about the three things that are important to us being modern, trusted. The third was connected. That's because we really do think the future of security requires deep connections and a deep ecosystem. We're working with the people that you would expect, like certificate authorities. We integrate with them.
Speaker 2:We integrate with the large public cloud providers. If you just think of AWS and GCP in Azure. We do work there. Then again, in some of these more modern situations, we're integrating with some of the DevOps community as well. You can see that could be like HashiCorp involved and those kind of things. It's a very, very broad ecosystem of folks that we work with. Because this technology does sit so fundamentally in how applications are developed, secured and managed. You wind up interfacing with a bunch of folks.
Speaker 2:That's worked well for our go-to-market too. We have people that support us very frequently in a go-to-market relationship with a customer because they know we're the best at what we do, we're really proud of it and we are open. So working with others is kind of core to the DNA.
Speaker 1:Love it. Speaking of DNA, you and the team are really on an important mission here. Give us a peek into the culture, maybe behind the curtain, the team that's built, the growing team and the folks who are on the front lines, if you will.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know this company has an amazing value system. What I would tell you I'm most impressed by, as a relatively new person to joining the company inside the core values. One of those values is that you put team over self, and it's easy to say that it's hard to do it. I have never seen a company culture that is so focused on team over self, and that's incredibly important because, you know, a core value here is about doing the best job for our customer. So you know, if our customers are first and the team comes before self, the customers are always getting the best out of the team and you know it's embedded down in the core values to the individual level like I haven't seen in an organization in my career. I'm super proud to be a part of it. It's really an honor to help steward that. Jeff Hudson, our CEO emeritus, really had instilled those values in the company over time. It's hard to do. It's a great testament to his leadership and the impact he had on the company.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. We're heavy into the travel season here trade shows, events and meetups of all various kinds. What's on your radar? I know you have RSA-C coming up soon, but you have so much going on. What are you sort of personally looking forward to out there?
Speaker 2:So I look forward to RSA every year. You know I bumped into you at RSA several times. It's a big event for all of us, so I'm super excited about that. I think what I'm most excited about at RSA is actually the. You know the sessions are great, but what I really like most is just reconnecting with the rest of the security community and hearing what's on everybody's mind.
Speaker 2:I took a lot away from last year's RSA conference. It really shaped some of my thinking around the impact AI was going to have, what it was going to look like in post-quantum, etc. So some of those big themes, I feel like, get built out, you know, when you're around your peers and other folks that are in the community and you just get to talk about the things that are top of mind. That said, I probably wouldn't be doing my job as CEO if I didn't plug the fact that we have a machine identity management summit which will be in your hometown of Boston October 1st through 3rd. It's the only summit, to our knowledge, that is focused on this category. We have some awesome speakers lined up and I'm really looking forward to that too. I think it's really taking on a little bit of the shape of an industry conference to talk about the issues that are related to machine identity management. I think that's going to be a really, really special show.
Speaker 1:That sounds like a great opportunity to learn and get educated. I look forward to attending that, and I see you're at KubeCon, the CloudNativeCon event that's happening right now in Europe, so you're everywhere all at once. Well, thanks so much, patrick, for just this quick update and insight into the mission and vision, and congratulations on all the success on Words and Upwards.
Speaker 2:Thanks, Evan. It was good to see you Appreciate the time today.
Speaker 1:Likewise, and thanks everyone for watching Reach out to Venify. They had put out some really great content on social media. It caught my attention, so it's worth following them and checking it out. Take care, take care everyone. Thanks, bye-bye.