Enterprise Cloud and Hybrid Network Infrastructure – Justin Stouder, FireMon

This is Textron TV. Hey everyone, welcome to another techstruck TV segment. You know I have for those who watch this regularly or know me.

I've been in the information security cyber SEC as we call it today Marketplace for 20 25 years. one of the first companies I met and people I met in cyber security early on was the folks the good Folks at Fishnet security as they were called then it was Gary fish and his CTO Jodi Brazil and Jody and Gary. Well Jody founded Gary helped, I guess fireman become a company.

It was actually spun out from fishnet. Jeez. It's got to be 18 17 something like that years ago 16, maybe and ever since then.

I've been a fireman for fan. I follow Jodi and Final on back. Then there wasn't really a cloud.

But what was happening was people were adding firewalls like mad and the idea of being able to manage policies across firewalls and routers was not an easy task. It was beyond not easy. It was impossible and Faro Mont quickly became the leader.

In what became known as security policy management and if I have the initials wrong, I apologize. You know fast forward fireman has gone through a lot of changes during these times. They've acquired some great technology and some great people with Acquisitions and lumina and disruptops and others.

I have a cloud aspect they still have that core security policy management, but that that missions changed, too. Anyway, we haven't had a chance to have a catch up with fireman in a long time. So, I'm really happy to introduce you all today to just Justin stauter and Justin's going to tell us all about his newly appointed role as well as his background just and welcome to Tech strong TV Allen, my pleasure.

Thank you so much for having me. Hey, that was that was a long-winded shortage reduction to you and fireman, but why don't you take it from here now man, tell us give us a little bit of the Justin story as well. As you know your take on firemind, absolutely.

So thanks again for having me really excited to be on the show. Fireman, as you know has been in this space for quite some time and it's an interesting correlation because when fireman was getting started was when I was starting my career in technology and software development and operations. And so I've got a 20 year career of building software companies and software teams all over the globe and have the incredible opportunity to lead the technology organization at this story company and you're right we've been around for all quite some time and you know and recently seemingly that kind of caught up in all these changes within the marketplace that said we find ourselves at a unique inflection point now and as I'm sure you're aware Companies across the globe are asking for consolidation.

They want fewer vendor touch points and what that requires is for vendors to be in a place where they have multiple Solutions and as luck as as Jody's leadership as the board would have it we provide that now so what my role is is taking yes our nspm solution and continue to push it forward and lead the edge but then also take our cybersecurity asset management tool with lumetta and our Cloud security operations tool with disruptops and bring those all together as a cohesive Solution. That's where you'll find fire on technology right now. absolutely and Justin, I mean part of the you know reason you're on today's read you were recently announced as po of well, why don't you explain what your position is?

I don't want to mess it up. Sure. Absolutely.

You know Jody's a brilliant leader just a fantastic technologist. And and as I was leading the lumetta division the general manager and vice president of that organization, we would have fantastic conversations about what's the future look like and how do we bring this together cohesively and just naturally kind of transpired and we need a CTO and the conversation went from there that my background and my understanding of this space just made for a really healthy fit in bringing all these portfolios together in a meaningful way meaningful in that not just to satisfy what we're trying to accomplish but the needs of our customers. So what does that look like look like?

Well the nspm space as long then and I'll say this at the risk of catching Flack from Jodi meyerd in the on premise application. Well, a lot of our customers are no longer exclusively on premise as you know, everyone seemingly besides maybe the government is In some government customers are starting to stretch out into the cloud. We need to adjust to that.

We need to actually leave that so we're looking at what is nspm in the cloud. Just let me stop you right there if I apologize, but you know what, we got a lot of folks here who are devops and Cloud people and they don't even know what nspm stands for so right, you know, we can't throw acronyms out there without telling them so network security policy management. That's right.

That's absolutely right. Thank you. Yeah, and so, you know taking that and understanding where our customers likely heading and making sure we're staying one step ahead of them.

That's where disruptops comes in because disruptops was leading and still is how to interact. I'm a security operation to posture with all the cloud providers. So we're leaning heavily on that as we talk about integration.

And then as you think about asset Discovery and then Asset Management, which is a huge space, it's Loading and lumetta was one of the original founders of that all the way back in 2000 from Bell labs for some three letter agencies with the government pairing that together is what I believe a fantastic opportunity to what we can provide to customers you sit down and just say I'm not just about network security policy manager. That's just one slip slice. I also have Cloud assets.

I also have security operations that are running wild. Can you cohesively with intent simplify all of that and help me secure my security operations. That's the unique position that fireman finds itself in.

Absolutely, you know what for what it's worth my two cents. Lose the end. Yeah, right because when we say network security policy management people sort of, you know, focus in on classic network security firewall router molten Castle perimeter that kind of thing really to me firemont today's about security policy management.

And in order to do security policy management number one, you got to know what you got what your assets are and in today's world those assets may be on the land on a land anywhere in the cloud, you know and and all of the above so number one, you got to be able to draw you got to know. What what is your surface? What is your what do you got?

Right right number two? Decide how am I what policies do I put in place? That I can manage.

To take this real estate real estate's a bad word to protect this surface. Right? Right, and and some of those might be kind of that traditional Network stuff because there's still a lot of firewalls out there still a lot of lands out there.

Some of it may be Cloud kind of the stuff, you know, the disruptops does with guard rails and helping to you know, keep things policy managed there. Some of it may be remote, you know people working from anywhere with everything coming on the network. And and what is that?

What's our policy management for those types of devices? It's really that's the power of of this fireman story. That's right.

Yeah, and and one of the things you touched on now and that's absolutely true both in Market data. And with our customers is the explosion of iot and OT. It's it's factor of a magnitude right now in the marketplace and so I don't want to sound too pitchy but we just are two weeks away from releasing a new version of The Meta that is focused on iot and OT but to your point what we're finding with customers is they don't know what they're supposed to be managing and when you're talking about security policy management and asking how many firewalls how many policies and they don't know what better, you know tag along tool then an asset Discovery device or asset Discovery solution.

So we're finding a ton of power between bringing those two things together. Better and leveraging them to secure your real estate. Absolutely.

Yeah, you know and this is always been kind of a Holy Grail, right? know the Lumen look I remember big fix and IBM buying them right? I'm sure you do.

And again that was the same sort of notion is hey, let's discover. What's on our Network so we can put in policies to manage the security. For these devices now you mentioned iot inner things connected things.

You know the numbers I see is what is like 55 billion devices by 2025 or something like that, right? You know, there's you know, that's about eight for every single person on Earth. When you when you think about it, and I mean that's daunting don't yes.

Yeah, we were talking to the a mid-level Manufacturing Company recently and we asked them to estimate the number of devices under management and there's a manufacturing business and the gentleman responded with 13 million. That's small SMB just exploding and and those are those are attack vectors. They really are.

Oh if you're not if you're not aware of them, how can you secure them? You can't manage what you can't see and so I was more too. I think you know Justin when are you used to think about connected things?

It was like scared of stuff, right? And that was scary because they're in you know, not important stuff like nuclear power plants, but but they were relatively simple devices. They were binary.

Yes, no kind of devices today's things. Today's things have real software on them. That's right.

We're doing a devops experience. I annually we do this event called devops experience virtual event, but this year there's three tracks. One of the tracks is the devops of things including the security of them because What's happening is these things increasingly are updateable via the web right?

They're not like dumb devices. They're connected and they're updatable. They have enough Headroom.

To to put some software in there and and to you know update it. They they have more sophisticated software running on them. There's there's a lot of Great stuff on these connected devices now, they're smarter.

There's machine learning going on. There's all kinds of, you know data thinking going on. This is a security.

Problem, right? I mean these dumb devices are getting smarter. That means our security needs to get smarter.

Absolutely. That's absolutely right. That's a big mission man.

6 within lumetta and it has all kinds of new features Integrations with other tools. But one of the key, you know table stake was back net and modbus support which are the two main protocols within Healthcare manufacturing attitude. Excellent.

So we'll look for the end of the month. Let's talk far walls a little bit Justin sure. you know people I think I think people are sleeping on it a little bit, but I'm sure if anyone fire him on odds how it's still a huge amount of devices out there.

It's massive and it's growing every single day. We get requests for ones. We haven't even heard of their tier two or tier three tier four, but I love you asking that question because we just did a refocus of the organization and we carved off an entire network security engineering team that is exclusively focused on tier one devices because what we're finding is as the checkpoints of the world go broader companies aren't keeping up.

And and the way to keep up is to pinpoint actual people to a vendor and that's our tax right now. We have a whole team of 10 people who are exclusively focused on tier one device support. We're doing training we're doing partner relationships everything we can to go as deep as possible because we are finding that that's a huge contention point in the marketplace is have you picked up the most recent release from checkpoint.

Can you validate and verify that we have to be able to assert that for our customers and our future prospects? Absolutely, man. I just you know, and again Justin you've been in security a long time.

We're always focused on the next cool thing. And we and when we focus on the next cool thing we kind of lose focus on. Some really bread and butter things like like firewall policy management.

For instance, right? We're all so busy about cloud and God rails and I am in the access control in the cloud. You know, hey, man.

Did when we look at people coming in with fishing and we see it's really DLP, right? DLP was dead. No one spoke about DLP for a long time.

All of a sudden dlp's back on the radar. Right people are saying wait a second. We got to stop this data from getting sucked out of our Network.

It's not necessarily getting sucked out of the cloud. It's getting sucked right out of right out about Network, right and we can still you know, stop it there. Yeah.

Anyway, that's honest. That's the unique position that farm on finds itself in that's why I'm so excited to be here is that we're pivoting and posturing from a place of strength and that's policy management, you know, if you're talking to a tool in our space a competitor you should be asking them truly not just to compare against fire mom, but because you're interested in securing your operations, you should be asking them. Okay great.

But what are you doing about asset Discovery and asset management because my networks growing what are you doing about securing the cloud because we're starting to talk about that. We're the only company in this space that can assert a position of strength in all three of those vectors. Absolutely.

so I know we spoke off camera, and I don't know so. The disruptops which is is a big part of the cloud. Has the CTO their Brandy that's right.

Your CTO kind of the rest of the piece of it. Let's talk a little bit how that kind of works together. Sure.

I'll give you a perfect example with this and I know keep going back to work. We're we're in release stride for for a policy management tour right now. It's gonna be after this next no matter release but it's a great question.

So so destructops has expressed and delivered an incredible aptitude to connecting to Cloud assets and then actually going out and pulling all that back. And so what we did with lumetta in this current release is we just we leverage that API. And now when you have lumetta you can connect directly to that disruptops API and go out to AWS and pull every single asset down and right back into your asset management tool.

So that's the type of collaboration I'm talking about it's it's exceptionally strong across it and that's not easy to do what we're finding great success in that right now. I love it, man. com right fi is IR em, just like it says behind here.

Yes, and they can stay on top of that. What about I assume you guys will be like RSA conference or some of the scores. He's not till April.

Yes. We we just had actually Jody is heading out to Germany. First of next week.

We will be at RSA. I don't have a list of the conferences between that and RSA, but I know we'll be heading out. I encourage people if they want to interact with me to head out to my LinkedIn Justin stauter look me up there.

That'd be a great place to find me directly and we'll talk more about what's going on. All right. Hey Justin.

Now that you're there you got this position. I expect you to be a regular on here. So I'd love to be it's my pleasure Alan.

Thank you for having no stay stay in touch just starter newly appointed CTO at firemon here on textrum TV. We'll be well, we're gonna take a break and then we'll be right back.