K-Pop, it turns out, is kind of like a great laboratory of what happens when you prioritize your audience. In a weird way, K-Pop bands are doing what technology companies should be doing - innovating with technology and giving users better, easier, more usable access to the things they need.
StrongDM manages and audits access to infrastructure.
- Role-based, attribute-based, & just-in-time access to infrastructure
- Connect any person or service to any infrastructure, anywhere
- Logging like you've never seen
I’ve been fortunate to be in the right place at the right time more than once in my career.
I had a front-row ticket to the transformation of Adobe from a boxed software company to a cloud powerhouse. I used the battle scars earned at Adobe to start Evident.io, the pioneer in continuous cloud security. Evident.io was eventually acquired by Palo Alto Networks, where I went on to influence the monumental growth as the core of Prisma Cloud at Palo Alto Networks. I thought I had solved the biggest problems in the cloud, so I shifted into the background to watch the next evolutions of technology pass me by. I had the comfortable couch, the latest game console, and plenty of time to regret the true state of my adult gaming reflexes. I thought I was done.
I was wrong.
Here’s the reality that’s been right in front of me all along: we live in an era of unceasing technological innovation and yet we’ve seen nothing in the way of modernizing access to these technologies. The tech industry delivered advancements in compute, storage, and web capabilities; next came virtualization, cloud, containers, and serverless. All of this was built on the foundation of access established many years earlier. Every time the paradigm changed, we made adjustments to how we work rather than fixing the tangled pain in the access that was left in the wake. Fast forward a decade or two, and we now sit at the crux of a massive problem.
The burden that we, the technology companies of the world, have pushed onto our engineers and staff is some of the worst technical debt in existence. Access pain is one of the largest problems that any company faces in our newly-distributed world. While the last barriers of the corporate perimeter are being shattered, we need a better way for our people to work with the technical resources they need to do their jobs. We still force them to use the same 20 year-old principles. Therein lies the core of the problem. The infrastructure we work with has evolved, and will keep evolving. The way we work, unfortunately, has not.
StrongDM Solves the Biggest DevOps and Security Problem Today: Modernized Access
StrongDM replaces the archaic principles with modern technology and modern work patterns. I see a company that has created a generational leap for operational and security teams in the form of an Infrastructure Access Platform. I see a solution to a problem that every company on earth has in spades. I see an opportunity to unleash the productivity of engineers, and be a hero to companies who want to make their employees happy through technology excellence. I see a reason to get off the couch.
Yesterday, I was a cybersecurity engineer. I was a founder & CEO. I was the first Chief Cloud Officer in the Fortune 1000. I was just about to play the Ghost of Tsushima. Today I am the SVP of Sales at StrongDM.
I’m not an easy person to motivate -- I only feel truly engaged by complex, multi-dimensional problems. The kind of problems where you sit up in the middle of the night and reach for a notepad to write down the next “this is so crazy it might work” idea. I joined StrongDM because they are solving the gnarliest of problems.
I deeply empathize with the access pain that our customers have lived with for years. I’m excited to bring the magic back to working with today’s modern infrastructure and deliver that magic to technology experts across various industries and at companies of all sizes. The problem is no longer “how are we allowed to work in today’s modern era,” but rather “why didn’t we have StrongDM sooner.”
There’s no greater feeling than waking up each day knowing that I’m making the work of DevOps teams, engineers, and security practitioners fun once more.
For more information, visit our latest press release.
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