Video: OTAVA CEO on New S.E.C.U.R.E.™ Framework and AI Security

hey Channel insiders welcome back for another episode of Channel Insider partner POV your source for untapped opportunities and unfiltered opinions in the it Channel all to help you make Better Business decisions I'm your host Katie boso my guest today is TJ Housey CEO of multicloud solution provider otava TJ is coming off of two very high energy weeks first having helped otava announce its new framework secure then presenting at Channel Partners conference and Expo in Las Vegas you've had a busy few weeks are you feeling okay have you caught up on sleep after Channel Partners Expo yeah I I don't know that anybody ever catches up on that kind of sleep debt uh but uh it's certainly nice to be back in the Eastern time zone so that works how about you are you catching up on your restr don't I know it yes as I as I mentioned to you before we got started hoping that you don't see a sneeze sniffle or cough during this call but there were a lot of handshakes last week and I'm paying for it so let's first of all talk about otava and get to know your company you design and Secure multicloud Solutions but when you talk about otava how do you explain who you are and what you do yeah it's a great question especially in today's landscape so interesting because it's so competitive and unfortunately it seems to be overstated right we just say cloud and then hope that everybody gets what that is it reminds me of that scene from Zoolander right where you're just putting it out there um but uh at the end of the day I think the easiest way to describe otaba where we separate ourselves relative to the industry in cloud is data protection and so if you look at the evolution of our company 30 years ago we started as bare metal you know hosted collocation um specializing in being early adopters to Hippa and high trust certifications back then uh which allowed for us to be early to provide whether production or Disaster Recovery workload support for Fortune companies all the way down to small business and then that evolved into Cloud but the roote was Data protection and compliance and we carried that up into cloud and then now have carried that up into secure and compliant multicloud uh solution so I think data protection is our sweet spot be it you know regular data you know backup uh disaster recovery but I think that's that's probably the best way to really organize and and concentrate your focus on otaba for me otava is one of those names in the industry where I I hear it everywhere and I've heard throughout my career but when did you go to market officially how long have you been around so you know realistically if you look uh largely grown through acquisition right uh in independent organizations put together to become who we are today but uh online tech so we'll call it approximately 30 years ago um and continue to graduate renamed the organization as shes Communications our parent company acquired uh the organization in in 2017 and moved into really uh adjusting the name so to speak speak uh in 201 late 2018 early 2019 um so really excited that at that point in time we went from online tech to otava and we've carried that name now for the last uh six years and let's discuss your clients and the verticals that they typically operate in one of my favorites on your website that I saw personally was Transportation just because I have a lot of questions when it comes to literal moving Parts but you tell me who do who are your clients what what are their sizes and what do they typically do if you kind of think about the way in which our business is organized while we handle all sectors with the exception of a concentration in like um sled uh and you get into public sector we largely stay in uh Healthcare uh we have a really good foot presence or a good presence in finance and some of those organizations that we serve and then tiers from Fortune all the way down to small business our customer sections though are really broken into two pillars so we have our Enterprise as we call them or commercial customers that end consumers and then we have a partner ecosystem and that's almost 200 different partners that run different clouds within our clouds whether that be fully privatized or hybrid versions um that solve and the neat thing is that each of them has niches that they play into so we have an opportunity to service and you know claim success through their success uh to other sectors that we might not directly serve but I would say an area of great competence for us uh is Healthcare and then Partners in general um in helping the various ecosystems that they support or the customer ecosystems that they support so earlier in the month of March otava introduced the secure framework to support organization's continuous security posture advancement so secure first of all is an acronym and I want to make sure that I I'll take this off your plate to be able to say all the words involved in Secure it stands for shrink examine contain undo recover evaluate beautifully put together that it also says the exact word yeah right you like that yeah I do I do kudos to everybody that came up with that so plainly put tell me what is the secure framework yeah I mean first to your point Kudos you know goes out to Chaz Moder so Chaz is uh one of our senior product specialist here and we were joking about this but you know it's always good ideas seem to either come to you when you're running or taking a shower is kind of how it works right um and uh so Chaz had been really putting his head around hey how do I help the internal organization think about the way in which we organize our product groups or cohorts so that we can have a fome conversation with any customer regardless of segment regardless of size um and equally how could we look at the portfolio of products that we have to make sure that we're continuing to compete and show relevancy in each of those segments and so he came up with the secure crosstick um what was interesting is that coming from my background in security I saw it as an opportunity to organize a consistent repetitive conversation I kind of call it like the Chick-fil-A of security experiences um so that customers can make sure that in any conversation as they're making decisions that we've covered the full spectrum of those things that they need to be thinking about in terms of like defensible architecture and so as all great ideas happen right it started one way and it evolved in a very quick amount of time and the adoption for it not only internal but external and the feedback that we've received from customers is man this is fantastic that we can have this kind of conversation and be really thoughtful about which area are we focusing in on or what's our greatest need right now because the reality is security never ends it's a it's a journey not a destination um and it can be overwhelming and I think that gen genuinely there's a lot of companies that make a lot of profit on confusion uh and so if to make this simple it can you know it's still complex it just doesn't have to be complicated uh and so I really like that that's what the framework allows for us to do and have more thorough uh conversation that really help customers get to the the business outcomes that they're trying to achieve from a consumer standpoint I'm such a fan of what you said about how there are companies really in the tech industry that profit off of confusion and make people go like oh that's a big word I don't really understand what's going on so I guess I should get that that's right get that thing so would you mind kind of like breaking down a use case scenario for secure to paint a pictures pain a picture for the customers that are listening when they go okay secure framework what the heck is that and how do I use it and apply it in real time sure 100% yeah and and I think that's spot on right like to your point like we all I think we tend to forget like when we leave the consumer world and we move into the commercial world for our day job that we're still consumers operating in the commercial world right and for whatever reason generationally I think that's shifting but a lot of people compartmentalize that and so they tend to stop thinking like a buyer and start thinking more like a seller um if you think more like a buyer this the relevancy of this is really like Eyes Wide Open of holy cow this makes a lot of sense right so if you think about any product set that you would buy from otava for data protection whether that be backup as a service or Disaster Recovery as a service whether that be endpoint protection which would include things like anti-malware um if you're focusing on uh just just basic data protection elements within this framework they all fit in a category right the outcome of what you're trying to achieve through being more secure is where this flow is really brilliant um so you know best practice in defensible architecture the first one is you want to reduce your Threat Vector right so you want to shrink the attack surface you know more to manage creates more opportunity less to manage or a choke point allows for you to have better control uh you know for that for the customer but once you shrink it what I find that next C the customers are typically struggling with as they adopt new technologies and even the processes is examining the success or failure of the particular products or processes that they're putting in place and so now you're moving from shrink into examine to start saying okay I understand that I've bought this this was the initial stage was to shrink that but second how can I examine it for its Effectiveness to make sure that we're improving the overall security posture that's the end goal right that we want to achieve and then last uh in that next section as you kind of move forward is is you know contained and the truth is and I think that people don't like to hear this but the truth stands on its own two feet so and that is we're moving into a time now where it's not about if it's about when you have a security incident and the goal is you want to mitigate the risk and the damage to keep it as an incident and not let it turn into a full-blown breach and so you really want to be thinking about contain from a perspective of if not when this happens am I set up the right way in incident response do I have my processes organized are my technical safeguards in place that I know that what they got to they're not get to get to the Crown Jewel right they're going to get to where I want them to get to whether that's Honeypot or anything else that you're going to organize you know for that and then undo it's just the reality of I think we've been conditioned for probably the last decade you hear have good backups have good backups have good backups right we probably should have been teaching people for the last 10 years check your backups check your backups check your backups because I think that a lot of people have become conditioned to focus on the backup and not focus on the restore and undoing the damage and how fast the recovery time objectives are recovery Point objectives are because when you're down or you're in a state of abnormality relative to your business service especially if it's your core Services right that's Revenue impacting and so you have Revenue loss at that point even more so than just a security incident uh so undo really focuses on asking those tough questions how much do we want in terms of protection what kind of insurance do we want to pay for right relative to that technical process and what do we need and why and then recover puts you in a position that says okay now that we're restoring what does that process look like CU it's not just rolling it back there's people that get involved who's handling what who's on first who makes what phone calls you know do you have to involve your insurance provider and if you do who owns that that's business continuity planning and I find that a lot of folks really struggle with that which genuinely business continuity planning is largely the least expensive but the most expensive meaning least expensive to do and work through because you already have the people you already have the process and you have some form of Technology but it's the most expensive if it's done wrong and now all of a sudden in a moment where you're exposed and vulnerable because your process wasn't there you didn't have a plan so therefore you you you're going to fail um and then last is evaluation and I think evaluation is that Journey not a destination helping people really understand one anything that you're doing today is outdated by the the time in which you finish it and so if you can just Embrace this as a lifelong journey it's never ending it's kind of like personal growth and and if if I could just stay the course and stay within the framework then what we hope that customers will Embrace is that secure is just a never-ending conversation you're just revisiting back to the framework on a regular Perpetual basis to say where does this decision fall within that framework and where are we relative to where we were last year as we go from version 1.0 to 1.1 and 1.2 so that's how I I think about it and talk about it and I think you can have a very fome conversation with somebody in an hour which is really how it's designed uh so that they're not overwhelmed because again the goal is you want to help people be successful at this not like freeze I know that you gave a talk at Channel Partners Expo last week in relation to to the secure framework and AI is AI one of the driving factors for otava to be really invested in the security conversation this year and and why it is it's a great question so yeah at the Expo you know my my my topic that they asked me to to spend time on was securing generative Ai and a lot of what I'm seeing right now in terms of Market is uh it reminds me of circuit early 2000s when there was an app for that right the campaign that got ran by Apple forever uh and then you everything was in the cloud and now we're just prepending every statement with AI and thinking that that makes it relevant right it's attractive and you know money's being invested in those things classified as AI the truth is today we're already consuming AI on a lot of different levels whether it's at your personal cell phone device the cars that you're driving the platforms that you're consuming in CRM cmdb databases right what what I think that a lot of people are now getting more specifically into is the intentional consumption of employe employes going to generative AI engines and so whether that be Bard or you know open AI chat GPT you know there there is a new conversation that's happening here which is more around hey similar to the pandemic and people on a global scale had never seen that kind of a supply chain problem I mean we had lines in grocery stores for toilet paper right you you have people in the in the AI World saying I don't know where to start like how do I secure this how do I help my employees understand what's the right way to use this and the wrong way and how do I have this conversation with them because they're using it I'm not going to be able to put that Genie back in the bottle but but where do we start and so I used that presentation to say again this secure framework whether it's managerial controls you know more administrative in nature or technical controls you can just come right back to the same framework and say how do you want to do that and so we presented it in that context and talked about Concepts like data anonymization you know and uh how you use training data sets what data you should put in training data sets as as an example as an element of shrinking the attack Vector right um or in the end when you're evaluating we talked about establishing a governance body what does that actually look like ethical use of AI let alone just general acceptable use you know from a corporation perspective and so it's certainly I think going to be a ramped level of intensity for businesses that are centrally focused on we want to use AI we see the business value and I I put a statistic in there that I thought was the most interesting and when you look at Market opportunity and everything's driven by money it's just the reality of life it's got about a 350 billion Doll Market opportunity in generative AI over the next you know measured in five years so you're not going to you're not going to not use AI right uh so our our focus is very much on yep you're going to use it how do we tie that into the secure framework how can we help you protect against that and then how can we equally use those same tool sets within our business to add more value to customers that want to consume it so we've talked about the focus and how it's uh framework is also con I would call it a mindset just as much as well but what vendors or Solutions are supporting the secure framework that you might be able to talk about I think one that's really interesting and where it's going to go right now that um we're we're pretty bullish on we've been with them for a long time as foret so I guess for for your show Katie and for me we would love for them to be a sponsor for both of us right as a as a company they have a pretty big market cap so foret we appreciate you um but uh but I'm I'm really excited to watch foret and I'll tell you why like of all the companies out there that I see as an organization from a security perspective we know where they are relative to like the gardener quadrant when you look at Palo Alto who's you know they're a premier leader you know Cisco who's certainly a known leader but when you look at what foret has built their platform on as an example to your question of like who why what solution they're a platform based they're an ecosystem right so for those customers that are consuming consing whether they're consuming Services votava which were a huge foret shop from cradle to grave Edge you know Ingress to egress in our data center we use a lot of their Technologies because we've been able to create and leverage their their total package right as you will um I'm I'm interested in that for customers I think that scale economies and reducing the number of vendors that you have participating is going to give you the best option to make AI effective what a lot of people are having a having problems with or like a real challenge is the understanding that AI is not new like you know language models and you know neural networks you know this a lot of this stuff's been active and running in in late 40s early 50s and and it was niched right and now because it's out in the public domain and again we'll go to the consumer mindset you know residential or every other person in the world playing with GPT right like give me a business plan in the Persona of Ryan Reynolds with the tone of Snoop Dog that's actually pretty fun right you can do some pretty cool things uh but when you think about it in context of security uh now all of a sudden it seems like it's new so I digress sorry but to kind of take it back to to Ford andet I think their solution that we spend a lot of time leading with to talk to customers about it's trusted they have a platform that is built that is ready that already has AI integrated and you can leverage it at scale now there's many others out there Cisco does it Palo Alto does it and there's New upand Comers my biggest concern for for for Security in the near term is there will be a lot of new entrances into the market and they're going to get attention and they're going to get funding and the consequence of putting your data in somebody that might be an early adopter like the 90s. comom bubble is that you're giving away your most precious asset your company data and you're putting it into an engine that you don't know necessarily what they're going to do with it and so my my advice to people is pick from a tried true vendor pick from somebody that has the right processes the right reputation you know in place that you're not going to put your crown jewel uh you into somebody's footprint so I think they're a big one obviously from a cloud perspective we're we're a very big broadcom shop you know we're part of the premere program now so the new one uh we're one of the top 400 Partners in that program and I think that they're doing a fantastic job really bringing in and leveraging AI uh and I know that that's got a long way to go uh but they're doing it more from workload optimization workload placement genuinely you know security and obviously and the like so those are two I'm pretty bullish on I think foret VM where you can't go wrong but that is not to suggest they're the the end all be all there's many of other you know big up incomers and already currently established you know Partners out there too my conversation with TJ is not over come back on Tuesday to learn about otava New Journey as a Premiere partner in the buy invite only broadcom Advantage partner program thank you to TJ for joining me today and thank you for watching or listening check out all episodes of Channel Insider partner POV on Channel insider.com or watch us on YouTube at Channel Insider newws and Trends or listen to us in podcast format on your favorite listening platform we put out a new video and podcast every week sometimes twice so don't forget to like subscribe and follow wherever possible to never miss an episode once again I'm Katie boso and I'll see you next time no

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