The Hybrid Identity Crisis: Bob Bobel on Securing the Transition from Active Directory to Entra ID

Hey, everyone. Welcome back here to Tech Drunk tv. I'm happy to introduce you to my next guest.

It's his first time on Tech Drunk tv. So let's welcome a warm warmly. It's Bob Bobo.

Bob is the founder and CEO of Koft. We're gonna hear all about it. If you're not familiar with Koft, it's okay.

Hey, Bob, welcome to Tech Drunk tv. It's great to have you on here. Alan, thank you very much for having me and, uh, appreciate, uh, the conversation we're gonna have.

I well, I hope you say that when we're done. Yeah. Love you.

I'm Sure I'll, Hey Bob, as I mentioned, you're the founder and CEO over here at Koft. Mm-hmm. Give people a stand.

Like I've, I've founded a few companies in my day as well, and no one wakes up in the middle of the night and says, I want a founder company tomorrow. Right. It's something, you gotta kind of feel it, you gotta feel it in your guts.

You gotta feel it in your heart and your head. Right. What was that feeling for you behind Koft Y?

Yeah, great, great question. I was in a very lucky, uh, position in my career at several different companies where I was involved with, uh, building software products. And part of that was not just building the products, but looking at alternatives to the products in, in a competitive situation, but also looking for acquisition targets.

And so, what's always interested me, and I come from an entrepreneurial family, uh, is how people got to where they are, the mistakes they made and the things that they did that made them successful. And I will tell you, uh, this isn't my first company either. I've had three or four companies, and, um, you learn a little bit each time.

Rarely, you know, are you, uh, a one hit wonder with these things. Yeah. It's usually several companies and then you, you mature the way you approach it.

And, uh, this time I think we did pretty good, pretty well. Very cool. You know, in prior company's prior experience, give us a sense of kinda where your expertise was doing, you know, what, what you came from there.

Well, I have a, a really short sort of history, uh, backstory here that I'll give you, um, because I think it, it is usually pretty interesting to folks. People don't often, you know, have a job that they started out or intended to have. I originally attended, uh, to be an aeronautical engineering.

I went to the Ohio State University. Um, had to give them a little pitch there. Absolutely.

And, uh, they have, They gonna have three of six player, the first six players in the draft draft three maybe. There you. Yeah, exactly.

Exactly. Uh, so, um, I did not finish my degree, but, uh, uh, in engineering for various reasons. But I did start my first co software company there.

It was a cad cam software, uh, product, and it ran on Windows 2 86, if you didn't know, there was never a Windows two. It was Windows 1 2 86, and then Windows three, three, it was right as they were transitioning to three. And so I knew a little bit about Microsoft and, and you know, back when they were 75 people, not the juggernaut they are today.

Mm-hmm. And through that, I swo I'd never do another software company. So I started doing consulting and programming, uh, and networking very early on.

This is when businesses were just starting. I'm in Columbus, Ohio, by the way, still. Mm-hmm.

Still even half college, big tech area, boarding in tech and all those folks. Yep. And, uh, so I woke up one morning, my wife was sitting on the edge of the bed.

She said, Hey, I love that you're your own boss and that you're doing consulting, but, uh, we're gonna have a kid now you need to go get a real job. Hmm. So I went to work for a small startup called IIDA Software, and they were in the Windows tool space.

And so it was a natural fit. Uh, several years after joining them, uh, they sold that company to a company called Quest Software. And then for the next, uh, eight and a half, nine years, you know, I enjoyed working for a company that was both, uh, leading that space, doing acquisitions in that space.

And, you know, for seven of those eight years, we were Microsoft Partner of the Year. So, you know, worked with the largest and medium and even some of the smallest, uh, Microsoft customers really learned a lot. Uh, they decided that they were going to sell to Dell and become Dell Software.

And I thought, you know, I've been here for a while. I wanna try something new. And so I went to another company for six or seven, eight months in the similar space.

And at some point I was like, you know, Microsoft is announcing this big cloud shift. You know, they're moving from on-premise client server to cloud. And my, my current business partner and I both recognize that this was the paradigm shift that we had seen all those other successful, uh, folks, uh, catch a hold of I LDA was there when Active Directory started.

Um, that was started by Mir, Tim and Andre Bernoff that went on later to create Veeam Software. Uh, and we really recognized this pretty quickly. We also recognized differently from a lot of other folks, uh, that this was not about enterprises and moving those to the cloud.

It was really about protecting the office, um, uh, product line from Google, the franchise Google Works or Docs and protecting the server market from Amazon. And so we realized that the enterprise customers that we had served for, you know, the past eight, nine years, we're not gonna have the tooling that they needed to make this transition. And yet they all were being pushed to move their, their expenses from capital expenditures to operational expenditures and use these cloud things.

So, you know, for those of you in the audience that ever had to work with Microsoft Exchange, it's a very complex email product. Right? And being able to offload that onto that, that piece of your infrastructure onto the people that wrote the tool, is a godsend.

It makes it that much easier. Right. And, and even with identity, there is a lot more energy put into the security side of Entra id, which is the next generation of Microsoft's directory, uh, versus active directory because it's on premise.

Microsoft doesn't control the security there. You're on your own to control it. So at some point in the future, you'll see that those other other, uh, pieces shift for a large segment.

But right now we're enjoying this, this time where we recognize that enterprises are locked in this journey. They started with client Server active directory and exchange on premise and SharePoint on premise. These client server designed and developed tools.

They have some really great collaboration and additional, um, um, operational benefits they get by integrating Cloud, but they may not be able to go fully cloud. So they're in this situation where they have a lot of on-premise and a lot of cloud, and they operate these two separate environments. They don't look the same, they don't act the same.

They have different security paradigms. Uh, and we bridge that. So we're actually a great way to take that journey from, uh, uh, on-premise only client server into hybrid mode, where we make it still appear as one cohesive environment.

And then eventually if you, you know, decide you're gonna go cloud only, you basically just turn off the client server components in our tool and you continue to manage. So it makes it a very, um, um, good, uh, uh, solution, uh, to solve some of the operational inefficiencies that hybrid, uh, naturally brings. Sure.

Um, and it, it's not just about management for us, we also recognized that the traditional model was to get into the market with a single tool like Active Directory Recovery, for example. That's one of the tools that launched IDA and got them, uh, acquired by Quest. But the old model was, Hey, you know, we have this market, we're selling to the active directory guys in the infrastructure team.

Sometimes it's identity, sometimes it's security, but, but we have that, that market, right? And it's easier to sell another tool to the same people. So let's go build a second tool and then a third tool and give it to the salespeople.

They call it putting it into the salesperson's bag, right? So that salesperson can then just go and start to sell more to the same people. Well, pretty soon you have 9, 10, 11, 12 products.

You have to build them each time. Developers build it a little bit differently. And so they're not the same.

They don't share a security infrastructure or a look and feel or approach. And at some point in really large companies, you might get away with that because the identity team now owns Active Directory, but the SharePoint pieces are over here. And you know, now with Teams or Slack, there's another team for that.

But when you get to the mid-size customers and smaller customers, it becomes very difficult. And so when we took this journey, my partner and I looked at what hybrid meant, moving those resources, you know, over 10, 15 years from on-premise only to cloud only with this hybrid mode in between. And we realized that we didn't want to lose the benefits of a completely integrated platform.

So we don't just do management, we do management change monitoring in a, in a novel way. And then we also do recovery, and we do recovery in both rolling back changes to a Microsoft team security policy or changes to a group membership that's all part of and integrated into our change auditing solution. But we also do forest recovery.

And that's where we really started to see, uh, adoption in the market of our solution and interest. Uh, prior to that, there were only two vendors in the space that could do a Forest recovery Quest software where I was, where you came. I understood that.

Matter of fact, one of my, uh, customers, uh, when I was early days at Quest, was one of the first Forest recovery customers that, that Ali had, and they had to do it all manually. So they went through all those 400 and some steps, I think it was to, uh, help that customer recover. And then that became the Forest recovery tool.

Um, but we wanted to get into that space. We recognized that that was a, a growing area because of ransomware attacks targeting active directory. I think Microsoft says 80% of ransomware attacks target active directory.

That thing was never meant to connect to the internet. Right. And yet with COV and work at home, it, it just happened.

Sure. And so as we started looking in that space, we realized that management, delegated administration, lease privilege, zero trust, combined with seeing what's going on in these hybrid environments. And then finally being able to recover when you make a mistake or when somebody gets in to recover from a ransomware attack, was the, the three big, uh, buckets of, of, um, we'll call 'em buckets of help that, that IT teams modern IT teams need help with.

And so that's where we concentrate. And we got really lucky with that last area. Um, we were so small, there were only three of us in the company when we started working on recovery.

And, uh, my, my business partner called me and said, Hey, we're gonna announce forest recovery, this, this, you know, ransomware recovery thing. Um, I was in Florida at the time I that You're down there in the warm weather? Yeah.

In the snowy Columbus weather. Right now it's, it is. I don't wanna rub it in, but it is warm today.

Yeah. Yeah. So I was in southern Florida at the time, and he called me late one night and we had a demo.

I think this was Saturday night, 3:00 AM he called me, um, he's in arm, was in Armenia at the time. That's where our development center is. And he, um, he said, Hey, Bob, we got the forest recovery thing ready to go for the demo, but you're gonna need four more laptops to demonstrate it for the recovery piece.

And I'm like, I'm in nowhere Florida. There is no Best Buy within 300 miles of me. There's no way I'm gonna get to that by, you know, Wednesday or Thursday and get all that set up.

So we had a, a quick discussion and realized that we had all the makings to do it all programmatically in the cloud. So we, you know, mother's the inventor of necessity or whatever that saying is. Right.

Um, mother of invention necessity, Mother of invention. So city is the mother of invention, right? That's It.

That's it. And so, um, because of our size and because of our limited resources, we had to do something different. And it turns out it was a game changer.

Um, and so we're likely the fastest way to recover in those, and probably the one that you have a hundred percent certainty is gonna work. Um, Fantastic. Yeah.

It, it really worked out well for us. And, and, and when we got that thing to market and started demonstrating that, that's when the acceleration really took off. I love it.

You know, Bob, as I sit here and, and I'm listening to you, the two things that I missed, and when, with the rise of cloud computing, the, well, the biggest thing I missed is I never saw multi-cloud coming. Mm. Okay.

Right. I I, it just didn't occur to me that you would spread your infrastructure across multiple cloud containers. It just seemed wasteful.

I gotta learn three different platforms, what have you, but yet here we are, right. Each of the major cloud providers have their own special sauce, their own things that they may do better than some others. And so, so many organizations today are multi-cloud.

They, they do use Microsoft Office. They do use active directory or hosted active directory and Trotter, I forget what they call it, ra. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mm-hmm. Others are using Google for what have you. And then of course others, you know, they, they first move to the cloud on Amazon and they still have instances there and there are things they WS does that the others, you know, don't do as well.

So, you know, multi-cloud I think was, so the second thing was I thought the train would keep going. Like, I didn't think everybody would move everything to the cloud all at once. Mm-hmm.

But I thought once you set up sharp in the cloud, there would be like an underground railroad, if you will, of things constantly, until finally you emptied out your, your server closet. Sure. Now, it hasn't really worked out that way, has it?

Right. We still have, there's probably, I'm gonna say still a majority of, of applications and infrastructure deployed not in the cloud or not in the public cloud, and maybe at third party data centers or what have you, colo, but not in the third party cloud. And that to me is, that's gotta be music to your ears, right?

Because the longer, you know, the more we have in these hybrid environments, the more they need the chaos koft type of solutions. So There, there are two things that I think, um, support that, that, that thought you just had. One is that I think people don't quite understand the magnitude of Microsoft's previous generation of client server.

And when I say that 90, and this is a Microsoft number, 96% of businesses worldwide ran active directory, that number, I no doubt it Is almost unconceivable or inconceivable to a lot of folks because they don't really understand how, but if you went all around the globe, everybody used Active Directory. And so I think there's a scale that it's just gonna take time because they had built for 25 years, by the way, happy birthday to Active Directory, which was two weeks ago for 25 years, people built applications around active directory. It was the, the standard.

No, it's, So it takes time to unwind all that. Right? So there's, I don't want to use the AM word.

We'll get sued. Yeah. But it, it, it pretty much, it was the standard.

I mean, I'm old. Look, I remember a time of NetWare Probably. Sure, sure.

Or Banyan Vines before that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You the same league here.

Yeah. Yeah. So that's the whole LDAP thing.

I think it just is taking time, you know? Mm-hmm. Um, so I think that's an important one.

And interestingly enough, when we started this company, uh, and we started to discuss what was available, uh, to us in terms of what we thought we would do for product, we were gonna start with Google because Microsoft had not yet announced Office 365. And so the platform we built actually is multi-cloud capable for management, monitoring, and recovery. We have gone down the path very similar to what Veeam had done, chasing VMware first and then switching over to Microsoft and doing both.

We are in that process currently with our platform of embracing what we've known the best, which is the Microsoft stack, but our first betas and testing role on the Google stack, interestingly enough. So I think Any, any plans and don't say anything you're not supposed to. Sure.

But any plans to, to work with the Google Docs? The Google office? So We already do.

We already do. Oh, you do? We have several customers that we support, um, uh, unified user provisioning for and group management.

We also support, uh, AWS for either running the solutions that, that we have on the client server side. Mm-hmm. Uh, or, uh, for example, with Forest Recovery, you can actually use an AWS instance to further insulate you from your on-premise active directory.

So you can have our automated backup and recovery of your directory. We actually call it a standby forest. We clone your forest every night.

You can do that in, um, uh, Microsoft's Azure, which is probably what the majority of folks are doing. Right? So you have that clone of your ad infrastructure there ready to go, should you get attacked, or you can do it in Amazon.

Um, and we also support some on-premise, uh, as well. But, uh, yeah, I think as, as we see customers coming to us, that is how we know when we need to start supporting things. We don't just, you know, put our finger in the air and say, oh, I think we should go do something.

We're constantly taking feedback. And I think that is another differentiator that's allowed us to, to really accelerate our growth. You know, a lot of companies say, Hey, we're doing great.

Um, we did about 76, 70 7% growth in our revenue last year coming off another year. Uh, and we will likely continue that or maybe accelerate that a little bit more this year. And I think that combined with our, you know, high 90%, um, customer retention proves that we're on the right track with our unified platform and listening to customers.

And as they run into these challenges, we're hearing that, and we then embrace those things. And if they come back and they tell us, Hey, you need to support JumpCloud or Okta, that'll be the next thing we do. Right?

So for me, those things are, are going to be revealed to us through our customer base. And our customers are, you know, mid-size Microsoft customers at the moment. Right.

That, that's what I was gonna say too, there. And, and look, in a lot of ways, you know, it was kind of a, a, an unspoken truth in enterprise. Microsoft controlled the enterprise, right.

But they also controlled the mid market and small market. 'cause they just made it so easy. E look, even, uh, when I started, uh, tech Trunk 12 years ago, 13 years ago, I mean, Google was there, don't get me wrong, but we were a micro, it was so easy to just use office already.

Right, right, right. And it was a no brainer. Right.

And we, I didn't have on-prem, everything was SaaS. I didn't have a server closet. I I still, we have a room here in the office that still has, when we moved in, it had a, a sign on the door, it says data room.

I got a cardboard cut out of commanded data and put it in there, and that's data's room. But other than that's that I got nothing. That's funny.

Uh, so, so I get it. However, I will say that, look, we're a, I don't want to throw the M word around, but you're right. 96% of the world, I think was on active directory.

Um, there are other directory choices. I think Google and I forget what they call Google Office, the official word for it, but workspace Used to be docs. Yeah.

Workspace, Google work, Whatever workspace soup de jour is this week, I think. Yeah. You know, it, it's made tremendous gains and, and inroads and, you know, we use it here too.

I, I offer people pick whichever one you want. I'm not, you know, discriminating, but, um, exchange server as well. Right.

Versus Gmail, corporate Gmail. It, this is the world we live in today. Right, right.

And, and I think that's why you need companies like KioSoft to, to navigate those borders, to navigate, you know, whether I'm gonna be all on-prem, all in the cloud, a little of both, a little here, a little there. We, we need something that sand out those rough edges. And, and that sounds like, Yeah.

Security identity infrastructure teams face, uh, uh, a major upheaval moving to cloud. And, and it's not a bad upheaval. I think, you know, with Google coming to the forefront, it challenged Microsoft.

Their stuff has gotten better, you know, because without a challenger sometimes, you know, you, you languish a little bit. And with AI coming on, they're embracing it. You know, You have to either, you either embrace it or you're gonna get rolled over.

That can't. Right. That's cant believe it's not there.

You know, you're talking about embracing a challenge. I remember when Microsoft invested in Apple. Right.

Remember that? That Was crazy. But yeah, It was good.

Keep Yeah. But they, well, they had to have a, a otherwise the Justice Department might've got involved, right? Yeah.

It just took justice a little longer than I think after, well, Whatever. Look, they, those guys at Apple did okay for themselves. com.

CAY Oh, My t-shirt right there. CAY. Yep.

And well, it's also gonna be in the bottom third Okay. That we have under you. So it's all in there.

Not to worry. Um, for people out there say, yeah, I'd like to give this a shot. We, we are in this kind of, that's exactly describing our situation.

What's your be, excuse me. What's your best advice for them to get started with Koft Bob? So, you know, I, I think if you look at what your Microsoft infrastructure is delivering, if it's around identity, uh, ongoing management or recovery, we're probably the, the, the, the number one choice right now.

Um, you know, we do a lot of, of replacement business for other companies where you might have a legacy solution. So, you know, come visit us there if you wanna just kind of see how the products work. Uh, we actually have a freemium tool called Guardian Protector.

And Guardian Protector allows you to run security scans a lot like antivirus for your identity. Think of it that way. It works with both, uh, active Directory and entra.

That's a great way to try us out for free. Keep using it. We love it.

We update it almost weekly with new threats like an antivirus would. Um, if you're, you know, really struggling with like user provisioning in, in ad in a hybrid environment, you know, uh, contact us. We're happy to run a proof of concept with you or, you know, if you just want a demonstration, we can do those things as well.

com. I love it. Hey Bob, thanks for coming on text TV today.

That was awesome. Thank you so much. Hope you enjoyed this.

It was awesome. Here as well. Come back and keep us posted.

Best of luck with chaos. Oof. We'll be watching.

Okay. Enjoy that warm weather in Florida. Well, it was, it's, we've had cold weather.

This is the first week it's actually warming up again, I hope. Awesome. We're done with the cold weather.

The one is, we're falling outta the trees. Alright, thanks Al. Hey Bob, we'll be in touch.

Thank you. Cheers. Mm-hmm.

Bye-bye. We're gonna take a break here on Text Drunk tv. We'll be right back.