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?
Balancing Security and User Experience: The FrontEgg Approach
Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com
Security should be easy, or people simply won't adopt it. This fundamental truth drives everything at Front Egg, where balancing robust protection with frictionless user experiences has become their mission in the SaaS identity management space.
During our conversation with Aviad Mizrachi, CTO and co-founder of Front Egg, and Miriam, their tech support engineer and resident Gen Z expert, we uncovered shocking statistics about how security friction directly impacts business outcomes. Did you know that 49% of consumers will abandon a purchase entirely when faced with a password reset? That's half of potential customers walking away with their wallets still full—all because of poor authentication experiences.
What makes this conversation particularly fascinating is the generational perspective. While older users grudgingly accept security hurdles as necessary evils, Gen Z approaches technology with different expectations. Having grown up with iPads, Google Classroom, and biometric authentication as the norm, they demand personalization, speed, and seamless experiences. Yet having witnessed countless data breaches affecting loved ones, they maintain healthy skepticism toward emerging technologies like AI. As Miriam puts it, "We understand that AI is innovative, but we also know new vulnerabilities will be introduced."
The rapid acceleration of AI has transformed security from a slow-moving field to one where threat cycles complete in days rather than months. Front Egg is responding with AI-powered solutions, including autonomous agents that protect both human and non-human identities. However, they emphasize that the human element remains irreplaceable—particularly in support scenarios where "people just want to talk to people."
Ready to see how the right balance of security and user experience could transform your SaaS offering? Listen to this episode for insights that could dramatically improve both your security posture and customer retention.
More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel
Hey everyone, really fascinating discussion today around simplifying authentication and security and management for SaaS companies with a really hot and innovative startup in this space at Front Egg Aviat and Miriam. How are you?
Speaker 2:Good Ivan, Thank you for having us.
Speaker 1:Well, thanks for being here and I think I'm going to enjoy this conversation on the heels of the RSA conference. Lots to talk about. Before that, we'll do some quick introductions. First, miriam, a resident Gen Z expert, here on the show, maybe introduce yourself and your role at Frontec.
Speaker 3:So I'm Miriam. I'm a tech support engineer here in Frontec and also I'm a student for data science.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Well done and Aviat as well. Nice to see you again. We saw you at RSA. Introduce yourself for the folks.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you Ivan, it was one hectic RSA. I'm Aviat, I'm the CTO and co-founder of Frontec. I'm Aviyad I'm the CTO and co-founder of Fronteg. Hopefully, Miriam will graduate soon and have data science expertise with the team as well.
Speaker 1:Fantastic, and you have a really interesting background Aviyad as well. Maybe introduce your career journey to Fronteg and the big idea behind the company.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So Front Egg was founded five and a half years ago by Sagi and myself. Sagi is my co-founder, the CEO of the company. We had the privilege of building the SaaS infrastructure and actually the SIEM of SaaS in Checkpoint. I've been a coder by heart, coding since the age of 15, professionally since the age of 20. And I always kind of went on the bridge between building products and building identity infrastructure for every product that I would build and then eventually, you know, both Sagi and myself said enough is enough, we should help developers unlock their innovation and kick off security for them. The challenges around security as fast grew were tremendous and we said we to make sure that no developers makes any error building SaaS and we're going to be the infrastructure for identity for that. So hence Camfront Tech, five and a half years old and we are excited for this journey.
Speaker 1:It is quite a journey, and you've been working on user experience for many years. Your main message, I think, is balancing convenience versus security. Tell us more about that topic.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think you know that's probably going to be a topic that we're going to cover more and more in this conversation. But yeah, security should be easy because we want people to adopt security in a way that is convenient for them. Otherwise, if it's too hard, they won't adopt it and it's a lose-lose situation. So, on one hand, we want to make it easy for the developers to implement security. So that's one hand, because we don't want them to think about security, we want them just to implement very easily security into their product. And then comes the one hand, because we don't want them to think about security, we want them just to implement very easily security into their product. And then comes the other hand, which is their users.
Speaker 2:Right, they are building products and these products have users. They want to make it very easy for the users of the product to consume security and to configure security, and everything should be much easier than it used to be. Years ago, when we built Fuse in Checkpoint, we built security infrastructures. We understood how this world of security is kind of lagging in terms of user experience, and that's mainly our mission to the world to make security easier to consume and to have security adoption much higher in SaaS products and in the AI era as well.
Speaker 1:That's something we can all get behind, and you and your team recently conducted a study that was headlined. Americans hate password reset so much they'd rather abandon your app. That's quite a headline. What was the finding there?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that was one heck of a crazy one. We found out that 49% of you know of consumer actually left a purchase. You know, you get to the point where you want to click a button I want to buy that and the e-commerce site will ask you okay, what is your password? If you don't remember the password, 49% that you will abandon the purchase. And that's crazy because these are 49% of buyers that actually leave their money behind. And it's crazy because these are 49% of buyers that actually leave their money behind. And you know it's pretty crazy. You know, because forget, you know, forget password flows are so tedious and they consume so many you know points in the way that it's actually crazy. When you kind of tie together with loss of revenue, then it's really painful.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's kind of shocking to read, and your study actually caught the attention of Forbes, who added that 72% of Gen Z was skeptical about AI security, among other topics, among other topics. So rather than guessing about that, we thought we'd invite Miriam to talk about the Gen Z perspective on technology, ai and security in particular. Tell us about your perspective and your colleagues and friends and peers. What are they telling you about this latest generation of tech and SaaS and beyond?
Speaker 3:So, basically, I believe that a technology is not something that was introduced to us. It was always there, starting from early iPads to logging into our Google classrooms during corona, logging in our online classes in Zoom. Tech was actually baked in our social lives, in our careers. So I do believe that we also value strongly value personalization, speed and seamless experience. We want experience to be effortless and, on the other hand, we witnessed a lot of issues that come with technologies massive data breaches, our beloved ones fall victim, mission attacks and people lose money. It's also really, really bad and sad and we do not want this to happen again, but we understand that AI is something innovative. This is something new. We do not know what comes with AI, but we do know for a fact that new vulnerabilities will be introduced to us, that new zero-days exploits will be encountered, and this is basically the main reason for the healthy dose of skepticism that we have towards it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a great point. And you know, Aviad, you and I were not born digital, we were born in an area of fax machines and modems. And I don't know, Aviad, do you remember your first computer, your first piece of technology?
Speaker 2:I do. It was an Intel 865 or 365, something like that, I was 16. I'm 43 now, so that was quite a while ago. I was so excited. I don't remember entering any password to log in to my computer.
Speaker 1:by the way, I'm guessing Miriam's first piece of technology was a mobile or a laptop.
Speaker 2:Probably a MacBook, yeah.
Speaker 1:An iPad. It was iPad 3.
Speaker 3:Of course of course I was playing games there and I had to remember my iCloud ID and all of those things. I had to remember my iCloud ID and all of those things.
Speaker 1:Yes, and you know, fast forward to today, we have this incredible AI boom. You know so exciting and you know AI is really infiltrating every aspect of our technology, aviat, especially in the business world. What's your perspective on that tsunami of AI use cases? What does it mean for us as enterprise and business people.
Speaker 2:You know I'll piggyback on what Miriam just said. You know AI world is. You know that's like a new era. It's like a new revolution of technology, right I mean. And then with that speed of revolution and this rapid development of revolution, obviously comes business threats and security threats. And we talk about, you know, face ID, right, you know these Gen Z guys. You know they used to open. You know we all have iPhones, we open our iPhones with our face and that's OK.
Speaker 2:But then comes, you know, headlines about deepfakes and deepfakers. Then everything is in question. Now You're unsure of everything. Is this real? Up until two years ago, everything was. You knew what security threats are. But now in the world of AI, you know, is this user? You know we had bot detection mechanisms. Now AI can bypass bots detection engines quite easily. And now comes the question what can we trust and how can we trust and how can we add more and more layers? If you know first layer fails, second layer fails, third layer fails, will the fourth layer be the one that catches it? So that's very challenging and as your protection becomes stronger, your attackers become stronger because everything is so rapid. So it's kind of a cat and a mouse kind of game and you chase around security because you're Up until two years ago, before kind of the AI revolution, cycles were much longer. Now cycles are like three days to four days where new vulnerability will be presented and introduced and you know, you kind of go around. The cycles are much faster.
Speaker 1:Yeah, a day feels like a month now in the AI world and, miriam, you're in technical support, so I assume that means supporting your SaaS customers and implementing Front Egg and supporting Front Egg. But how does working with AI change the way you approach your job and your day-to-day work in tech support or otherwise?
Speaker 3:Anyways, I can tell that AI is a game changer and it enhanced, actually my workflows. It optimized my workflows, also all the things that I consider in troubleshooting. Information gathering becomes faster and these 10-15 minutes may be critical for some production issues. They can be really impactful and they can impact businesses and if we can save this time, we're going to do that. Ai is definitely our to-go assistant.
Speaker 1:Yes, it's your co-pilot, always there, always supportive, and I assume you have the same perspective, aviat. What will it take to get your customers, also Gen Z, comfortable with AI security and what are you doing with the whole AI security approach at Front Egg? What's the big idea there, from a product or go-to-market?
Speaker 2:Yes, first of all, we introduced several agents to protect our customers' infrastructure with autonomous AI agents, everything has become much more thorough with the agents' era.
Speaker 2:I would say that the Gen that they're used to consume security, they're used to Face ID will implement Face ID.
Speaker 2:They're used to do pass keys will implement pass keys. You know, even with passwords, we kind of, you know, strive to make them adopt to six digits code sent to their emails, them adopt six-digit code sent to their emails rather than inputting a password that they will, for sure, use in 70% of the cases. So we try, for one hand, to make it easier on the UX perspective and, for another hand, we try to make it kind of just to justify why we are doing that. Because these guys are smart and we kind of want to explain why it's better for them to use that approach rather than the other one. And, obviously, in the way that we are incorporating AI, adaptive MFA, pascis, biometrics everything has changed. So we are incorporating AI pretty much in any technology that we ship and that becomes a really game changer for us in terms of rapid development and in terms of rapid even product development around the company as well. Wow, that's fantastic company as well.
Speaker 1:Wow, that's fantastic. And, miriam, I imagine AI at some point could provide tier one, tier two tech support to customers and, maybe even, one day, full tier four engineering support. Are you worried about AI stealing your job or?
Speaker 3:your work? Hopefully not. I think that AI is definitely a really powerful tool. It can help us with troubleshooting. It helps us with gathering information, with querying, with communicating to our customers, but there are things that cannot be taken from us. It's our humanity. People just want to talk to people. They do not want to talk to AI, by the end of the day, and I think that they still need us to feel this emotional support.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's funny how, in spite of all the support channels, speaking with an agent, speaking with someone, is still the preferred channel, pressing zero to get through the bot is still the preferred mode, and I don't think that's going to change People you know, in admission-critical use cases like yours, still want the preferred mode, and I don't think that's going to change. People you know, in admission-critical use cases like yours, still want the human touch. So, avi, just to wrap things up, you had a fantastic RSA conference. What's next for you the rest of the year? What are you excited about, looking forward to?
Speaker 2:So obviously, you know, the AI era is not something that we're going to leave behind. So we just introduced our own AI agents identity infrastructure. Wow, yeah, much deeper. We just introduced our first AI agent, security for Siam, an autonomous agent that is protecting both SaaS and non-human identities. So that's really exciting for us. We're going to make it much deeper and much more powerful and obviously, you know, keep our innovative approach around SIEM Customer Identity and Access Management, helping our customers within every vector and every industry to protect their customers and to kind of unleash innovation by providing their developers, their security teams, their entire company a much better, secured way of launching products.
Speaker 1:Wow. Well, that's a mic drop moment, very exciting. You're already helping hundreds of SaaS companies power their services and sounds like you have thousands more to help ahead of you. So congratulations. Thanks so much for joining guys. Have a great week and we'll be in touch.
Speaker 2:Thank you, ivan, thank you, miriam, thank you.
Speaker 3:Thanks guys, Bye-bye.