The Launch of FireCloud Internet Access with Andrew Young

This is Textron tv. Hey everyone. Welcome back here to techron tv.

Our next guest for you today is Mr. Andrew Young, chief Product Officer at WatchGuard Technologies. I'm happy to have him on.

Hey, Andrew, welcome to Trunk tv. It's great to have you on here. Thanks, Ellen.

It's wonderful to be here. Absolutely. Um, so Andrew, we're gonna jump in a watch guard and, and some announcements coming out, but let's spend a moment talking about you tell our audience.

Awesome. Yeah, I've, um, so Ellen, I've been with WatchGuard for about 10 years now. Um, just coming up on my 10 year anniversary.

I'm the Chief Product Officer here at WatchGuard. I've been in, um, security my entire career. So, um, going on 30 years with, uh, just pure, uh, pure play security technology.

You know what, I, I've been in security about as long myself, and I'm glad you still call it security, not cyber. Um, 'cause we didn't call it cyber 30 years ago. Certainly it was security InfoSec.

Maybe that was, that was it. Uh, anyway, give us a flavor over the 30 years. What kinda roles and, you Know, um, so I, things you Yeah, I, I started out in, in, um, in engineering, actually built products for about 10 years and, um, made the transition to product management about 10 years ago and have moved through, um, really two organizations in my, my career, kind of working my way up to, to chief product Officer.

Um, I'd say that, you know, it, it's really been, um, in, in companies that focus on channel, right? And, and what the needs of, of that MSP that channel is and, and, um, but a very kind of broad, broad, uh, set of security technologies that I've worked with. Very cool.

Now WatchGuard is a company that does focus a lot on the M-S-P-M-S-S-P market, but WatchGuard has had also a long distinguished run, right? Uh, if I'm not mistaken, was wa was WatchGuard part of Dell at one point? No, no.

Uh, WatchGuard has been ummm, Simon stand Yeah. Standalone for, for a number of years. Absolutely.

But the red boxes, that's what I remember about WatchGuard. Absolutely. Yes.

The red box, um, Uhhuh, so, partners, partners, uh, by the way, we have very loyal partner community and they come up to me all the time and, and tell me about the, the red boxes and, and, um, you know, how cool it is to see a rack full of, of red boxes in their customer's environments. Absolutely. Uh, you know, we, well, over the course of my career, one of the companies that I helped, we wound up going public and everything, uh, was an early a SP inter reliant in the dotcom days and, um, and was a little bit after that.

But I remember our, our data center was in one of our data centers was in Tyson's Corner, Virginia. We had a bunch of the red boxes there. It was, it was impressive when you, you know, back when we were racking and stacking right?

You'd, you'd get a whole rack of those red boxes and stuff was happening. Um, anyway, but WatchGuard today is different, but still we're very much a channel play, right? It, the MSP market is still, you know, at the core.

Absolutely. So, um, in fact, about maybe about eight years ago, um, we set out our mission statement to deliver an MSP focused security platform that simplifies every element of, of, um, security for our partners. And so, you know, when we think about the MSP, we really think about them as our customer, right?

We think about them as the end customer. Now of course, we have to solve the security needs of their customers, but everything that we do is really focused on making the, um, the MSP's lives EAs easier. And that goes from operational efficiency to, um, having great support, uh, for our partners and, and really good relationships.

And keeping those personal relationships with our partners is, is so important. And, and then, and then building out the security platform and, and the whole, the idea of the security platform, what we call the unified security platform, is really about providing that operational efficiency and, and, and helping MSPs drive profitability, um, within their business. Absolutely.

So, you know, Andrew, uh, in the mid two thousands, or early from 2001 through 2010, I, I had founded co-founded a company called Still Secure. We made vulnerability management, intrusion detection, network access control. Then we, but I came to the conclusion that security was too hard for all, but the biggest, biggest, biggest companies.

And that M-S-P-M-S-S-P was the only way to deliver decent security to most organizations. And we pivoted the company. I actually bought an MSP down here in Florida, and we were going to do more.

We want to do a little roll up. 'cause as you know, the MSP market, it's funny, I mean, there's some big players, but it's, it's highly fragmented geographically and all, all the rest. And, um, it was an eye-opening experience, right?

Because when you're an MSP, you are responsible for dozens, if not hundreds or thousands of organization security. And each one has a little bit of a different flavor, a different culture, a different reason. It's hard building a product across that, that serves that market so they could serve their market.

And I would imagine that is the, the reason for your being a lot as chief product officer of WatchGuard is, is actually, you know, having that kind of mentality follow through with things. So, Uh, absolutely. And, and when we think about the unified security platform, and there's really two ways to kind of view the world.

One is, is, um, portfolio, right? Kind of bringing all these things together from a single vendor. Um, and the second is platform and platform is where all the special things that you just talked about really come together, right?

How do you make it, um, you, you know, efficient for the MSP? How do you make it simple? How do you simplify security and make it accessible, kind of democratize security, uh, for everybody and really make it accessible for even the smallest of companies?

And, and so taking, you know, what, what historically are complex, um, you know, security concepts that only the largest enterprise can, um, can afford, right? It's pricing deploy, right? It's about that simplicity.

Um, and, and then really leveraging that relationship that the MSP has with the end customer. 'cause I think that, you know, having, that's, that's where the MSP is, is really, um, adds a lot of value, is having, owning that relationship with the customer and then allowing us kind of to be in the background and really provide them with the security services in a way that's scalable and simple, um, for them to manage as an MSP. Right?

You, you think about, you know, uh, as an MSP, I'm, I'm managing, you know, 20, a hundred, 500 different customers and I need to be able to do that in an efficient way, right? So you think about, you know, the way that I can have templates and master configurations that can span all of my customers and then be able to go into an individual, um, tenant or an individual customer and be able to tailor it for their needs, right? And being able to do that, uh, that in a way that's really efficient at scale for the MSP is, is really important.

Absolutely. Andrew, if you don't mind, I wanna kind of pivot to, uh, you guys just unveiled, unveiled a new fire cloud internet access for hybrid SSE implementation. Unpack that for us if you can.

Absolutely. So, you know, we, um, we are WatchGuard were, we're very sort of, um, you know, we make that really important build versus buy decision on everything that we do, right? And going through, and this is an area for, uh, a couple of years, this whole kind of sassy space.

You know, the idea that the, that the data center, that the core of the data center or the core of the network is moving from the data center to the cloud. And, um, and what that means. And, and we evaluated, you know, 20 or 30 different companies in that journey of, of making that build versus buy decision.

But at the end of the day, we, we really focused in on this hybrid approach, right? The perimeter isn't going away. And, um, but there's this really important evolution that's happening with the, the network topology and the architecture and, and providing that efficiency and scalability out through the security services.

So this idea of a hybrid approach, right, where you can have very consistent, um, set of security services, set of policies that spans both your perimeter and your sassy infrastructure, your, your sassy topology, and having a hybrid across both of those, but being able to do it in a very efficient way as an MSP, um, you know, having common, like I said, common security services across both of those common policies across both of those, um, being able to have a network view that spans, um, both, uh, traditional perimeters and, and, and your cloud-based infrastructure. Um, and doing that in a way that's very efficient for the, um, for the MSP is so important. And so as what, what we learned through that process is that, um, we had to go organic, right?

In order to have that consistent, um, set of security services to have that consistent policy for it to be a cohesive solution in a hybrid environment, that it was really important that, that, um, um, that we kind of build this organically. And so, you know, kind of the, the conclusion through that, um, through that build versus buy decision was that we were gonna build something that was native and, um, and and hybrid from the beginning. And that's what we've built.

And we're really proud about the, the, the, not only the user experience and the experience for the MSP, but the, the level of depth of security that we provide. And you think about all the wonderful services that WatchGuard provides, um, with the, with our UTM, with our firebox solutions, you have that exact same consistent set of security now available, um, with what we call FireCloud, our, our SASS e solution. And then the unified security platform provides that single, um, that single user interface, that single pane of glass, um, where you can, you can be efficient as an MSP and create a hybrid architecture that aligns with the needs of your customer, um, and tailor it, right?

You may have a little bit more perimeter for one customer, a little bit more sassy for another customer, but you have all the building blocks to build a, um, uh, uh, uh, the hybrid solution that fits right. Um, that's like that perfect operational fit for your, for you, for both you as an MSP and your customers. Yep.

You know, I've been hearing so much lately, it, it seems we're at a bit of a crossroads where companies are now evaluating how much do I want to keep OnPrem? How much do I wanna move to the cloud? How much am I gonna run on hypervisor?

How much maybe do I wanna modernize, re architect, whatever word you want to use, uh, for a cloud native sort of stack, right? And maybe we architect into, uh, not multi-threaded, uh, Like multi-tenant. No, well, multi-tenanted.

Yeah. But no, the very, the applications themselves are multi-threaded threaded. Um, it'll come to me as I'm talking, it happens as you get older, the word just escapes me.

But anyway, you know, there really cloud came on in 2005 and we've seen a steady, everybody has something in the cloud, but not everybody has everything in the cloud. And, and so, um, this is, but now we're getting to the point where people are really starting to make those decisions and they want those hybrid, I want to do anything from anywhere at any time type of solutions. And, and so, um, I would imagine that, you know, there's a big customer call for this kind of hybrid implementation here that you guys are coming out with A Absolutely.

And when we think about the remote worker, right? That's obviously so much more prevalent in, in, um, a, a post covid world and, you know, how do you tailor a security solution so that they're getting the same level of security when they're, when they're working from home or working remote or on the road as they get when they're in the office, right? We, we used to, um, easily rely on sort of our perimeter for our security because our workers were in the office all the time.

And, um, now that they're remote, you need to be able to provide them with that same level of security and those same layers of security, right? You gotta look at, I, you know, I need endpoint security, um, I need identity security, I need network security. And, and you have that defense in depth.

You have those layers of security, and I need to provide all those, but not just when the user is in the office, right? I need to have that consistent set of, of security capabilities no matter where the user is, right? And, and it shouldn't rely on the location of the user.

I should be able to provide those same level of security, those same set of security sy uh, solutions, um, and have consistent policy, uh, whe whether a use, no matter where a user is, right? So that idea of a remote worker has really changed the way that we look about, look at it. And I love the way that you, you kind of described all of the building blocks, right?

I may have, um, virtualized environments within my, my premises, and I may have some cloud hypervisors that I'm using. Um, and, and I also wanna rely on, I, I need to do this in an efficient way, right? I need, mm-hmm.

I need my vendors to be able to provide the security as a, as a, as, as a cloud service, as a kind of, as a security, as a service offering and being able to take those building blocks and, and really, you know, again, it's different for every customer. So I'm going to use these building blocks in different ways for each my customers to be able to build the right topology that makes sense for them, but, but have a very consistent security posture across, you know, each of those building blocks. Agreed.

And you're about outta time, but I want to just quickly, uh, tie this up. Solutions available now. Yeah, we did, um, in, in earlier in March.

It's available now and, and you know, through kind of open distribution, you could go and get it, um, pretty much the same way you can get any of WatchGuards, uh, security solutions And for people just want to grab more information. com. Got it.

Andrew, thanks for coming on Techstrong TV and keeping us up to date with what's going on at WatchGuard. You guys are gonna be at RSA, uh, conference. Um, yeah, we'll definitely have people at RSA this year.

Cool. We'll see you there, Alrightyy. All right, thanks Allie.

It was great talking. Thank you. Andrew Young, chief Product Officer at WatchGuard Technologies, talking about their new fire cloud, internet access to, uh, for hybrid SaaS, implement, hybrid and SASS e implementations.

We're gonna take a break here on Text Trunk tv. We'll be back in a moment.