What's Up with Tech?
Tech Transformation with Evan Kirstel: A podcast exploring the latest trends and innovations in the tech industry, and how businesses can leverage them for growth, diving into the world of B2B, discussing strategies, trends, and sharing insights from industry leaders!
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?
Safeguarding IT Infrastructure:Nntirety's Cybersecurity Innovations and AI Integration
Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com
Ever wondered how top companies safeguard their IT infrastructure in today's volatile security landscape? Join us as we engage in an enlightening conversation with Emil, the CEO of Entirety. Discover how Entirety has transformed from Hostway and Hosting.com into a leading force in cybersecurity, offering comprehensive solutions across healthcare, financial services, and industrial sectors. Emil shares insights on how they integrate AI and machine learning into their offerings, ensuring their clients receive the most advanced protection available.
Get a glimpse into Entirety's vibrant team culture and their unwavering commitment to customer satisfaction, known as their "wow culture." Emil provides crucial cybersecurity advice for businesses, stressing the importance of not tackling security challenges alone. He also reflects on the personal joys of the summer, including our host's son beginning medical school. Finally, Emil unveils Entirety's mission and vision, inviting listeners to explore their content and enjoy some authentic Texas barbecue. Tune in for an episode packed with valuable insights and heartfelt moments.
More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel
Hey everybody, happy Friday. We made it through another week and I am delighted to have a true industry thought leader, industry insider here to chat about the future of IT security, managed services and so much more from entirety. Emil, how are you?
Speaker 2:Doing great. Happy Friday to you, Evan.
Speaker 1:Doing great. Happy Friday to you, Evan. Well, thank you Thanks for being here. Really excited to chat and to explore all things around the IT security landscape.
Speaker 2:Before that, maybe introduce yourself and how the CEO of Entirety. Entirety is a managed services company that is focused on cybersecurity, but really focused on providing a comprehensive security solution to enterprises that transcends cloud to the cybersecurity protocols, to compliance, as well as data and database management, as well as using AI and using the data as a platform to train AI for companies as a platform to train AI for companies.
Speaker 1:Well, there's a lot there to unpack. Really exciting, maybe. Describe where you fit on the landscape. You have a unique position at the managed IT services company. You know there are hundreds, if not thousands, of security solutions. It's really hard to navigate this landscape as as a buyer, I think. So how do you, how do you fit in that landscape and what's your unique appeal?
Speaker 2:I think yeah, the landscape is full with point products.
Speaker 2:There's lots of point security solutions and the issue that companies are now facing is that these point solutions are actually failing to stop the threats, because, you know, hackers are figuring out what these point solutions are and you know, they kind of, you know, insert themselves in between these point solutions.
Speaker 2:We pride ourselves as being a comprehensive security provider, meaning we manage the infrastructure, we manage the security layer with managed SOC as well as MDR and XDR, and then we also manage and optimize the data right. So what happens there is that in a lot of cases, threats, whenever they occur, they will come in through the infrastructure and then the infrastructure managed services provider will say, well, you know there's a threat, or the security provider will come in and say, hey it, you know there's a threat, we contained it, but now you gotta go and fix it with entirety. We own the entire chain. We see the threats, we fix it, we do the patching and then we let the customer know. In a lot of cases, our competitors, you know, stop either at the infrastructure and doing the patching that's needed and God forbid if there's actually a hack that went through we're able to do disaster recovery. We're able to do recovery from backup, whereas a lot of our competitors really stop at that point.
Speaker 1:Solution yeah, that's a great point and tell us about the genesis of the company and its evolution over the years. Take a little walk down memory lane if you would, oh yeah, what is the? Founding story.
Speaker 2:Absolutely the founding story. The company was started in the late 90s. The first incarnation was called Hostway. Honestly, there's a lot of people.
Speaker 1:I remember it well, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, see, I was going to say lots of people that had their first website with Hostway and then the company progressed in 2018. We merged Hostway and Hostingcom, so two companies that got started about the same time. We merged the two companies and we created Entirety and I was the CEO of Hostway and then I was asked to be the CEO of. The idea of merging these two companies is actually to create a managed services provider with a heavy focus on cybersecurity, which is what entirety is today. It's a, so we shed a lot of the commodity hosting assets. You know co-location and all that. You know we don't do that anymore.
Speaker 2:You know, we're really focused on managed services targeted to three verticals, right the healthcare vertical, the financial services vertical and the manufacturing slash industrial vertical. All verticals that require compliance, that require a heavy level level of security. And, yeah, I mean we focus on mid-market to high end of the mid-market type of enterprises and this is kind of where we are. Mostly, we operate in North America. We have personnel all around the world, of course, but most of our customers are in North America.
Speaker 1:Fantastic approach and talk about your focus on emerging technologies. There are tech giants out there. We won't go through them all in security, investing billions in R&D. How do you integrate new technologies? You talk about AI. How do you ensure best of breed when it comes to your solution set?
Speaker 2:when it comes to your solution set, yeah, so we view ourselves as an integrator of technology, so we will always take advantage of the best technology that's out there, because we're a service provider. So if Palo Alto has the best technology to implement SASE solutions, security solutions, we will use that. However, if there are other vendors that we're able to leverage, we will integrate that and productize it. Now, we're not a reseller of hardware or software. We integrate those into our platform. We have a proprietary platform and a control panel that, essentially, our customers interface with, but underneath it we will use best of breed technologies and always leverage the best and most advanced.
Speaker 2:So, in terms of AI, as you said, there are two areas that I want to touch on. One is that we get billions and billions of threats and alerts that are coming from all over to our customers. We have 1,200 enterprise customers, so all of those. It's really impossible to look at every one of those threats by a human being. So our SOC, our Security Operating Center, has been utilizing AI and machine learning technologies to identify threats right AI and machine learning technologies to identify threats right and identify them and isolate them and then escalate them so that the human being can look at them and assess whether that's a real threat or not a real threat, and then what we do. And if it's a real threat, what do we do to mitigate it? And this is essentially how we've been using AI and machine learning for the last five years. And now we're accelerating it even more and pushing AI into almost every function in the company. Right, because this is the perfect set. You know, because AI is great at removing repetitive tasks and, you know, essentially automating those in an easy fashion. And this is essentially what we're doing in terms of digesting all these threats.
Speaker 2:The other area that we are productizing AI is that we've had a long history, evan, about 12 years ago, we bought a company that did nothing but manage, configure, transform, modernize databases. So that business has been great for us, has served a great purpose for us. However, now it's in the middle of this AI battle. Right, because for companies, for enterprises, right, to essentially leverage AI with their data, with the data of their own company, they have to build what's called a data lake. With their data, with the data of their own company, they have to build what's called a data lake, and this is what we've been doing for the last 12 years is we have expertise in all the major databases out there, from Oracle to SQL to MySQL to even NoSQL databases so we're able to pull all these data sources together, build data lakes for our customers and essentially help them train language models and AI models against their own data.
Speaker 2:So this is the holy grail of AI. Chatgdp is great. It's basically glorified and easy to use Google but when you train a language model against your company's data, you're getting answers that are relevant to you and you only, and that's your proprietary sauce. So we are engaged in helping our customers in that journey and, to be frank with you, evan, once you earn the right to talk to customers about their data, then you can talk to them immediately about how to secure that data, how to make that data compliant and where to run that data whether it's in the public cloud or the private cloud, and so on and so forth. So basically, we're leveraging all the four areas that Entirely offers into that offering and kind of packaging it up for our customers.
Speaker 1:Well, well done. What a nice proposition. And talk about the onboarding process. As a service provider, I mean, how long does it take to bring a healthcare system onto your network? Is it, you know, days, weeks, months? What does that process look like, which is often a big challenge? You know people are overtaxed and difficult to make changes or ads or moves to a network. What does that process look like of onboarding?
Speaker 2:Excellent question. So you know, look, it always takes quote unquote too long. I'm just joking, but you know it's not instant. These are big enterprises that are being onboarded, so on average, about 45 days. Sometimes it'll go up to 90 days and I'll talk about that a little bit. This is part of our secret sauce. So our onboarding process is part of our secret sauce. We've automated a lot of it. We have, as soon as a customer signs the contract, immediately there's a dedicated team that is assigned for that customer.
Speaker 2:You know that essentially is doing the discovery and starting the process of migrating data, modernizing data, so on and so forth. A project plan is put forth, you know, very quickly, and then milestones are, you know, get followed. You know there's meetings, sometimes every day, sometimes every week, depending on the scope and size of the customer migration. Here what I want to say is that the 45 to 90 days is that sometimes, evan, you have to train the data, you have to get live data to train your security, to train the AI right. It's not a flip switch where you know you just migrate someone and then you can quickly, immediately secure them. You've got to look at the patterns of data so that you're not flagging good data as nefarious and you're not flagging nefarious data as good data. So you've got to really look at the pattern and then that process usually takes about 45 days, essentially to kind of look at the data that's coming through into that customer's environment and make sure that you are accurately discerning what's nefarious from what is legitimate traffic.
Speaker 1:Fantastic, really interesting. So are most of your clients on a cloud journey of some sort? Have they moved to the cloud, and has that made security simpler or riskier in some ways? What say you when it comes to your customers' cloud adoption?
Speaker 2:So, look, a lot of our customers are on a cloud journey, just like every company out there. And you know, one of the tidbits I always share is that, you know, from a personal standpoint, I was one of the founders of OpenStack when I was at Rackspace, which is the open source cloud platform, but then also Hostway in 2008, when Microsoft did not have an answer to the AWS I'm sorry, microsoft did not have an answer to the AWS threat. The AWS I'm sorry, microsoft did not have an answer to the AWS threat came to actually Hostway and said would you build a public cloud for us based on Hyper-V at the time? And that's what we did. It used to be called FlexCloud and that was really the ancestor of Azure. If you will, that was the ancestor of Azure. And then, of course, after that, microsoft developed Azure and, if you will, that was the ancestor of Azure. And then, you know, of course, after that, you know, microsoft developed Azure and you know we adopted that.
Speaker 2:So you know our history with cloud technologies goes from you know to the beginnings, right, you know very, very, very beginnings of the cloud journeys and we're able to help our customers, in a, I would say, you know, pretty neutral way decide whether it's AWS, is it Azure? Is it staying on VMware? Is it staying in a private cloud? Is it staying in one of our data centers? Is it staying, you know, on-prem and we would manage it on-prem for the customer. So we're pretty neutral about it. You know we approach it in a hybrid fashion, but the secular trend in the industry is definitely a move to the public cloud, whether it's Azure or AWS, and Entirety is absolutely perfectly positioned and has been positioned for a very long time with some of the original experts to manage data in the public cloud, whether it's Azure, aws or even Google, for that matter.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Give us a peek behind the curtain on the team and the culture, if you would. You're obviously a pretty dynamic leader. I imagine you built quite a team and you're in a spot of the country that's really on fire in Austin just so much innovation and growth and excitement happening. What's that like?
Speaker 2:Yeah, evan, I'm lucky I wouldn't be able to do it without the team. We have a team of veterans in the industry and the company. If you look at the staff and the tenure I'm sorry, my direct team and the tenure that they've been with the company, you have people that have been with the company for 18 years, 19 years. The shortest tenure is probably somebody that's been with the company for four years but I've worked with for the last 12 years in my prior company. So it's a team of veterans, team of professionals.
Speaker 2:The culture company the company is that of customer focus and customer centricity. We have what's called the wow culture, the entirety wow culture, where you know we always go the extra mile for the customers, not just in the customer service aspect but also in developing our products and the comprehensiveness of our products and comprehensiveness of our approach, as well as the fairness by which we approach our customers and our partners alike. So very dynamic company. We have locations across the US and Canada, as well as Europe. As I had mentioned, I was in Europe actually last week with our team over there. Extremely dynamic team. You know lots of energy. You know highly technical people that are customer focused is the best way that I can describe our company.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Well, sounds amazing, I guess. Last question here what advice would you give companies besides working with entirety and chatting with your team? What advice would you give business leaders looking to improve their posture and security and might be worried about risks? What are the first one, two, three steps they need to think about to really up their game?
Speaker 2:absolutely. Um, look, the number one thing that I would advise mid-market and even larger companies um and smbs, I mean, I think I think that's a think, that's a general piece of advice is don't try to do it. All the smaller companies and mid-market companies, I guarantee you, do not have the expertise or staff to provide a solid security posture. They can manage it, they can oversee it, but there's no way any C-level is going to be able to convince their board that they have a 24 by 7 staff. They can staff 24 by 7 function, that is, an S expert at all the different threats that we're seeing. So don't try to do it alone. That would be my second thing that I would advise companies to do is, you know, be cognizant of their risks and their exposures.
Speaker 2:Many companies will say well, you know, nobody cares about us, you know we don't have anything to protect. Well, guess what? There's universities that are being hacked. There are schools that are being hacked and they're being ransomed and, as we saw in the change change healthcare pack, which crippled, you know, crippled major healthcare institutions, you know whether it's CVS or hospital chains or UnitedHealthcare. So I mean it was a crippling event and it's still ongoing. Right, the amount of remedying that event is close to 100 million, and this is the other issue that we're talking about here. Yes, they paid the ransom and supposedly the gang that ransomed them the first time, right, actually gave them the data. But now there's another competing gang that has nothing to do with the first gang that is telling them if you don't give us money, we're going to release the data to the world, and then there are going to be even more fines because of compliance reasons, and then, you know, all the HIPAA stuff is going to come, you know, coming down, because we haven't seen yet. I mean, all of what we're talking about right now is remedying the event, not necessarily yet what the fines are going to come in from all the different compliance organizations, right?
Speaker 2:So my point is that do not underestimate the threat. All of us, every company, has personal information that we contain in our there's personal information If we're taking credit card, if we have names of our employees. Any of those exposures is a big risk. Don't underestimate it. Be honest and truthful with yourself, because the people that are engaged in this, in this hacking, on these hacking emotions, have really no scruples and no conscience. I mean, they're they're hacking hospitals and schools and shutting them down and bringing them to their knees. You know, people can get their dialysis in some cases because an organization has been hacked. Think about that, right. They can't get their treatment. They can't. I mean on and, on and on and on right.
Speaker 1:So do not underestimate the data that you have and the potential value that it has to a hacking group. Well, such important advice on that very stark note. One final thought here. We enter the summer months. What are you looking forward to personally, professionally? Hopefully there's lots of in Austin you have lots of barbecue and lakes and outdoor time on the horizon, but what are you looking forward to over the next few weeks?
Speaker 2:I'm going to tell you one thing that I'm looking forward to. My son just got admitted to, accepted to, medical school and July mid-July it's going to be his white coat ceremony. So my wife and my kids and I are super excited. He's our oldest and it's going to be great and you know we're really looking forward to that. You know we're probably going to take a short beach vacation as well, together before he starts medical school, but that's, you know, that's kind of the that's going to be the highlight of our summer.
Speaker 1:Wow, wonderful. Well, congratulations on all of that and for the incredible work you do with clients. Thanks so much, Emil, for joining and sharing the mission and vision.
Speaker 2:Of course, Evan. Thank you so much for having me on your show and please promise me, next time you're in Austin, you'll let me treat you to some of our very good barbecue here.
Speaker 1:Yes, that would be my pleasure. Thanks everyone. Thanks for reaching out and following Entirety. They put out some great content. That's how I discovered them on social. Thanks everyone. Thanks, emil. Thank you, take care, bye-bye, thank.