Ryan McCurdy: Why Strong Governance is Non-Negotiable

Hey everyone. Welcome back here to Techstrong tv. My friend Ryan McCurdy, VP marketing at Liquibase is joining us on this next Tech strong TV segment.

Hey, Ryan, it's good to see you again. How you been, man? I'm doing well, Alan.

Thanks for having me. It's great to see you. Always, always good to see you.

Um, hey, Ryan, you know, for those who haven't caught you on Tech Strum TV before, give them a chance of, give them a flavor of, of your journey here and, uh, and if they're not familiar with Liquid Base, let's bring them up to speed. Yeah, sure. So, um, you know, I've been working in technology for the last 15 years.

Spent a lot of time in cybersecurity. Um, spent a lot of time in the DataOps space, uh, at a company called Astronomer, working on Apache airflow things. And, uh, for the last year, I've been over at Liquibase, um, another really incredible open source company.

Um, and for those that aren't familiar, Liquibase has our Liquibase community, which is our, uh, our community offering effectively where we automate database change. And then, um, our commercial product, liquid based, secure, uh, really automates and governs database change across 60 databases. So, um, we're doing something really unique in the market where we help a lot of companies achieve the developer productivity they want, um, with the automation, but then also making sure their, you know, their database change is auditable, making sure people have the right remissions to that change, making sure that nothing risky really reaches production and causes downtime, uh, which is happening a lot in the market as of late.

So, um, we're doing some pretty incredible things for our customers, and we work with some of the most regulated customers in the world. Very cool. Ryan, I know you mentioned the open source and the commercial versions URLs for those, so people can go check 'em out.

com, um, you can also, uh, you know, go to GI as well. com we have, um, our community offering available, uh, as well as more information OnBase secure. Absolutely.

And of course, liase probably the company that kind of established what we used to call DevOps for databases or databases for DevOps. So both, uh, in the market. So we've been following liquid base for many, many years.

Many, Ryan, you guys recently announced a couple of things. Number one, this whole, you know, burgeoning area of AI governance and governance around ai. And, and there's two pieces of it.

One is, you know, government governance, GRC if you will, governance risk compliance governance around the use of ai. And then there's the using AI for governance aspect of it as well. What exactly did liquid base kinda launch here with governance capabilities?

Yeah. Uh, well, I mean, obviously as I think as everyone knows, AI is changing a lot and, um, the, it's not that AI is risky. It's, um, not governing change that is risky.

And, um, we really allow our customers to govern change at scale. And, uh, you know, when you look at, um, AI is writing different queries and modifying structures and in some cases touching production directly, um, you know, you really need to be able to control who's making that change, whether it's developer or it's AI assisted or it's agent ai. Um, and we're able to enforce those controls through, through our custom policies, so we're able to support our customers, uh, in that regard.

I think the other piece of this that's really interesting is, you know, your models are only as good as your data foundation, right? Which in a large, a lot of cases are your database. And if you're not governing, uh, the changes in your database, well then your models can become corrupted and, um, you know, so it's really the, um, you know, it's, it's how accurate your models are, one, uh, and then two, it's, you know, what are you controlling that goes into production, uh, through AI potentially.

So we're really helping our customers ensure their ac their model accuracy as well, just if, uh, they have AI helping with, uh, any type of development. So we're helping our customers both on those fronts. Um, we also are able to provide schema level lineage so they're able to track the full history of that change, uh, the who, what, when, where, and why, um, uh, to ensure the accuracy of those models.

But also, you know, you have things like the EU AI Act and NIST who are publishing, uh, regulatory guidance on ai. Um, so for the customers that are, uh, needing to achieve that, um, that compliance, we can help there too. So that's a, a big problem in the market that we're solving today.

Uh, we've also introduced, um, some new capabilities as well, uh, to help, um, some of, you know, the velocity our customers want through AI change log generation. So, uh, we had announced an AI change log generator, which was built on our 15 years of frontline experience, uh, which is really, really incredible. I mean, you basically de can describe it and deploy it, um, and it's done in the exact liase way you would want, obviously making, um, you know, a change log, uh, creation happen rather quickly and, uh, very accurate.

And, and when you use that with Liase Secure, uh, it's governed and controlled. So, um, we have some really, really exciting updates for our customers. Excellent.

Excellent. So you guys also announced in the same vein, uh, uh, an integration with Mongo MongoDB and, and look, MongoDB is a company that needs no introduction to our audience or anyone in tech MongoDB. You know, I, I still remember when the, I first heard MongoDB and the whole no SQL database thing.

It's gotta be back in 2008, maybe, something like that, right. Um, but you guys announced this integration and it, I think it around, it's around the AI governance stuff as well. Talk to us about that, Ryan.

That's right. So, um, MongoDB obviously is, uh, an incredible technology out there, and, uh, we built a strategic, uh, integration with them, uh, that brings AI governance down to the database layer. Uh, so teams can move fast with AI while keeping, you know, their data safe, consistent, and fully traceable.

And I think, you know, the thing with Mongo is it's, it's great for fasting teams that want to remain flexible. You can shape the data however you need. Um, but the challenge is as teams grow, things can drip.

So fields, names change, collections evolve differently. So that flexibility really needs some light structure so things don't go sideways. Um, and liquid waste Secure brings that structure in a way that doesn't slow anyone down.

Uh, so on one hand, MongoDB stays flexible, uh, and then we make sure the changes are tracked consistent and safe. Um, so we're really, really excited about what this means for, um, our customers using Mongo, um, whether, you know, they're supporting their gen AI applications, uh, or whatnot. But, um, it's a, it's an incredible partnership and we're really excited for it.

Um, we know that, you know, there's, this is a, a big problem in the market and we're excited to solve it with Mongo. Very cool. Now this has already been announced and it's available to use right now?

Yeah, That's right. Yeah. So available on our website.

Um, and, uh, you know, we, we just probably, we actually have a webinar coming up here in December that people can join to learn more about, um, this integration with Mongo. And, um, we also have a bunch of content on our website that, um, folks can engage with too. Uh, that speaks to the integration a little bit more, but it's available today, uh, and we're excited for folks to start using it.

We are too. com, where do they get to the Mongo integration stuff off that, you know? Yeah, so we actually have, if you go under solutions, there's a, um, uh, an option just to select MongoDB, uh, so we have a whole page dedicated to it.

Very cool. Ryan, what about it's conference season? You guys been out anywhere?

Are you going anywhere? Um, yeah, we've done like some local shows and things like that, you know, really, um, working with kind of smaller development communities. Um, there's so much happening in the market though, um, you know, there Is crazy, it's noisy and it's crazy.

It, it is. And you know, sometimes these shows, um, it's, uh, it's, it's, we wanna go be with our audience and sometimes these shows don't always allow you to do that. Um, but you know, I think just recently we're having a lot of conversations, um, with different engineering leaders on the CloudFlare outage, the app, uh, yeah.

And the, the database permission change that took down, you know, a part of the internet and, um, you Know, including some of the tech strong sites, I'm sorry to say. Right, right. And, you know, we're, um, it, I think it's a, it's a, it, it's a big challenge that, that folks face where if they're not governing that foundation layer, you know, it, it can break a lot of things.

The blast radius can be pretty significant, and a lot of companies don't actually govern database change. Um, and something as small as a database change permission can have a really significant impact. So, um, now we help our customers solve this and, uh, you know, we're having a lot of conversations around this today.

Uh, but we'll, well, I mean, just so people know, right? This, this particular incident revolved around, I don't wanna say something is trivial, it's not trivial, but something is, you know, let's say down the, you know, from the very top of the kind of things you would think about, this really came about with a database permissions change, right? That's right.

I'm wrong. Right? And, and, you know, this happened to one of the most resilient companies in the world, CloudFlare.

I mean, think about how hard in their infrastructure is. Um, so, you know, most companies are up to that caliber. And, uh, when you start to factor in things like AI and you know, how humans can actually keep up with, um, governing ai, um, you know, that, that makes that even worse.

So, um, we are really helping customers close that risk. And in some, in a lot of cases, actually, uh, being a trusted AI adoption partner, we work with a lot of really regulated companies and they know the risk and they understand the risk of not governing, governing a ai. So, um, we support that.

Excellent, man. Excellent. Um, you know, look, that was this particular incident, Akamai was down a couple weeks ago for another incident that's happened to CloudFlare before.

I think another thing, you know, just Ryan, that we, we concentrate so much in such a handful of companies, right? Think about the amount of traffic, the, the percentage of TRA internet traffic that goes through Akamai and Cloudflare together. It's almost half of the internet.

And you, you, you think about that, that's, you know, that says not quite, it's a double point of failure, if not a single point of failure. Yeah. But it's something we need to think of in terms of supply chains and, and resiliency and all of these things.

I, I couldn't agree more. I I actually think, um, there's gonna be more of this as there's more pressure on the database and more pressure on infrastructure, um, to the point where you could, you could make the case where it's, it will become a national security threat. So, you know, if America wants to lead in, um, ai, well, we really have to look at our infrastructure and can our infrastructure keep up?

Uh, can we have the governance at, you know, the database layer and some of those other critical infrastructure to actually scale with it? Um, those investments are critical. Um, so it's, it's a exciting time.

I think a lot of people are a little bit nervous about, you know, AI and adoption of AI and, um, no, we're here to support them in the, in their journey. Um, but yeah, what a, what is time to be alive? Absolutely.

Hey, Ryan, I gotta run onto my next interview. It's great seeing you. If I don't talk to you before, have a happy Thanksgiving and hopefully before the new year and holidays we'll get back together.

Thanks. Appreciate that. You have a great Thanksgiving too, and talk to you soon.

Alrighty. Ryan McCurdy, VP Marketing Liquid Base here on, uh, liquid Base's new AI governance capabilities, as well as their partnership with MongoDB. You're watching Tech Trunk tv.

We'll be right back.