All Aboard

This week’s episode of the All Aboard Podcast, dives into the world of Identity Threat Detection and Response – or ITDR – with Didi Dotan. Didi was the CTO and co-founder at Oort, which provides IAM analytics and helps companies check for identity security vulnerabilities. 

Didi, with over a decade of experience in the cybersecurity space, shares the common identity security challenges Oort was built to address and shares his outlook on the intersection between IT and Security; specifically what it means when we say identity is the new security perimeter. Didi also chats about his experiences in taking a company through an acquisition and his thoughts on the future of the IAM space.


What’s inside:

• How Oort shifted from an access controls solution to a threat detection one to acquisition
• Why there’s value in positioning through the user’s perspective
• The key differences and current uses for IAM vs CIAM 
• Balancing advanced detection modeling and the day-to-day security necessities 
• Why test driven models are the way to go 
• Future goals and predictions for IAM and ITDR

In this week’s episode, Tom Alcock joins our host, Alex Bovee. Tom is a co-founder and partner at Code Red Partners, a cyber security recruitment practice built to help companies mature their security programs and scale teams, by bringing on top notch security professionals from engineers to senior level leaders.

Hiring is hard, and hiring quality security professionals is even harder. Code Red saw this need and made it their super power – finding and connecting the right security folks to the right companies. In the interview, Tom dives into how Code Red helps companies form realistic hiring expectations, how to find talent “outside of the box,” and tips around making your first security hire. 

What’s inside:

• Code Red Partners’ origin story
• Making the first security hire 
• Tom and Code Red’s hiring philosophies
• Why unconventional hiring is not something to be afraid of

On this episode of All Aboard, our host Alex Bovee is joined by Rob Szumski, the CEO and Founder of Edgebit. Edgebit is a software supply chain security system that helps teams cut through the noise and prioritize the most important software vulnerabilities in their apps.

With over a decade of experience in the security space, Rob has seen the good, the bad, and the ugly of vulnerability management. In this episode, he spills the beans on vulnerability management, how government cybersecurity directives impact compliance regulations, and achieving compliance without compromising efficiency. 

What’s inside:

• What SBOMs actually are and why they are so important
• How Edgebit secures software supply chains 
• The differences between centralized and decentralized security 
• What stage should companies start thinking about compliance
• Edgebit’s origin and how they empower security teams 

In this episode, Dom Lombardi joins the All Aboard Podcast to talk about cultivating a culture of security, how IT and Security are becoming more intertwined, and where device access and identity fits into your Zero Trust strategy. Dom would know a lot about these topics: as the VP of Security and Trust at Kandji, the Apple device management and security platform, he's responsible for driving his own internal security culture and securing the Kandji infrastructure.

What’s inside:

• Why IT and Security teams and workloads are converging and why that’s a good thing
• Kandji’s journey, from its founding story to today 
• Dom’s advice on cultivating a security “consciousness” at your company
• How device identity and security fits into Zero Trust

Scaling and managing access to cloud infrastructure is hard. Just ask Will Bengston from HashiCorp: they have over 20,000 AWS accounts and 100,000+ IAM groups. HashiCorp needed a modern approach to managing sensitive access and permissions for these resources, and traditional off the shelf PAM solutions didn’t cut it. So, they did what modern tech companies do in that situation: they built a solution for themselves.

In this episode of the All Aboard Podcast, Alex dives into the world of security engineering and cloud privilege access management with Will Bengston. Will is a security researcher, an angel investor, and currently leads the Security Engineering team at HashiCorp. 

What’s inside:

• The key differences between traditional PAM and cloud PAM
• How Will’s team grappled with the explosion of infrastructure accounts and permissions in their environment.
• How the Security Engineering team at Hashi home grew a cloud privileged access management solution
• A practical framework and approach for realizing least privilege access

Engineering teams want to build quickly and security teams need them to build securely. These two goals are not incompatible. Platform engineering teams help deliver both through concepts such as “paved roads”. Paved roads create shared tooling for the most common challenges encountered in building and deploying apps and infrastructure and make sure that what’s built or deployed is secure and compliant by default.

In this episode of the All Aboard Podcast, Alex is joined by Jason Chan. Jason is a cybersecurity leader and former VP of Information Security at Netflix where he created one of the most forward thinking security cultures in the Valley. 

Jason has decades of experience in the cybersecurity space and helped evangelize security platform engineering – which has become adopted by many security teams today.

What’s inside:

• A deep dive of [security] platform engineering
• How the Netflix security team kept up with explosive growth and digital transformation
• Jason’s advice to founders innovating in the security space

Tech help desk ticketing is going out of style. Cloud forward companies are shifting left and moving towards self service access controls to increase developer productivity. 

In this episode of the All Aboard Podcast, Alex is joined by Travis McPeak, CEO and Co-founder at Resourcely, a startup that helps developers simplify cloud resource management and security through automation and well defined guardrails. 

Travis is a security leader with over a decade of experience spanning cloud security, application security, and automation at companies like Netflix, Databricks, IBM, HP, and Symantec. 

What’s inside:

• The discovery of a company security fault that led to the start of Resourcely
• Travis’s advice on where time should be spent to optimize developers’ workload
• Why ticketing is an outdated practice to drive security remediation
• What the platform engineering movement is and how it has changed the way teams are organized
• How to empower developer teams with self service access controls 

With the rise of the distributed workforce came the need for better remote connectivity. Traditional VPNs have fallen short.

In this episode of the All Aboard Podcast, Alex chats with Avery Pennarun, CEO and Co-Founder at Tailscale. Founded in 2019, Tailscale uses mesh networking technology to help companies ditch their VPN and provide access to critical infrastructure and resources without sacrificing speed, scalability, or performance.

What’s inside:

• Avery shares the accidental origin story of how Tailscale was founded
• How and why traditional VPNs are falling short for the remote first world
• How Tailscale’s mesh networking technology creates a delightful connectivity experience for users
• Avery’s advice on managing product lead growth in startups

When you think of IT, you might picture the unsung heroes who fix your computer glitches, who help you set up new software, or who train users in how to use new equipment and technology. 

But IT is so much more than just the "break fix" function.

In this episode of the All Aboard Podcast, Alex talks to Ylan Muller, Senior IT Manager at FireHydrant. With over a decade of experience spanning from smaller startups to high-growth, late-stage tech companies, Ylan helps demystify the role of IT and explores its transformative potential for organizations.

What’s inside:

• A deep dive into the true scope of the IT function
• Ylan shares insights into the unique challenges and opportunities faced by IT teams at early vs. later-stage companies
• How Ylan measures success and evaluates progress
• Ylan’s advice for balancing productivity and security in a remote-first world
• How forward-thinking IT teams are thinking about security amidst growth

​​​​​​Building “dope” features doesn’t mean focusing on the flashy or sizzly. 

It's about making customers’ lives a lot easier.

In this episode of the All Aboard Podcast, Kunal Agarwal, founder and CEO at Dope Security, dives into what a Secure Service Edge is and where it fits in the security stack. We hear Kunal’s tips on channeling passion into product development and how the team at Dope is setting themselves apart in an established space.

What’s inside: 

• What is a Secure Service Edge and how is it used?
• How Dope is reimagining the secure web gateway
• Kunal’s advice on channeling passion into product  development
• His approach to fundraising and investors
• Kunal’s advice on having an “anti-exec mindset”