EP 279: Free Remote Endpoint Protection From Qualys

com, Security Boulevard. You're listening to another DevOps chat. Today's DevOps chat features Sumar Sarkar, president of Qualys.

Samid, welcome to DevOps chat. Thank you, Alan. How are you?

You know, good making. You know, we're all in uncharted waters, Sumate, so, yeah, Look, I'm a I'm an adventurous kind of person, so it's so good. It's too bad.

Qualys came out with some information some news this morning. Why don't you let you share it with our audience? Yeah, we've got a lot of.

A lot of questions from over customer around and a new challenge that they're facing now with the changing situation, which is really, you know, we're in lockdown. So everybody's working from home. And, you know, IT administrator, security administrators are now faced with how do you secure the remote end points?

Want everybody taking their laptop or using home desktops to continue to work. And, you know, way where traditionally a lot of that what is called is that more clients use to be more within the office space. Now suddenly outside.

So that, of course, creates a new sort of vector for access to a company's most important information. And how do you secure those? And really brought up a lot of interesting questions around VPN and how VPN skill to be able to do that, because a lot of the traditional tools that do the basics of the patching and the basics of the security hygiene are on prem tools are more installed inside the company environment and which work.

OK. When you heard occasionally somebody coming in and matching or VPN, now you have five, ten thousand employees suddenly trying to patch or VPN. That's a real challenge.

And so offering that we have really come out with this leveraging qualities, this cloud based platform where we have the ability to essentially monitor remote end points, leveraging the cloud platform without requiring VPN, rewinding an ability to keep a company track off the security hygiene of these Windows laptops, Mac laptops, and then also provide a way to match them directly or what they've done without requiring any VPN. So these devices can get patched directly by putting patches from the vendors on the endpoints and not saturating your VPN and then be able to sort of give that quick way to secure these end points to ensure that, you know, a lot a lot of people are leveraging the unfortunate incident that is happening to scam people and to send out emails and compromise them with fake maps of infections and things like that. So really, this gives the opportunity for for Divya administrators to lock down and really hard on these remote end points.

And that that's all we're offering, basically. It's a 60 day free so that people don't have to get into trying to buck the salespeople in trying to get purchase orders and all of that data really. Let's first get people secure and help the enterprise and then we can talk about the rest of it later.

Sure. So I just want to make sure, Sumit, you don't have to be an existing Qualitest customer for this. Anyone any company can pick it up.

Yeah, absolutely. You don't have to be existing while this customer you can sign up. We're putting out a sign up page quickly so that you can sign up and then we'll give you a quick account or download of the agents that can then be distributed.

It's very lightweight, three megabyte agents. So that way we can we can leverage the cloud off of that to really keep an eye on what's going on. Excellent.

Now, the. This I'm I'm I'm I have the benefit of looking at a screen shot, others may not be going, you know, looking at it, but it's a pretty this is not like a dumbed down, you know, version of this, that this seems to be pretty full featured in terms of what it's what it's finding. And we are absolutely in fact, it's a situation, I would say really focused on that.

It more than points because they have their own challenges compared to soda wars. And so what really we are what we did is that we said, look, what would a Nike administrator who was sitting in his office by himself with his, you know, entire workforce working in 15, 20, 30 countries, what would they want to know? And so fast, his inventory and the breakdown of, you know, what type of operating systems are these laptops using?

Are their end of life? How many of them are still not patched? One of the latest patches that are missing, we also kind of went a step further to focus on configurations because a lot of times you have this device that is left open in a public space.

Does it even have the basic hygiene of saying, you know. Is that a screensaver? Is there do I set to lock?

When you walk away, you go get coffee or something? Or does the device lock by itself? So a lot of times a lot of these things are actually not really talked about because people focus just on patching.

And so what we've done is really package more in the workflow, the ability to do your rudimentary ability to look at the critical vulnerabilities of missing critical missing controls that really help you secure these end point. So there's much more than vulnerability scanning. Yeah, it reminds me more of what we used to do back in my those secured days with Nacke.

Yeah. Where we we we can really look at the registry that I am driving, look for in a lot of things besides vulnerabilities. One version of software, what's turned on.

What's turned off. Yes. Much like that.

So and that and that's critical for this. I tell you another thing is just before you came onto our. Conference platform, want to record this.

I was talking with someone else who said, you know, I I'm working from home and I plugged in an old phone and there's so many people who are pulling the equipment out of the closet, right? Yeah. And, you know, I also wanted to find a Web camera.

I'd know, by the way. So just I know I going to buy a weapon. I'm on Amazon now.

This is a lot of things. I it's it's pretty crazy. But, you know, hopefully supply chain will works its way through.

But, you know, so we are turning on a lot of older equipment and a lot of this equipment probably hasn't been updated regularly. And, you know. But, you know, we still need to use it.

People need to get work done. People are working. People are you know, no one wants to sit at home and watch doom and gloom on TV.

Right. We all have stuff to do. And so it's important.

You want to. T.? T.

has to serve its customers. Epsilons is this guy. And so we can't be the people who say, no, you can't use that.

All the more important. Yeah, I don't want important, like not in this kind of a situation. It's ideas, really what's keeping the business running right now.

All right. Get making sure that these devices that open access is there and they're secure. And, you know, and I think that's that's the reason why we really jumped in to sort of create this service and give it something, you know, without without having to deal with the sign ups.

This that it's really straightforward and we give it for 60 days and then really give that ability to get started for the security and quickly without having to worry about other things. Sure. You mentioned another things.

T. T. is relying on the cloud.

Yes. Oh, that's right. I mean, here we are.

We were recording this over. Zoop. Yes, I presume.

Right. Yeah. But just, you know, thank God for the cloud, because I think that if every company had to maintain their server closet, the only centers and everything else, and we didn't have this whole cloud infrastructure and so forth.

Yeah, I think that cloud and the Sastry really is it has shown how important that architecture is to a lot of the companies who move on to leverage and, you know, cloud for collaboration, for e-mail. Like zoom platform. And, you know, they're using they're using cloud based services to scale in the backend because they're seeing tremendous full on their service right now.

And it's the same with the caller's platform. And that's really why for us also, it was pretty straightforward to to be able to create the service to help the community because we are already deployed. And for us to have provide a service that's directly off of the platform makes it a lot easier if at this point the customers have to try and use enterprise solutions, that would just not work because you are to first even go to the office to get something installed started in the first place in your data center.

It's just not going to work. So that architecture that Paula says and some of these other solutions that are being used heavily, I think those are really are showing why that cloud based architecture is the future today as we go into a more distributed and remote workforce. Smet, I want to ask you mentioned that he covers Windows devices and Mac devices.

So any typical laptops are people working from home that stops and stuff, any other device coverage in terms of mobile or ads or anything? Yeah. So we'll we're going to evaluate how our customers are rolling this out.

Today, the focus has been on windows really for the most part and a little bit of the Mac. So today we provide the company reasonably can Windows and Mac. And then there's the patching we provide on windows.

And then the next steps we know we'll see how we can leverage additional capabilities from Qualitest to be part of this. We sort of risk when that is protecting malware or anything else. And if we can expand, as you know, call this already has a solution for mobile devices.

That's about Android Iowas devices. And so today, customers are more focused on getting that windows to ISIS secure. And I think that that will be the next step, of course, to say how do you look at the mobile devices?

So that definitely is an opportunity for us to help customers as they go through this journey and take it to the next level. So this is great and thanks to qualify for doing this and making it free for people. And you don't hate it.

I should also say you don't have to be a big organization to do this. Is it? No, this is fine for small organizations as well.

I'm thinking here at MediaOps,, we're only 20, 25 people. And that's the beauty of a cloud based platform right to you. But also, we don't really have to go into a huge deployment that takes a long time, you know, when we have customers all the way from five devices to five million devices.

And so it's the same platform. And, you know, you go and you sign up and you get account and get the agents. And it's really is straightforward.

So, yeah, you're right. You don't need to be a big, massive company even when somebody with 15, 20 devices. This is perfect because it's cloud based and it just deploys out of the box.

Sure. So we don't have a lot of time left. Matt, I wanted to hit one other area.

I want to you know, you're the president now of Qualitest, right? We're talking to NITI audience here. T.

team is, as we mentioned there, trying to serve their customers the best they can, especially like see and security teams out there. And here's what we're faced with, right? Real world is real world down here.

We want to enable people working from home to be as productive as possible. Right. That we don't see a big drop off from the kind of production as maverick.

I saw a recent article. People are working on average three hours more a day at home. I believe that.

Who may you know, if I'm an employer, I may never bring them to the office. But that being said, you know, it's the old security conundrum right there. I want to make it happen.

I really, really do. But I got to have my security right. And there has to be at some point, there might be sacrifices or, you know, decisions that have to be made.

Once you're, you know, speaking officially now on behalf of quality. What's your advice to these people who are who are dealing with this real life situation? I've got to get my way most remote workforce up and running and allow them to make it happen.

But look, the security mission hasn't gone away. Yeah. Yeah, I think so.

It's about always about the balance between the, you know, the security and the ease of use and deployment and all of that. And I think one of the great things self of IP, if you if you see recently with the move to the cloud and all of that is that they have being very agile in adapting to the changing trends and leveraging your technology to be able to do a much better job with IP. And the same with security.

Now, we've seen with DevOps, Dev, Cyclopes, a lot of that happen and there's really not that different on the end point. This today we have a situation and we want to enable our teams to really do a good job remotely. And security is very important.

And so this is a good opportunity to really look at a new architecture, cloud based solutions, not just quality. There's other out there like Zoom and a few others ready. This is the opportunity.

This is the time to really look at new architectures, new solutions that are going to help us deal with the new reality. And as those happen in the cloud and others and most of the time, you're going to find that this is actually much more beneficial, cost effective, and something that gets security out of the way because it's happening on the endpoint. It's in realtime and it's not going through your VPN and all of that, creating more headaches for you.

So I think my my you know, really my thought process here is that they let's take the opportunity to meet this new challenge with a new approach from a technology perspective, as we've always done. Technology can be leveraged to make things better and adapt to the new changing situation. Absolutely.

So I want to thank you for joining us. Thanks, Carlos, for making this available to everyone for free. We're about out of time.

Stay well. Regards to all of my college friends. And hopefully we'll follow up soon.

Absolutely. Thank you, Alan. Always a pleasure.

Thanks. If you too, my friend, Sumed Sakar, president of Qualys announcing free end point security of the Qualys suite for the next 60 days. Check it out.

com slash remote patching. You can get it all there. No, no questions asked.

com, Security Boulevard. You just listened to another DevOps chat.