Intro: [00:00:07] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Sandy Springs, Georgia. It’s time for Sandy Springs Business Radio. Now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:24] Lee Kantor here with Rachel Simon, another episode of Sandy Springs Business Radio broadcasting live from the Sandy Springs Perimeter Chamber of Commerce. This episode is brought to you by Connect the Dots Digital. When you’re ready to learn more about LinkedIn and how it meets your business goals. Go to Connect the Dots Dot digital. Well, Rachel, this is going to be a great show.

Rachel Simon: [00:00:49] Yeah, I’m super excited for our guest today.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:51] So who do we have?

Rachel Simon: [00:00:52] We have Stacy Blaiss who is the vice president of corporate marketing at BeyondTrust. Stacy, so great to have you here.

Stacy Blaiss: [00:00:59] Thanks for having me, Rachel.

Rachel Simon: [00:01:01] It’s great to see you. I’d love to hear a little bit about you, what you do and your company.

Stacy Blaiss: [00:01:07] Sure. So I’m Atlanta native, graduate of Dunwoody High School and at BeyondTrust, where I’ve been close to eight years. I’ve had various roles within the marketing team. My most recent function is leading our corporate marketing team, which includes a lot of different marketing functions. It includes digital demand, content marketing, website marketing, operations, and our brand and creative.

Rachel Simon: [00:01:30] That is a lot to to manage as I’m sure what is BeyondTrust do? What is the company all about?

Stacy Blaiss: [00:01:37] Yeah, so BeyondTrust, we’re a leader in identity, access and security and a leader in identity security. And what does that really mean practically? We are a leader in the cybersecurity space. We are we sell software to help companies protect their most important digital assets, their customer data, their intellectual property, their networks. We sell to beat. We’re in the B2B space. So we sell to other companies.

Rachel Simon: [00:02:04] And are there certain industries that you tend to work with or is it a wide variety?

Stacy Blaiss: [00:02:09] We sell across all industries. Some of the ones where we have a strong representation include higher education, finance, retail, hospitality, the kinds of companies you would think that would be vulnerable to, to attacks by hackers?

Rachel Simon: [00:02:25] Oh, absolutely. I mean, finance and higher ed right there seems like it’s ripe for hackers and bad actors in the cyber space. So, I mean, obviously cybersecurity is something that on the business side, on the on the individual side, like we all need to be aware of, think about like, what are some of the burgeoning issues that your company helps to mitigate? Yeah.

Stacy Blaiss: [00:02:48] So, you know, the cybersecurity landscape and the threats are always changing. It’s really fast paced and fast moving. So there’s a lot of different areas that companies can focus on when it comes to protecting their network and their IT environments. And so we’re Beyondtrust really focuses on protecting identities and access. So what does that mean? Right. The identities is what people use to log in and access the network or our business assets every day. And the access is the way that they’re accessing it. So especially since the post pandemic world, huge numbers of people working from home remotely accessing, you know, even pre-pandemic, the idea of you walk into an office and every and everything was kept inside a physical space that had already gone away. And then that’s only accelerated post pandemic. So when you’ve got someone connecting to your network or accessing sensitive resources externally, maybe they’re in their home office, maybe they’re sitting in a Starbucks, maybe they’re traveling in another country. How are you ensuring that that access is protected?

Rachel Simon: [00:03:49] Yeah, I imagine that that is a there’s a variety of areas where, like the hackers can come in and kind of find those vulnerabilities and really take advantage of those those things in various businesses. And obviously customer data is so important to keep protected. Right. Because reputation management, all those various things, security data, we don’t want that stuff out in the out in the world. Although these days I’ve kind of believe, like all of that stuff is just out there floating around.

Stacy Blaiss: [00:04:20] Yes, that’s absolutely true. I mean, the idea of privacy certainly has changed a lot, especially in the social media area and the social media era. For many companies, they think we think of cyber security as a journey. You know, you’re never done, right. So companies are always looking to add additional, whether it’s software technologies to utilize to protect their businesses. But the other piece of that is the human piece. So you know, as a software provider, we certainly position ourselves in the value of what software can use to reduce your risk and to really reduce the chances of a hacker having a successful intrusion. But it can never negate the human factor. Right. And so that’s the other side of it is as. Hackers are becoming more sophisticated, right? You know, there’s this image of of a bad actor as a teenager in their basement in a hoodie. Right. But it’s actually a lot more sophisticated than that. Many times their nation states or people with really advanced knowledge of how to how to social engineer to get in to companies to compromise them. You know, some, some examples of things that we see is a more advanced social engineering is maybe you get a phone call at your desk and you’re really busy and you’re like, hey, it’s Mike from I t we need to install the most recent version of software in your laptop. I’m going to send you a link now to connect. And people just have this reaction of, oh, it’s someone from it. I should take care of that. Right? Or, you know, I personally have gotten fake texts from people I work with in my company. So that means somewhere they’ve got my phone number. I once got a text from our CEO. Hey, Stacey, can you can you send me a link to X, Y or Z and. My CEO. While I know him, he doesn’t typically text me right? But my reaction at first was, wow, this must be important. My CEO is texting me, right? And then you looked into it and found out. Yes, it was indeed a phishing attack that many people at our company were targeted by.

Rachel Simon: [00:06:23] That is wild. That’s crazy. And do you think that in your industry, the hackers are more likely to try to kind of use their tricks on you, or does that happen across the board? A lot of your customers have similar stories where they get know from it. Oh, everyone knows Mike.

Stacy Blaiss: [00:06:44] Yeah. I mean, I think being a cybersecurity company. So I mentioned one of the functions within my team is, is our website. So that includes two pieces. So one is the content and the design of our website. But we also maintain the back end of the website. And we find ourselves under constant bot attacks. Our website is under attack from many different places. So we’ve built in a lot of redundancy and security. So it’s been years now that our site has actually come down, but we ourselves experience those attacks on our site all the time and for our customers again, any company, many companies think, oh, my data isn’t that valuable. But the odds are is every company has data that’s valuable. But there are certainly certain industries that can be greater targets, especially like in the financial space. You know, as I mentioned before, higher education, hospitality, I mean, many, many of the retail and hospitality breaches have really been in the news in the last few years from target to hotels. And that’s can be really scary for people who are impacted. Well, most my credit card on file. How is how is that company that I’m enjoying their product. But how are they protecting my data? And that’s something many of our customers take really seriously, because they know if they lose the confidence of their customers, it can really impact their brand and their ability to meet the needs of their own customers.

Rachel Simon: [00:08:00] Absolutely. So, you know, in your function leading the marketing, how do you utilize what are some of the tools that you use to make sure that your customers, potential customers understand the problems that you solve, how you solve them, and really the the trust that you build with your with your audience.

Stacy Blaiss: [00:08:21] Yeah. So, you know, for our customers, we really believe that knowledge is what’s most important to them. And we really try to position ourselves as that trusted partner. And education is so key. Not only is the cybersecurity landscape and the threat landscape changing quickly, there’s a huge shortage of personnel within the cybersecurity space. So that’s become attractive for new for people coming out of college looking for career changes to enter into cybersecurity. So we never want to assume that someone visiting our site or consuming some of our content knows what all the acronyms mean, right? And it is a complex industry. And so we really focus on trying to using language that’s clear, that’s as simple as possible, that avoids jargon and most importantly speaks in the language that resonates with our customers.

Rachel Simon: [00:09:08] Yeah. That’s so interesting. You brought that up because I am very sensitive to that jargon and like, industry lingo, you know, because when we want to balance, right, that knowledge and education, but then when we speak in lingo, we completely can alienate certain parts of our audience who don’t know what we’re talking about. So that’s very interesting because I’m imagine there’s a lot of technology that goes along with it that is pretty advanced.

Stacy Blaiss: [00:09:36] Yes. I mean, we call like the alphabet soup of cybersecurity, right? And one of our more popular areas of our site that we see a lot of really strong traffic to is we actually have a glossary. Right. And that’s something that we’re constantly maintaining and updating that we see a lot of engagement on, because people may not understand every term, or maybe the way something is defined is changed a little bit. Right. So we have found the glossary has been a really valuable tool on our site for customers, for prospects, even for our own employees.

Rachel Simon: [00:10:03] I bet that is. That’s so interesting. It’s like a next level, frequently asked questions, I’m sure.

Stacy Blaiss: [00:10:09] Yes, yes.

Rachel Simon: [00:10:12] So what else? What are some other aspects of sort of what you do in your role there? You do manage a pretty large team. So I imagine again, in a fast paced industry, then kind of that leadership component can be very busy as well.

Stacy Blaiss: [00:10:27] Sure. I mean, really what it comes down to is like, what’s my number one goal that I’m that I’m measured on that our CMO, our chief marketing officer, is measured on is is pipeline, right. Our business goal is creating pipeline that can generate revenue for the company. So when you think about pipeline, though, there’s there’s some things that you can directly say, hey, this drove a lead or this drove an opportunity. But so much of what we do now is unattributed. And what do we mean by that? Right. We think of it within beyondtrust as demand creation and demand capture. So demand capture is when someone comes to our site, they ask to see a demo. They request a call from sales. Right. So that’s that’s pretty clear. Someone’s raising their hand. They want us to. They want to hear from us. They want to engage with us. And that’s a clear marketing driven opportunity, right? But then there’s all the other things that we’re doing around demand creation. And what we mean by that is the things that are happening maybe even outside of our site. One thing we know in cybersecurity who are cybersecurity buyers, many of them work in IT and they’re in a technical space.

Stacy Blaiss: [00:11:28] And they have natural they have a natural distrust of what vendors say they can do. Right. So we like to think about of show me, don’t tell me right. And who’s doing the showing. Right. There’s our role in the showing, which is how we’re telling our our stories and using our customers as much as we can to talk about how our products and technologies have driven their cybersecurity journey and positive outcomes for them. But we also know that picking up the phone or sending a text message or an email to a trusted colleague, maybe you worked with them before, or maybe you know them from the industry, from a trade group, that a lot of those conversations are happening completely outside of our purview. So how can we get and do and do activities that get beyond trust, top of mind that gets people to think of us in their consideration phase of if they want to tackle, if they want to tackle challenges related to identity and access security, that we are top of mind and that we’re seen as a leader.

Rachel Simon: [00:12:25] So it’s that’s a good segue into, you know, a great way of being top of mind is through your team, right? Like through employees within an organization. So talk to me a little bit about how you utilize employee advocacy in order to help with that, that strategy. Yeah.

Stacy Blaiss: [00:12:45] So we’re extremely active on all social channels but primarily LinkedIn. And so employee advocacy we utilize a tool. It’s called we use Sprout Social. So shout out to sprout. And what it does is it enables our employees to share the content that we write and post as if it’s their own. They can also edit it. They can add an intro to it. Because what we found is that engagement for content that our employees share is like 4 to 5 times what we share under our own Beyondtrust name and our own Beyondtrust account. And our employees really like it because they feel confident that they’re sharing messages consistent with how we’re trying to talk to the market, and that will resonate with our customer. And frankly, it also makes it easier because they don’t have to write their own content, right? Especially within our sales team. They’re really busy. They’re focusing their time on engaging with customers and prospects. And so this enables them to help their personal brand to position themselves as that industry. Is that with that industry knowledge, by by feeding into our entire company content that we know will be relevant to our audience.

Rachel Simon: [00:13:51] Yeah, it’s it’s interesting that you bring up the, the difference in the, the stat between what your company page and what your employee content because it, it I mean, obviously you’re speaking my language here with LinkedIn. Right. But having that robust employee advocacy tool and strategy is so beneficial for organizations. It’s great to see it working well for Beyondtrust. Yeah, we.

Stacy Blaiss: [00:14:17] Have a huge content engine, right? We have a team of content folks that are working on whitepapers, blogs, our web content. You know, we have a PR agency. We actually we have our own podcast. Right. And so a big way we expand the reach of those things is through our social channels.

Rachel Simon: [00:14:34] So as we’re moving into, you know, wrapping up 2023 and going into 2024, what are some trends that you’re seeing or things that you’re looking ahead into the year to come that will sort of impact your industry beyond trust?

Stacy Blaiss: [00:14:49] Yeah. So what we’re finding, you know, I don’t think this is necessarily new. Right. But that the buyer journey and the way people want to buy has changed pretty drastically. So when you think about your experience as a consumer, right, do you want to really want to talk to a sales person? Many times we do all of our own research, and then we might go into a store when we’re actually ready to buy to make a purchase, or we’re doing it entirely online. We’re looking to have as much of that buying process as possible, be a self-service. And that’s no different in the in the B2B buying space. Now, there definitely is within the buying within the buyer journey, there is value. And many of our customers value that that contact with the salesperson, with the sales engineer, especially as they move along the the evaluation of the product stage. But before we ever get to that, you know, 70 to 80% of the buying process is done before they ever even reach out to us, right? So how are we focusing on providing the most information, the best information, so that they can self educate. And we also are really looking for you know, we know that people come to our website. Absolutely. That’s a place you look for information. But if someone’s interested in Beyondtrust, they’ll look at our website and they’ll find they might find value of what we put there, but then they might go on to Reddit, they might go to a review site to get, again, that third party perspective or that pure perspective on how they might be using the product.

Stacy Blaiss: [00:16:07] It’s interesting. We launched our own podcast, our own podcast about a year, a year and a half ago, and one of our goals with it is we don’t talk about what we do or our products at all. It’s it’s hosted by our chief technology officer, and he just interviews different people in the cybersecurity space about the problems they’re facing, challenges that they’re having, and really telling those stories. And it’s just, you know, yes, it helps with our brand, but it’s really not our goal. There isn’t about necessarily directly driving revenue. Right. But what we’re finding is it’s been about a year and a half is the podcast is getting more traction. It has really become a way to talk to people in our market and to just help Beyondtrust be top of mind in a way that doesn’t feel like we’re just pushing our products, but that we are also out there educating and self educating or providing tools that people can self educate. And it’s also interesting what we found is it’s actually helped with our recruiting, with our, you know, we’re always looking for talented engineers and to be developing our products, to be selling our products. And we’ve we’ve gotten feedback that the podcast gets mentioned a lot, you know, as an interview during their interview process of like, hey, this is this is a way I either found out about Beyondtrust or when I was doing my research about your company, I started listening to it and it gave them an insight to kind of who we are as a company.

Rachel Simon: [00:17:22] That’s so interesting. I mean, Lee, not too dissimilar to sort of the approach here, right?

Lee Kantor: [00:17:31] I think that what you’re doing is you’re it becomes almost a product placement when you’re chief technology officer is the host of the content. Your brand is associated with it without saying anything. It just comes along for the ride. And also you’ve excluded all other competitors and noise. So the only really connection that the guest has and the listeners are with your brand. So I think that’s part of the evolution of podcasting in my opinion, over the years, I think has been that when brands see their show or their podcast as a product placement and spend their energy spotlighting their guests and their targets rather than talk about themselves, then they’re better served in the long run.

Stacy Blaiss: [00:18:16] And people love stories, right? They want to hear how the cybersecurity, how the cybersecurity every day people are there in the trenches, right? They’re facing these every day, these attacks and even challenges within their company. I mean, cybersecurity teams and, you know, it and many of which are IT teams, right? They’re traditionally underfunded, under-resourced.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:38] Underappreciated.

Stacy Blaiss: [00:18:39] Underappreciated for sure. Right. But they have a lot of pressure and there’s a lot of expectations on them. And so I think really uncovering and highlighting those stories has been a really important goal of what we’re trying to do with our own podcast.

Rachel Simon: [00:18:52] Yeah.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:52] And then in your business, I would imagine most of your clients are coming to you because of something bad has happened. Right? I mean, what percentage of people are coming because something bad happened and they need your service as opposed to, oh, let’s look into the future and let’s be proactive about this. I’m sure it’s less or doing it that way that you’d like it to be, but it’s probably less.

Stacy Blaiss: [00:19:15] It’s a good question. I think we absolutely will get you’ll you’ll hear of a big company that was breached on the news. And lo and behold, we’re seeing we’re starting to see inquiries and opportunities within Beyondtrust. So there’s absolutely that reactive of a company experienced a breach or an intrusion of some close call or a close call. And I think the flip side of that is when there is major breaches in the news that also the CEO might all of a sudden now.

Lee Kantor: [00:19:39] It’s an elevated priority.

Stacy Blaiss: [00:19:41] Protected against this kind of breach. How did this happen? You know, we have seen and we hear from our customers that there is more awareness and visibility at the sea level for CEOs at the C-suite, but it can really vary. But many times other maybe a competitor or just a huge a huge breach on the news can then drive. Well, are we protected against that?

Lee Kantor: [00:20:02] Right. Because now it’s a priority. Because if it was on the news, then I’m paying attention, right?

Stacy Blaiss: [00:20:08] One of the challenges it’s hard to quantify many times the value of not being breached. Right. So so that’s a challenge within cybersecurity is proving your value. So look if you can say your company hasn’t experienced a breach in several years. That’s a testament that what you’re doing is working right. But that can still be harder to quantify versus if you did have a breach and how you reacted or what the business impact was of that.

Rachel Simon: [00:20:34] There’s a reason why we all have insurance, right? Right. You have it when you you don’t use it until you need it. But when you need it, you really need it. So the idea of having these tools in place to protect and not having any issues means that’s a good thing, right?

Lee Kantor: [00:20:50] Right. But from a company standpoint, it’s hard to get your customer to appreciate that, because a lot of times it’s an out of sight, out of mind. It’s like when you’re not seeing that, then you’re like, well, do I really need that? And that’s where you have to always kind of remind your customer that, hey, we’re working here hard and we’re doing a lot of things you may not be noticing, but we’re here for you in case that situation does occur.

Stacy Blaiss: [00:21:15] It’s interesting you mentioned insurance. You know, there is cybersecurity insurance. And the last year and a half, two years, we were hearing from customers that it was harder to requalify, even if they hadn’t themselves suffered a breach because the number of payouts was going up. That insurance company were insurance, cyber insurance policies. And the companies that issue them were really raising the criteria for qualification for these policies. So it’s really been interesting. And that was a great opportunity for us to talk about how our products specifically can align to requirements by cybersecurity, by for cyber insurance policies. And that’s been that’s also you talked about drivers, right? So maybe you’ve suffered a breach. Maybe there’s a big breach in the news. But maybe you’re trying to renew your cyber security policy that you didn’t have any issues with the past few years. And your insurance company is saying, hey, in order for us to renew your your policy, you have to show proof that you’ve done these, these steps and taken these activities to protect your your network. Yeah.

Rachel Simon: [00:22:15] I was actually curious if there’s like legislation out there that says, you know, mandates like what companies have to do to protect their customer data.

Stacy Blaiss: [00:22:24] Yeah. So different industries can be subject to different requirements. And it’s also different by region. Europe has they they rolled out GDPR which we’re talking about acronyms. I’m trying to remember what stands for right in the US actually when it comes to privacy, our requirements tend to be less or more lax compared to to Europe. But then within each industry, like I’ll use healthcare as an example. Many of you are probably familiar with HIPAA. Every time you go to the doctor, you have to sign your HIPAA statement. And so companies in the health care space have certain requirements to protect what’s called personally identifiable data or for their for their patients. Right. And so, you know, hospitals, doctor’s offices, anyone in the health space, they may have certain requirements that they are required to do to be compliant with that mandate. So that’s definitely something we also look at and we think about education is how can certain products or certain functions or approaches to cybersecurity can enable customers in certain industries that are that that have to meet certain requirements, actually meet them?

Rachel Simon: [00:23:27] Yeah. Just thinking about like the wide variety of industries, the different requirements per industry again. And then Beyondtrust is a global company. Correct. So you have customers all over the world who have different requirements based on where they are. That’s a lot of, you know, things to manage in a fast moving space where there’s just a lot of people trying to do bad things and get people’s information. Yes.

Stacy Blaiss: [00:23:55] And there’s not one like global requirement, right? So we have a presence and have been growing substantially in Australia as an example. So they’re they call the Australian Essential Aid as something that the Australian government has put out. So you know, for companies that are in the US may not be as relevant, but for our, for our sales team and our engineers in Australia, it’s something they’re really focused on and how to educate customers on how to align with the Australian Essential eight. Because if you’re a company based in Australia, you are required to comply with that mandate.

Rachel Simon: [00:24:24] So interesting. Well, I think we’re kind of at our time. This has been so fascinating. Any last things you would love the audience to know about you, about Beyondtrust?

Stacy Blaiss: [00:24:35] Yeah, I think, you know, when it comes to marketing and cybersecurity day to day, the pace is really fast. We have to move as fast as the industry does, and I think it’s something really exciting place to consider. You know, there’s so many different roles within marketing, within my team, within the larger marketing team, we also have field marketing, product marketing. And I think for the folks that come in to marketing functions within the cybersecurity space, they become super marketable. They learn great skills. It’s a really exciting place to be a marketer right now.

Rachel Simon: [00:25:07] Absolutely. It sounds like it. And, you know, where’s the best place to find out more about you and Beyondtrust?

Stacy Blaiss: [00:25:13] Sure. So, you know, our website are, you know, our most visible sales person, beyondtrust.com. You can access information about our podcast, Alison. And Bob, they’re about our company. And I can be found on LinkedIn.

Rachel Simon: [00:25:27] Excellent.

Lee Kantor: [00:25:28] Now, before we wrap, I want to get just some knowledge, a little bit of your low hanging fruit for anybody out there when it comes to protecting themselves. Is there anything kind of that’s easy for most people can do that. Maybe they’re not thinking about to protect themselves.

Speaker5: [00:25:43] Yeah. Mean.

Stacy Blaiss: [00:25:43] I think when it comes to low hanging fruit, it’s always be suspicious, right? Is, you know, don’t just trust that because it’s a company you do business with that communications you get from them are valid, right? Whether it’s your bank, right? I mean, I know as a bank, for example, they will never call you on the phone and ask you for your password. Right? But again, it’s the bank. It’s very easy for bad actors to maybe find out who you bank with and to try. And that’s that social engineering to say, hey, Lee, I know you bank with Wells Fargo, so I’m going to or I’m going to try sending you a text. Right. Hey, we need you to reset your password. Right. And you just think, oh, yeah, I think at Wells Fargo. So this must be legitimate. So definitely. Especially when you’re being asked for sensitive information like passwords, Social Security number, even your address. Right. Is that really be suspicious if it’s not something you yourself have initiated.

Lee Kantor: [00:26:38] Yeah I know for myself personally, I’m super paranoid of everybody at this point in my life that I’m if I get anything from anybody, I go to the website or I’ll call them myself directly to ask if it’s real or not, because like I am bombarded with, like you said, I know you’re a Wells Fargo customer and it’s like, I’m not a Wells Fargo. So if they’re if somebody’s trying to ping me about that, then there’s going to be other people pinging me and just hoping, or your Netflix subscription is something, you know, something that they’re just taking a shot because a lot of people have Netflix, so they assume that I have Netflix. And so whenever I get something, I’m always proactively going backwards to say, is this real? I’m going to check I’m not clicking on anything anymore at this stage.

Speaker5: [00:27:29] Yeah.

Stacy Blaiss: [00:27:29] And as great as those risks are for your personal life, they can be even greater in the workplace. So the same cautions that you would exhibit in your with your personal life and your personal information, you should bring that same mentality to work.

Lee Kantor: [00:27:40] The same paranoia, the same.

Stacy Blaiss: [00:27:41] The same level of of of just really thinking things through. When you get something that maybe you’re not anticipating or you’re getting an attachment from someone that you weren’t anticipating, even if it appears to be coming from a coworker, especially a superior, that’s often how they will target you, because it’s like, well, you’re going to be more likely, hey, this person who has a lot of seniority is reaching out for you and asking for information.

Lee Kantor: [00:28:03] And I don’t want to mess it up. So I’m going to do whatever they say without questioning.

Rachel Simon: [00:28:08] Well, and I’ll share one, one tip as far as on the LinkedIn side, which is if if you do not already have two factor authentication turned on, turn it on immediately, because a lot of people have been having issues getting locked out of their account because someone will log in, kind of access their account, change their password, and if they don’t know their password, they can’t get back in. So turn on that two factor authentication really everywhere, but definitely on LinkedIn.

Lee Kantor: [00:28:33] Is that something, Stacey, that you agree the multi-factor authentication authentication is kind of a must have nowadays. That’s not a, you know, just do it occasionally.

Stacy Blaiss: [00:28:43] I mean, that is a best practice. And something to think about too, is it’s not just for your personal account. For Beyoncé’s business account, we have two factor authentication turned on. Absolutely.

Rachel Simon: [00:28:53] Well, because your team are the ones who access your company page through their personal profiles, and so they’re the company page. Collateral is potentially at risk if their profiles are at risk. Right. So yes, just a good thing across the board.

Lee Kantor: [00:29:08] But it’s tricky from a business to business standpoint because part of your value is speed, right. Like you want the customer to not have friction. And you’re adding now friction on purpose to protect them. And I think people have to just accept a certain level of friction nowadays in order to be safe.

Speaker5: [00:29:27] Absolutely yeah.

Rachel Simon: [00:29:28] I agree.

Lee Kantor: [00:29:28] Now are we almost at the end of passwords? Where do you think we are when it comes to that.

Speaker5: [00:29:33] Yeah. So for.

Stacy Blaiss: [00:29:33] Years there’s been predictions that the password is.

Speaker5: [00:29:36] Going away.

Stacy Blaiss: [00:29:37] Right. You know we are seeing one of our, one of the products that Beyondtrust sells is password safe. Its password vault for business, for business, for business related passwords, for privileged passwords. And while passwords may exist in the background, the idea of having to remember and type in a password is slowly going away, right? So whether it’s through using other types of identification, whether it’s your, you know, your thumbprint, other types of biometric identification, the idea of having to remember and recall passwords is really is really decreasing.

Lee Kantor: [00:30:16] And they’re using more kind of social intent. You’re able to tell tell the software can know that what I’m doing is I’m really me based on behaviors.

Speaker5: [00:30:26] And that’s where some of the.

Stacy Blaiss: [00:30:28] Analytics can come into play. And some of the intelligence behind some of these tools. Right, is maybe, maybe Rachel typically access maybe she’s a privileged user. Right. She’s an IT admin. She needs additional privileges and the average user to to access the account. And she typically is working Monday through Friday from 9 to 5. And guess what? Rachel logs on Saturday night at 2 a.m.. Even though she’s a privileged user and she’s been granted rights that have been validated that she she needs them, that’s an unusual activity, right? So that can be flagged as potentially problematic because it’s outside. That’s where the intelligence comes in. This is outside of her normal behavior.

Lee Kantor: [00:31:09] And I think it’s so important that when you’re working with a company like Beyondtrust, this is all they’re thinking about 24/7. This is all they’re doing. This isn’t something that you this isn’t a do it yourself project. You know, being, you know, safe with cybersecurity. I mean, you have to go with a trusted advisor that is really living and breathing this 24 over seven and learning best practices from all of their clients. You’re getting kind of really robust intelligence from this, from a beyondtrust.

Speaker5: [00:31:39] Yeah, absolutely.

Stacy Blaiss: [00:31:39] As I mentioned with the with the under resources around it and cybersecurity, you know, the vendor relationship is very important. And we also are seeing customers wanting to decrease the number of vendors they have. So the more of their needs and their business outcomes that we can provide, the more we can position ourselves as that trust and be that trusted partner. And, you know, one thing you mentioned was friction. And we know that’s a huge pain point when you’re introducing tools that can help make you more secure, is that you feel that friction. So that’s also a big focus of our of our products is not just making more making companies more secure, but also how can we do it in a way to reduce the friction that doesn’t cause negative impacts on efficiency and the ability to get the job done?

Lee Kantor: [00:32:22] And then one more time before we wrap the website. Website. Beyond trust.

Stacy Blaiss: [00:32:28] Beyond.com.

Lee Kantor: [00:32:29] Good stuff. Well thank you Stacy so much for sharing your story. Doing such important work and we appreciate you.

Stacy Blaiss: [00:32:34] Thanks, guys. I loved being here today.

Speaker5: [00:32:36] Thank you.

Lee Kantor: [00:32:37] And thank you, Rachel.

Rachel Simon: [00:32:38] My pleasure. This was a great conversation and I definitely learned a lot.

Lee Kantor: [00:32:42] All right. Well this is a wrap. We’ll see you next time on Sandy Springs Business Radio.