Dan Amiga, Island | RSA Conference 2023

This is texturung TV. Everybody we are here at rsac in San Francisco 2023 having some great conversations with companies and Technologies and a lot of discussion. What's happening in the industry the pleasure being joined by Dan Amiga, Dan and CTO and co-founder with Island.

Welcome back pleasure to be here. Yeah. Fantastic.

Tell us a little bit about yourself and tell us a little bit about what island does and we'll get into brow Enterprise browser security, but tell us a little bit about the company in you for sure. I'm the CTO on the co-founder Zion, I build the product. So I run a team of about a hundred plus engineers and product managers back in Tel Aviv, and the company's headquartered in in Texas where we have a big go to market team been in this space for about 20 years.

This is you can say my sixth or seven security startup and fortunately, A few of them were very successful my co-founder Mike Fey used to be a president and CEO for cement Tech and before the blue coat and McAfee and we met in 2017 when he acquired my previous company also in the browser space. I've been working on on browsers and specifically cormium and Bowser security and Enterprise security around browsers for you can say more than 10 years. Now, the things have changed a lot in the browser space and she started security things have changed about space, but they also change the also I like to say And the way people work have changed more than the tech.

That's for sure. Right. So I recalling in 2013.

I was looking at the folks that used to work for me. They're like 25 26 years old. They had nothing on the left top except except the bazos the main vehicle of work and I was like Wow in 10 years.

This is how financials would work. This is how Healthcare everybody we're moving to that as the call operating system. 9 of the applications today are delivered the bazos.

It's all the steps anymore. We do a few but now yeah, even the ones we install Alberta base. Yes, exactly that exactly that's very true.

Well tell us a little bit about the the Enterprise browser security Market is not everybody may be familiar with it. But it's it's a thing that's kind of happening up and coming people are starting to adopt it and understand given the importance the role of the browser. So tell us about what that what that means.

Absolutely. So we we like to differentiate between the security aspect and the end of his aspect when you install something like Chrome or Edge or any chromium baseball, you know, the lots of security has been built into the commune open source, so things like, you know, Auntie exploitation, you know fishing Etc already exist in those in those what It is we took what we call the enterprise approach. I have a catch that phrase always like to use that my mother back home.

She uses Chrome and it's the same browser that's being used by somebody that works that a big Healthcare or a big Financial. It doesn't make any sense. Right?

It's too different things. So what we try to do is make the Enterprise play make the vows of play better within the Enterprise. So we integrate with your identity provider.

We integrate with your DLP program. We have our zero trust capabilities if it's networking or device posture built in we have performance monitoring built in so consider it as really an operating system. Well, we literally belt or integrated a lot of the security world the data leakage World ITN networking and we also have a big team working on productivity.

So an intelligent clipboard and intelligent AI assistant to make people work easier. When you build that when and it's such a central tool for the Enterprise. They you know, our customers very quickly a solve a lot of their challenges dyod is a big one so they can use our browser for BYOD without installing vpns or vdis Etc vdi is a great one the ability to reduce the usage of vdi nobody likes tovi we call it the length of the wire.

Nobody likes to wait so from getting pixels from the cloud, right? You don't need to do that if you use either Contract always a big Challenge and the whole supply chain and that contractors go through to go into an access business applications. So overall we've been lucky enough to see the category evolve super fast.

Faster than we thought we have, you know, many many different customers from different verticals. Again Financial is a big market for us Healthcare. We have big customers in the hospitality tech companies here in the Bay Area really big a key names all adopting it and if I have to summarize Yes, we we've built a big platform that has all the modules but it's about the end user.

We make the experience for the end user smoother faster the more secure more connected and I think that was a that was changed that that's the main thing that's changing our Industries the workforce demands and easier way to access things. I think it's a key point because people will find where you're around things that again in the way, especially security require me to go through extra steps, log on to a VPN. I'm curious, you know, things like Chrome you mentioned a lot.

Of course a lot of people use Chrome are making it attempt to sort of personalize a bit of the experience let the Enterprise control it a bit right when you're logging in but you're still using like maybe your personal account and one profile your work accountant to and in other profile, but it doesn't go really far enough. I mean to me it's just kind of a starting point to say, I have my identity in these tabs and different identity these tabs maybe some security settings, but Basic stuff, you know two-factor and things like that. What's the next jumping off?

What do people need? Beyond that to help them secure the browser for for the business environment. Absolutely the so the concept of modalities in the internet where you have your personal identity and your work identity is key.

Right and you have to supply privacy for the first modality for your private modality and you have to supply security and governance and policy and connectivity for the business modality. So what we enable is we enable organizations to give their users a choice right whenever they want to access their personal stuff they can go and use either the consumer style vows or like Chrome and whenever they want to use the business applications, we would automatically launch the island. So think about it like Zoom If I send you a link to a zoom invite and you don't have zoom it will automatically launch or download and automatically launch.

So same story with with Island, we do see A big we do see a lot of a lot of big challenges for organizations on that for example, super how to differentiate between private Gmail and the organization generator. Yeah private box. So we have that modality.

We call that multi-tenancy detection. So we understand the different tenants and allow to apply different policies. Very nice.

Well, we're here at rsac tell us a little bit about what's happening with Island and things that you have that are either coming up or here or in the works. Sure. So island is I really like to use the AWS metaphor when I think about what we are what we are building.

So if you think about AWS, you're not buying the data centers, you're buying the services on top right the computer the storage the networking and what have you with Island, you're not really buying the communal the browser part of it. You're buying your DLP program your zero trust connectivity, you're buying the use cases and the modules themselves. So what we have in our product organization is the ability to ship new modules.

We have a big customer base now, so we get to talk to our customers. See what's next. For them do they want to consolidate this tackle that Tech right and when you build it like AWS, it's a good path for consolidation.

So we're launching a we have quite a few announcements coming up. One of the main announcements is around our self-protection capabilities a island becomes such a key tool for customers and they're asking how do we protect Island itself from being? By from different types of attacks, right like memory dumping or Corruption of the binary code itself.

So we're launching a very big we call this self-protection module and that's our ability to detect as the bounces DLS being changed the underlying operating system. Has it been tempered any many in the middle events that that have a code and we're doing it using a technology that's pretty similar to the way antiviruses are doing so very sophisticated but also gives our customers a show and says that the business can continuous as usual one of the call use cases with Island is it runs in a breached environment by definition BYOD is bridge by default when you have it when you a bank and you have a DLP program. They assume the computer at home is already has malware Etc.

So we allow same goes for contractors. Right? So we allow them to have that security that secure environment right with our self protection capabilities with the business continuity and access the Enterprise Basel gets you Excellent.

Excellent. Well, it's exciting to great to hear about some of the new announcements and then nice thing in environment. You're delivering in is doesn't have to come in one big step and continually to deliver new capabilities.

Absolutely. Well, I think one of the the interesting things for island is you don't have to have an enterprise-wide all out. And again, I I really like to use the AWS metaphor, right?

It's if it's recall 2015 everybody is like I'm not gonna move my workloads to the cloud 2016. I'm only gonna put my marketing website in the cloud, right 2020 is the reality everybody uses it and businesses that have not used it right lacking behind. We really see the same adoption curve with Island.

It's a matter of where you start you start with your BYOD or contractors or we do vdi or maybe I will call center population. But once you give it to them, it's at Target to add more modules more users more use cases and we see a lot of our customers in a self-service support right once we give them the platform they keep on adding modules and you use cases. So it's only a matter of focusing on when you start.

Okay, excellent. We're working folks find out more about Ireland and Enterprise browser security. Sure.

Just go to our website at islandio and you can learn all Outed and contact us and happy to help involved great. Well, thank you, Dan. Hope you have a great show and congratulations on the progress that you've made.

So we talked last year so fantastic news. Thank you so much, Matt.