Nicko van Someren, Absolute Software | RSA Conference 2023

This is texturung TV. Hey everyone. Hey, we're back.

We're in RSA. It's a happening crowd a happening event happy to be here. It's so good to see these folks.

My next guest is nicoban Summer and Nico is with absolute software as I look at his RSA veggie not allowed in the they're serious about security not allowed in here without a badge. Anyway, for those of you who are Tech strong TV fans. You might have seen Nico on was about three weeks ago a month.

Probably until we got a plate it was three or two weeks because we have such a backlog of content these days. But anyway, Nico as much to my happy surprises a like me a fellow security industry veteran who's got 20 plus years in here 25 years plus and it's good, right? I mean we You know a lot of us have moved on a lot of us aren't in it anymore.

So, it's good Nico. Welcome. Welcome to text back with you in person now, so Yeah, I gave a little bit of your background, but you could do a better job than I did sure as you say I mean, this is like my 27th RSA and a right guy.

Is that crazy? You got me, you know, it's not a ballroom up at the fam on with 400 people in it anymore. Not quite.

Yeah, I think the trade show back then was like three Booth tables at the back, but it was really much more about encryption. And yeah, I mean was really focused on RSA absolutely and and you know encryption is sort of the foundation of all of the stuff that's going on at the conference now, but you know, we've built a lot on top of that a little bit. Yeah.

So yeah, I've been through the whole range of building encryption Hardware back in the 90s building networking security Technology Building mobile security technology and now doing endpoint security. Absolutely. Why don't you if look not everyone in our audience knows absolute software.

So actually it is a company that builds a platform for securing endpoint machines, so it's really about Your endpoint compute. What do you need to do to keep them secure? It's really about resilience.

A lot of people think of us from our early days doing tracking and tracing and locking and wiping of lost and stolen devices. But on top of that foundational technology that is actually built into the bios of hundreds of millions of PCS that are out there already. We build a platform that allows us to monitor the Health and Welfare of those endpoints make sure that your security controls are running not just to report on it, but actually to fix it if it breaks down and allow you to be much more confident about the security posture and help you manage some of that complexity and some of the continuity problems that you have as you've got an increasingly mobile Workforce.

Yeah. Absolutely. I'm glad you explain all that so Some news here at the show from absolute.

Yeah. So as I said, you know, we've got technology is built into a lot of machines that are already out there. We have about 14 million machines under management as 14 million that's is not enough.

We know if so, if you'll if you're buying, you know, come talk to us. Yeah, so seriously, so we collect quite a bit of telemetry for our customers, right and we present it to the customers. But we also have the ability to take anonymized data and do some very interesting long-term analysis on that and we really look into three areas.

We look at the complexity situation, which really drives, you know, the the scale of the problem with a lot of our customers have we look at that continuity? Because in an increasingly hybrid at both ends world where we've got hybrid workers at one end and we've got hybrid services that may be on premises or maybe in a hybrid Cloud at the other end. There's a lot of continuity of service issues.

And then of course, you know, you only have to look down the show floor to realize that compliance is a major problem for a lot of our customers, right? So we've been digging into the data. And finding some really fascinating nuggets down there.

I'm sure well it that kind of scale. It has to be here do share with us. So, you know when we look at, you know the marketplace for you know, what what operating systems do people have installed, you know, you you might look at the headline and say like 80% of the PCS out.

There are running Windows 10, that sounds pretty homogeneous. But actually we're seeing like 14 different versions of Windows that have more than a minimal install footprint and there's like 800 patch version my God we've seen companies which have had several hundred different patch versions just within a managed Fleet. And so so in terms of the complexity of the operating system, it's pretty high and then on those machines we're seeing typically on average around 60 different applications 10% of the Enterprise is out there have more than a hundred different applications installed on these endpoints.

And and critically from a security point of view. There's you know on average around 11 different security applications installed by the Enterprise onto those endpoint machines and it's like can you even name 11 different categories? And actually there's a lot of duplication.

So what we see from our data is that most Enterprises really don't have a good handle on all of the different security controls that they're deploying and why they've got them absolutely and the other thing that we see is that most of those security controls when you get past, you know, the sort of eight nine ten mark which most Enterprises have they're fighting with each other. Yeah. And so at any given point at least one of these controls is probably not working properly.

Sometimes they fight with each other and take each other out, right and so maintaining a state of compliance when I actually we're seeing that your controls are probably not working at any given moment. Order of machines have at least one control not working. That means that that spend that you when you went down to the show floor a couple of years ago.

You spent some money on a product. It's not working. Why are you spending that money?

You know I sit here and I shake my head because you know that you you're in Security even longer than me. We have such shiny trinket syndrome worrying about what's the new hot vector? That we very quickly.

What was yesterday's news is yesterday's news and we we gloss over and we forget look it only takes one. It only takes one chink in the armor. To bring the whole house down end points.

We like. Oh, yeah. No, we solved them Point Security.

We solve them but no we did it. No, we did it still the most common entry point for for the attackers. And so but you know, when when we think about you know, why do we why do companies keep on spending they buy these shiny train kits and they install them and they keep on using them and part of the problem.

Is that do you want to be the mid-ranking director of information security who says hey, how about we take that security control out and then two weeks later you get breached and so nobody wants to take these things out they buy a shiny trinket and then you can never get rid of it. So what people need is the data they need to know what's working. What's not working?

Because if you know, what's not doing anything for you, you can stop paying for it agreed agreed Nico. We're gonna be running out of time here, but for people want to get more information about absolute and these yeah kinds of access to this kind of info where where do we go? com and we're not the Vodka companies.

I just add an extra e on the internet and that that's the the company absolutely. Hey man a pleasure running into you here 27 rsas. You need your loyalty plus I I the problem is that I stop spending money on the fancy conference passes because I do I meet so many people here.

I never make it into the interview. Well that's by design for me. But that's why I have a nice place to hang out here.

You want to see me come see me. We're live. We're at RSA.

We're gonna take a quick break. We'll be back here in about two minutes with our next guest so standby.