Smarter IT and Cybersecurity with Jared Humiston | Buying Local #70

00;00;00;12 – 00;00;08;26
Speaker 1
welcome to buying local, welcome, everyone, to my local, Mike Nelson from Five Towers Media here with Jared Robinson from Adirondack. It’s.

00;00;09;03 – 00;00;17;15
Speaker 1
So I was thinking about this on the way over. Are you still Adirondack technical solutions or you just ADT techs or.

00;00;17;15 – 00;00;19;14
Speaker 2
He kind of rumbles as a legal name.

00;00;19;21 – 00;00;20;29
Speaker 1
That’s the legal name. Okay. Yeah, I.

00;00;21;04 – 00;00;32;00
Speaker 2
Believe we started down to educate taxes because, you know, 20 years ago we started the business with him, realize that when he answer the phone. Thank you for calling Adirondack Technical Solutions. Yes. That’s all I think.

00;00;32;00 – 00;00;33;26
Speaker 1
Everybody has a tax at.

00;00;33;26 – 00;00;40;09
Speaker 2
This point. We’ve we’ve been branded as any kick for, you know, better years, ten, 12 years now. Yeah, maybe even longer.

00;00;40;09 – 00;00;55;15
Speaker 1
So yeah, it’s why I’m 20 years, man. You said that to me the other day when I bumped into you here. By the way, we’re at Jerry’s new location. Over by exit 17, off the highway, I don’t know, are you next to Stinky’s coffee or is stinky coffee next to you like that?

00;00;55;21 – 00;00;57;08
Speaker 2
We moved in second, so I guess we’re not.

00;00;57;09 – 00;01;08;24
Speaker 1
You’re naturally thinking. Okay, well, we’re next to Stinky’s coffee. If you haven’t checked out Stinky’s, go ahead. I’m having one of their lattes as we speak here. But you said that when I bumped in here at 20 years.

00;01;08;26 – 00;01;12;12
Speaker 2
Yeah. 21. Now we’re starting a 21st year, so we completed 20 enter in 21.

00;01;12;13 – 00;01;16;24
Speaker 1
That’s wild. Guess how time flies at us. We’re old man.

00;01;16;27 – 00;01;19;02
Speaker 2
We are,

00;01;19;05 – 00;01;38;25
Speaker 1
We call those wisdom highlights. Jared. Wisdom highlights. So I you know, you said that and I was like, oh my God, we got to talk. So I want to I want to hear about the last ten years. Your business has changed, obviously for the better. It’s only gotten better in the last 20 years. So many people don’t even make it five years.

00;01;38;25 – 00;01;52;07
Speaker 1
You know, that’s a big milestone for a lot of businesses, let alone making it 20. So I’m not even sure where to begin. But let’s start with how did you end up starting a tech tax 20 years ago?

00;01;52;09 – 00;02;14;19
Speaker 2
Well, I guess it started with just like watching the way the industry works. You know, when I first started out, I mean, I think, like it was not really customer centric, right? It was more of like, you had to have it right. That was, as you know, you get to there, you know, you know, late 90s, early 2000, this technology was emerging.

00;02;14;21 – 00;02;33;09
Speaker 2
You know, that was where it was just starting to kind of be looked at as like something to enhance your business. There was still paper processes in place, and then you just made some efficiencies with computers and, so, you know, your, you know, I guess it came from going from the big, you know, mainframes.

00;02;33;09 – 00;02;53;16
Speaker 2
And now that was going on the personal computers and servers in every office. And, you know, you kind of go through these cycles, right? And you’re now at it through another one of these cycles where you went from big mainframe personal computers, then the servers getting hybrid that. Now we’re going back to the mainframes out in the cloud, you know, and I don’t have big super data centers.

00;02;53;18 – 00;03;13;23
Speaker 2
And then you’re going back to individual devices that access stuff in the cloud. So it’s just kind of going back and forth, you know, but it’s been, where we started was, you know, kind of fell on that niche, a lot of project based work, you know, get certain, desktops running cable, building kind of like a private cloud, right?

00;03;13;23 – 00;03;26;15
Speaker 2
Or putting a server in every business. We were installing an exchange server. We were configuring that to connect to their cell phones. And cell phones were emerging. People had their websites hosted in their, you know, website on their own server.

00;03;26;16 – 00;03;28;16
Speaker 1
Got an old surf life, right? Yeah. Yeah.

00;03;28;16 – 00;03;51;16
Speaker 2
So, you know, we used to have a client make up of all these little clouds inside of their radio, inside of their networks. We had a predictable. As things changed. Right. You know, the pace the world picked up. Everybody wants everything now, want to be agile as a business. Want to be able to do business from everywhere.

00;03;51;18 – 00;04;09;17
Speaker 2
That kind of model became, you know, a little bit more expensive, right. So you’re still having to maintain all these servers and to grow different servers for security reasons. So you had to start passing off, you know, servers for different roles. And then like I said, that became taking up real estate inside of the business. That’s consuming a lot of power.

00;04;09;17 – 00;04;14;16
Speaker 1
You know, everybody had those old server rooms, right? Yeah. And they’re out there with all the racks and stuff. Yeah.

00;04;14;19 – 00;04;33;04
Speaker 2
And so but then the attacks started going against the business. And so that’s where cloud computing comes in, where you get to kind of offload some of those things. You’re still susceptible to those same, you know, attacks and things like that. But now you have different tools like a protect. You don’t have a whole separate, you know, area in your office up for this anymore.

00;04;33;06 – 00;04;51;25
Speaker 2
Smaller footprint, you know, maximizing what you have and also making them more agile. Right. Where the power out goes in this building, we can all go work from home. We can go work anywhere. They all have cell phones. You know, we can work from cell phones so we don’t really have to we’re more agile. We’re, you know, more functional.

00;04;51;25 – 00;04;58;16
Speaker 2
We’re cheaper, and, you know, it’s able to, you know, deliver the same result for, for a smaller cost.

00;04;58;16 – 00;05;20;05
Speaker 1
For a lot. Yeah. It’s while, you know, it’s funny too, because I, weirdly, I, watched the original Tron movie. I I’m. Have you ever seen that movie or not? I haven’t. Oh, my God. So I watched the original Tron movie, last night, and I was laughing about, like, you look at that movie that was, I don’t know, maybe late 70s, early 80s compared to what the movies are today.

00;05;20;07 – 00;05;25;05
Speaker 1
And, just how much technology has changed. It is so, is so. Wow.

00;05;25;06 – 00;05;40;13
Speaker 2
Yeah. So, Matt. Well, as you said earlier, we’re I guess we’re, we’re old men now. Some of the science fiction stuff is, you know, you know, you watch Star Trek and there was a flip of that over there talking to it. You know, it’s like everybody’s literally on the phone to their head talking to everybody throughout the world and changing messages.

00;05;40;19 – 00;05;46;07
Speaker 2
You know, very quick. So you know, we, we, we become so old that science fiction is not real.

00;05;46;07 – 00;06;13;27
Speaker 1
Is now the reality? Yeah. That’s information on demand and people on demand. Right. Everybody’s accessible instantly these days. It is absolutely wild. You know, so you kind of got into a little bit about how your business model has changed over time. And we were chatting about it before we officially started the episode. But, but, you know, one of the things that businesses struggle with is the pivot, right?

00;06;13;27 – 00;06;32;08
Speaker 1
The changes that you have to make to stay ahead of your industry and be on top of things and the people that don’t pivot over time end up getting left behind and going out of business. Right. So obviously technology is changing at an ever increasing rate.

00;06;32;11 – 00;06;45;22
Speaker 1
You’ve had to keep up with this over time and kind of stay at the front side of that way. But how does that look like? How do you do that as a business? Right. Like if you’re going to tell someone like, hey, hey, this is what you got to do to stay ahead of your industry, like, what do you do?

00;06;45;22 – 00;06;48;13
Speaker 1
How do you do it, especially in your industry that moves so fast?

00;06;48;15 – 00;07;06;27
Speaker 2
Human beings inherently don’t like change, right? We’ve kind of learned that in this industry, right? Yeah. That’s we thrive on it because we like technology. We like change. We like the you know, when a new iOS comes out, we love that when new product comes out on our server, get a new cloud service, new, you know, hardware, whatever it is, we like that.

00;07;06;29 – 00;07;24;13
Speaker 2
But other, you know, for the most part, business like standards, right. So one of the ways that we’ve, we’ve pivoted and that we went from kind of like, I wouldn’t really call organized chaos, like the old way of doing it was like generally it was like a fire truck. Oh, this person needs that over here.

00;07;24;13 – 00;07;48;06
Speaker 2
Let me send three people over there. Just take care of that. Meanwhile three other fires start and then you just rush three other resources back in another direction. Yeah. Like that is exhausting. It’s exhausting for your team that’s providing the support. It’s exhausting for your customers just to kind of, like, just feel like you’re just kind of just stopping all fires and then you’re going over the next one, and that one just pops up over there, and it was just chaos.

00;07;48;06 – 00;08;09;24
Speaker 2
And so where we pivoted was to standardize, right. The old IT models and we still even see it today. And I don’t know how some people still like those environments, but it’s like, you know, the on the cart, like, oh, we’re going to do, here’s the ten services that you offer. I want this stuff first. I want five.

00;08;09;27 – 00;08;35;17
Speaker 2
And so that creates a dilemma of like, okay, well they didn’t want this, you know, EDR, you know, protection against malware or against ransomware. They don’t want that. So what do we do when they get ransomware? Do we just let it burn through, you know, and so you so that creates all this communication in this, nonstandard way of reacting because it’s like I have these 14 different contract types.

00;08;35;19 – 00;09;03;05
Speaker 2
And so 4 or 5 years ago we just said we can’t do that. More like we can’t allow people to choose their protections. And that’s a maybe a crude way or maybe a a over direct way of saying it like we can’t allow anyone to do that, but you’re, you’re getting, you know, you’re getting to where you’re not 100% sure what that protection actually goes.

00;09;03;07 – 00;09;22;21
Speaker 2
So we just created a program that’s just like hey you know from A to Z. This is just what we’re going to do. We’re going to just cover your desktop installations. We’re going to cover the way that you monitor cybersecurity. We’re going to, you know, cover your employee training for cybersecurity to, you know, train the human firewall. We’re going all these things are going here.

00;09;22;21 – 00;09;35;11
Speaker 2
And risk assessments are vulnerability assessments. We’re going to do this right up to this point. Then we’re going to ask you to have a pen test that drops and verifies what we do for you that shows the program is in place, that it’s being effective. So independent.

00;09;35;11 – 00;09;43;02
Speaker 1
Pen test means penetration test. Yes. So that’s essentially where you purposely try to break this down to see where the vulnerability. Yeah. Sorry.

00;09;43;07 – 00;09;59;12
Speaker 2
Yep. You’ll you’ll have a third party service come through and just say okay we’re going to you know, we’re going to tox. We’re going to see if you bend. Hopefully you don’t break if there are instances that would break. Hey, is this, a vendor specific vulnerability that’s not patched yet? Okay. That’s great. We know about that.

00;09;59;16 – 00;10;19;03
Speaker 2
We know it’s a weakness, but what’s the controls that we put in place to monitor? It minimizes, you know, you know, its ability to affect our business. So we put it in that full program and there’s no more like it. It’s, it of yesterday is here’s block hours and we’re going to wait till you have a problem.

00;10;19;03 – 00;10;19;19
Speaker 1
That break.

00;10;19;19 – 00;10;29;27
Speaker 2
And give us a call when your company is running inefficiently. And to me that’s never really made sense. And we’ve strived to like, kind of get to this point of like where we’re proactive instead of reactive.

00;10;29;27 – 00;10;30;15
Speaker 1
Yep.

00;10;30;17 – 00;10;52;13
Speaker 2
And where we want to be, you know, where we’re taking things is where we’re going to sit down. You know, we want to sit down and, you know, do tabletop exercises where we’re like, okay, you just got ransomware. You’re a payroll company. What what happens? And then we just sit back and we let their leadership team discuss that, say, well, it sounds like you’re missing, you know, some of this in your incident response plan.

00;10;52;13 – 00;11;16;06
Speaker 2
It sounds like you’re missing some of this. What is your return to business like? How if you were had ransomware in your systems were unavailable for 48 hours, what does that look like to. Oh, okay. You need to be back in business in 24 hours. Here’s what that cost us. Do you have the business model that supports that type of profitability that gives you that return to business, you know, technology like can you restore this back?

00;11;16;08 – 00;11;32;25
Speaker 2
Those are all because you get some people saying, oh, all my stuff is backed up in the cloud. Okay, great. What happens? You need to restore, you know, how fast is your internet? Good. Actually I’m 50. My connection. But you got three terabytes worth of data that needs to be restored down. And when you start to do that, test restore says, oh, it’ll be restored.

00;11;32;25 – 00;11;34;25
Speaker 2
And, you know, 36 hours.

00;11;34;27 – 00;11;41;29
Speaker 1
Can can you explain for our listeners, explain what ransomware is, because it is scary.

00;11;42;05 – 00;11;42;13
Speaker 2
Yeah.

00;11;42;17 – 00;11;49;26
Speaker 1
And I know that a lot of people do. But, I also have to assume there’s people that don’t know what ransomware is, so just explain that to me.

00;11;50;01 – 00;12;13;25
Speaker 2
Yeah. So ransomware is where they, you know, execute malicious code, to a system or systems within your, you know, your environment. And then it will encrypt, the data with an encryption key that they only have reversible, in which the bell make a demand to you. So hence the ransomware, they say, hey, you give us, you know, you know, five bitcoin or 1000 bitcoin.

00;12;13;28 – 00;12;19;22
Speaker 2
And if you give us that, we’ll give you your data back. And so.

00;12;19;24 – 00;12;21;07
Speaker 1
So they’re holding your stuff.

00;12;21;10 – 00;12;43;26
Speaker 2
They’re holding you hostage until you do that. Unless you if you have good backups and you have, good rollback procedures and things like that, if you have good technology on your end points and years, you just roll that stuff right back in a few minutes, restore your data, do all that good stuff. If you have the right, you know, protections and programs in place if you want, with the other carton, you know, model, you’re kind of just spinning the chamber.

00;12;43;28 – 00;12;46;06
Speaker 1
It’s going to get expensive. Yeah, yeah.

00;12;46;09 – 00;12;59;00
Speaker 2
And then so you never want to be in a spot and I we’ve even heard this for a lot. I have, I have cyber insurance. Okay. So do you want to go through or you got to make a cyber claim and just say, okay, well, at least I’m covered for the $2 million of data I just lost.

00;12;59;03 – 00;13;15;21
Speaker 2
Yeah, but you just got over, you know, 20 years. That’s a difficult position to be in. So you don’t really like your cyber insurance should be breaking, you know? You know, break this glass here, this emergency. Right. That should be. We’re hoping that we can take care of that fire before absolutely. Coming off.

00;13;15;21 – 00;13;40;15
Speaker 1
The bridge. Right? Yeah. Yeah, it is wild. I and it’s funny too, because I read I mean, I know I probably get ten different newsletters in my inbox every morning with different industry stuff, and, every single one of them always has something about somebody who has gotten hacked. Is, had a ransomware amount, a malware took all this data was the tax, like all this different stuff that’s out there.

00;13;40;15 – 00;13;43;17
Speaker 1
It is such a scary world in the digital environment.

00;13;43;23 – 00;14;12;13
Speaker 2
Yeah, we just did, Facebook and LinkedIn post about, you know, international conflicts. Right? Obviously everybody’s aware of, you know, all the conflicts that are going on right now. And, and you just see, you know, three days later as we put this out, we’ve been doing this quite a while. We we know the trends. That goes over then you have, you know, pro-Iranian company or, I shouldn’t say a company, but, you know, you know, a group, hacktivists.

00;14;12;13 – 00;14;13;04
Speaker 1
Hackers or.

00;14;13;04 – 00;14;35;28
Speaker 2
Activists, right? So they, they, they targeted, a major U.S. medical, company, you know, launch ransomware, denial of service attacks. And it targeted them to cause harm. Good. Even. Really they did. They took over some, endpoints and just deleted that. This was more of a malicious attack when you saw some of your hacktivist will do the ransomware, make some money out of it.

00;14;36;00 – 00;14;46;23
Speaker 2
So I’m just going there, capture a flag to say, hey, that we did it. They’re looking to be malicious and they’re just deleting data and saying, hey, we captured the backups, we got the data as well. We’re just going to be we’re.

00;14;46;28 – 00;14;48;15
Speaker 1
Burning your stuff to the ground.

00;14;48;17 – 00;15;10;00
Speaker 2
So that’s your that’s your unattended consequences of, you know, you know, the international complex and sometimes it does even involve our own country. It’s just that we’re a wealthy nation. And so you are a target for ransomware. And if you make that ransomware one off and you’re like hey well you know for $10,000 I can just be done with us.

00;15;10;02 – 00;15;28;13
Speaker 2
That’s $3 million worth of data. I’ll pay the $10,000. Some of these groups are very nice. Like they give you, you can actually go ahead and give the decryption key. And that way, you know, that’s the purpose of having a program like this in place so that you have the resources players to properly implemented, you don’t just give them full $10,000.

00;15;28;13 – 00;15;43;25
Speaker 2
If you were in that unfortunate state that you had to pay the ransom, you would say, okay, we’re going to give you a 2500. Now you show us that you actually have our data. And you could ask for proof of that and maybe even hopefully do that before you get the 2500 bucks. But yeah. So it proves that.

00;15;43;25 – 00;16;07;06
Speaker 2
Yeah, they usually do that. They’re generally very nice to leave a nice, text file behind that says that we have this data and here’s the data that we have. And sometimes they leave a little folder with the data that they’ve captured. And, and, you know, uploaded. But other times we just take them and they can show you and then you say, okay, now give us all this and then we’ll do that, and then you got to have you got 200 lawyers got hired people that specialize in all of that.

00;16;07;08 – 00;16;24;20
Speaker 2
And that’s where your cyber insurance comes in to handle all those expensive stuff. But then most of the time, if you’re a big enough organization or you’re kind of a midsize organization, you want to have the proper coverage for this. So that’s that’s where go on through the exercises and go through the stuff that we talk about.

00;16;24;26 – 00;16;25;19
Speaker 2
Yeah.

00;16;25;21 – 00;16;57;15
Speaker 1
Come on Tommy. You know it’s almost being becoming cliche right now to talk about AI in every single business conversation. But it’s in every single business conversation. And, and I’m very curious how everyone is reacting or responding to AI and how they’re using it. And afraid of it. Love it. Implementing it. Do you guys see AI impacting your industry and are you making pivots because of the AI and what it’s offering and doing?

00;16;57;18 – 00;17;15;16
Speaker 2
So I am still learning. Yeah, right. And so it is it’s obviously like one of the biggest things, you know, every time you scroll through Facebook you see all these ads, AI is going to create more jobs or is going to create more millionaires, in the next, you know, six months than the last 20 years as a blah, blah, blah.

00;17;15;18 – 00;17;39;09
Speaker 2
Some truth that some, you know, you know, overzealous marketing to that as well. But AI is not something to be feared. It’s not something to be, you know, running into whether it’s something to be respected. Right. And so, like, from a cyber perspective that we look at, we talk to a lot of our customers about, you know, hey, make sure you have like an AI policy in place first.

00;17;39;11 – 00;17;59;12
Speaker 2
Because like right now people are, you know, businesses right now. So you’re familiar with the term shadow it. Yep. And where people would, you know bring in technology into your business and connect them to your, you know, network. And that could be you know creating threats. Shadowy AI is that same type of that. You know. So right now you’re getting where people are like, you know what?

00;17;59;13 – 00;18;15;20
Speaker 2
I’m going to make my job easier. I’m going to take this financial spreadsheet here. I’m going to drop it into ChatGPT, and I’m going to have it do my monthly calculations for me, and I’m going to turn that into my boss and record time. You just taught AI what you’re supposed to be. You know what your yeah, you know, statement looks like.

00;18;15;23 – 00;18;24;12
Speaker 2
And if you’re not in a paid subscription with confidentiality and things like that, that data has been learned that data can be disseminated, you know, and searched upon.

00;18;24;13 – 00;18;29;04
Speaker 1
Yeah, it can be uploaded into the chat engine. It’s learning. It’s what? Yeah.

00;18;29;07 – 00;18;53;18
Speaker 2
And so you’re saying, you know, businesses should standardize standardize on AI workflow. Just like you know, what we talked about. We standardize, the computers that we put in place, the firewalls that we use, the, you know, the cyber, you know, training materials that because everything’s standardized, businesses should be looking to standardize or AI practices and what they’re using, what engines they’re using and for if that data is being, you know, protected, if it’s, you know, vulnerable.

00;18;53;18 – 00;19;11;06
Speaker 2
Because now, you know, the hackers are using AI to learn about businesses and all the information that is in the engines that record speed. Yeah, right. So whatever, you’re free to get into the machine is learning and that’s, you know, going to be past, you know, being searched and to be used and so used.

00;19;11;06 – 00;19;11;19
Speaker 1
Against you.

00;19;11;19 – 00;19;29;24
Speaker 2
For that used gangster. Yeah. And so you got to be careful what you’re teaching and you got to make sure that you have, you know, close subscriptions that are to your business. And then everybody looks at it and this is you’re going right back to where we were, you know, ten years ago. And it was almost like, well, I don’t want to buy a copilot license for $35 per user per month.

00;19;29;27 – 00;19;52;16
Speaker 2
Okay, here’s the free versions and just put all your information out there. Right. Let somebody search it and then take $300,000 a year because they, you know, learned everything about your business and you see it on social media. What was the the way to say that they just had or they had the character created and they would show, like, you know, your diploma to show what you do for a living, that would show your dog there what kind of dog you have.

00;19;52;16 – 00;20;04;00
Speaker 2
And so that picture was worth a thousand words. Everybody went through created that, and they’re like, those trends are created to garner information about you. You have to be socially engineered.

00;20;04;01 – 00;20;09;04
Speaker 1
Yeah. Now they know your dog, your dog’s name. They know where you went to college. They’ve got maybe your birth date when you.

00;20;09;07 – 00;20;11;00
Speaker 2
Know your profession, you know.

00;20;11;02 – 00;20;18;12
Speaker 1
Yeah. It’s a it’s like those, social media posts where it’s like ten questions, right? Like, what’s your favorite color or what are you, you know, all those different than.

00;20;18;13 – 00;20;20;12
Speaker 2
What are security questions when you walk into your back?

00;20;20;12 – 00;20;20;29
Speaker 1
Yeah.

00;20;21;00 – 00;20;36;19
Speaker 2
Where did you meet your spouse? Oh that’s right. I didn’t put it there. So your secret questions as a social media trend. People don’t realize that the same thing, the AI stuff, that’s just that. Hey, show me your AI character. Oh, I guess everybody else is doing it, and it’s being done for a reason.

00;20;36;22 – 00;20;37;14
Speaker 1
Is wild.

00;20;37;14 – 00;20;38;29
Speaker 2
And so, yeah, I know,

00;20;39;05 – 00;20;55;25
Speaker 1
I’ve been reading a lot about cloud bots and, like I say, genetic, basically AI agents that people are putting on their laptop to do all this. And you can basically give it full autonomy. And it’s like sending emails, like, we doing all this different stuff and it’s like.

00;20;55;28 – 00;21;15;03
Speaker 2
Yeah, about that to me right now at the stage when it’s at is wild because so like we’re like I said, I’d be lying if I said I don’t use I, we use it. We use it a lot. I haven’t we use a lot. But that’s foundational stuff in my opinion. Technology should enhance your, you know, your your you know, given.

00;21;15;08 – 00;21;30;22
Speaker 2
Yeah. That’s right. AI is really good for creating the foundation of what you’re trying to create. Still, you know, we still would like to see people, you know, retain their creativity, right? Yeah. Using AI to speed up that creativity.

00;21;30;26 – 00;21;31;26
Speaker 1
Absolutely.

00;21;31;28 – 00;21;47;02
Speaker 2
Embrace that. Right. Use that to create a better product, a better end point to, shorten the time frame that it takes you to get to a business outcome. Right. And that’s what we’re really, you know, trying to help our customers with is like let’s not be scared of it. You know let’s use it responsibly.

00;21;47;06 – 00;21;47;16
Speaker 1
Yeah.

00;21;47;21 – 00;22;13;04
Speaker 2
And then let’s use it not to you know limit your team’s natural giving abilities and creativity. And you know, I use I would use very quickly for a lot of, you know, customer things. I roofing data and we have a private closed, you know, copilot subscription that is based on our Microsoft currency. It is not publicly accessible.

00;22;13;09 – 00;22;31;12
Speaker 2
And we were used up there when we were. Well, you did some analytics and say, okay, we get these reports for these meetings or something like that. We build that. We still have to review it. And I have still being taught by us all I do. It gets more accurate every time we do this. And it does help, you know, put together and help us see trends quicker.

00;22;31;19 – 00;22;32;15
Speaker 1
Yeah.

00;22;32;18 – 00;22;44;15
Speaker 2
It does help us see network events quicker. So it is very, very good. But we’ve also done this very responsibly over the last 12 to 18 months. It’s not something we just say, hey, just start taking these.

00;22;44;15 – 00;22;46;29
Speaker 1
Just throw it all. Just start throwing it there.

00;22;47;01 – 00;22;58;02
Speaker 2
Hey, do our job for us. Because then that that becomes we’re we’re hands off and then we’re not driving that in value. Yeah. And so you still want the human to interpret and say, hey, you know, these are some things that we need to do.

00;22;58;03 – 00;23;24;08
Speaker 1
Yeah, yeah, I agree fully. I mean I, I can easily say that I spend 4 or 5 hours a day using AI for different activities in our business and the there’s not a single conversation I have. I primarily use cloud, and there’s not a single conversation that I have with cloud where I don’t have to. I’m looking at what cloud is giving me, and I have to say, hey, that doesn’t seem right to me.

00;23;24;09 – 00;23;34;28
Speaker 1
Can you please cross-reference that against these other things and it comes back? Oh, you’re right, I missed this. I and it makes they all make mistakes. So it’s it certainly is not.

00;23;35;00 – 00;23;55;19
Speaker 2
Yes. Without without error. For AI to be its most effective, you you have to train. Yeah. And you have to correct it. And you have to make sure that when you’re reporting in as a given, you know, especially from a business perspective, that if you’re an experienced business owner and you’re letting I give you projections, there might be some things that I haven’t learned yet.

00;23;55;19 – 00;23;56;17
Speaker 1
Yes.

00;23;56;19 – 00;24;11;05
Speaker 2
Same thing with cybersecurity. Like, you know, I see all these things where it’s like, oh, we have a cyber, you know, hands in the background. It’s like, yeah, well, you should still have someone really smart looking over that. Yeah, you should still. Yeah. You don’t have a human being that has 20 years of experience. I don’t have 20 years experience.

00;24;11;05 – 00;24;21;11
Speaker 2
Yeah. That’s right. Now, the beauty of AI is that you have a lot of people freed of information. So we can close that gap pretty quick. And they’ll get there you know with with advancing attackers all the time.

00;24;21;11 – 00;24;21;17
Speaker 1
Yeah.

00;24;21;18 – 00;24;24;25
Speaker 2
That’s and that’s you know what. What it is artificial for a reason.

00;24;24;28 – 00;24;54;08
Speaker 1
Yeah. Well that’s like with the new workflow automation stuff that we’re doing, AI is helping us with solution design to get there a lot faster. However, we still need to have our software engineer reviewing that solution to make sure that it is accurate and is not like on a couple of instances, we’re getting back a solution design that is so horribly complicated and has bits and parts and things that it’s like, that doesn’t need to even be in there and so let’s we can remove that whole thing from this.

00;24;54;08 – 00;25;00;28
Speaker 1
And if you’re just trusting AI fully with what it’s giving you and then just acting on it, you might be making some bad decisions.

00;25;01;00 – 00;25;11;18
Speaker 2
We have we have a full time position that that’s all they do. All okay. So anything that goes into our Cyber Ninjas or anything that goes through our security operations center, any of those alerts that is still, you know, looked at by.

00;25;11;18 – 00;25;12;20
Speaker 1
Person, by human.

00;25;12;20 – 00;25;13;00
Speaker 2
Yes.

00;25;13;05 – 00;25;13;22
Speaker 1
Looking for those.

00;25;13;22 – 00;25;35;08
Speaker 2
Areas. Just because one thing that AI is not really good at detecting at times is some of the false positives. Yeah, that was retrain that it’s better you know what you can choose some of these, you know, some of these edges. You look for impossible travel, right? And impossible travel is essentially can I log in from multiple places and within a certain amount of time.

00;25;35;10 – 00;25;55;12
Speaker 2
And that be a valid log. Yeah. Now you know, so if you’re logging in from New York, new Jersey and Miami, Florida, three times 18 minutes, that’s got some possible travel right there. There isn’t anything known to the old man that can get you from New York in new Jersey to, Miami in 18 months.

00;25;55;14 – 00;26;14;11
Speaker 1
Yeah. Well we have that too with we have multiple team members that have to log in the systems. Yes. And they’re like, let’s just say it’s a Google email address. And I’ve got four different people that are logging into that email address for different reasons. And they’re all of a good just like impossible. You would not be able to cover that distance like in the two.

00;26;14;11 – 00;26;14;23
Speaker 2
Minutes.

00;26;14;25 – 00;26;15;11
Speaker 1
Difference.

00;26;15;11 – 00;26;38;23
Speaker 2
Right. So those are what we either call white noise or false positives. And then so that person will say, hey, these events right here, those are we have customers that when they access data on their mobile device, they use an amount of visor or other VPN technologies to access it. And it’s like, well, okay, well, you’re using an amount of visor that’s showing you’re coming from an IP address in London, and that’s that’s an impossible travel.

00;26;38;26 – 00;26;58;04
Speaker 2
So we have to, you know, start curbing people’s behaviors. Well, even accessibility, we’ve brought that to a lot of customers, you know, do you want these people to have access to this is what their access to their data? So on one hand you have AI, you know, tools that are analyzing all the event logs, which is very good.

00;26;58;04 – 00;27;17;03
Speaker 2
Right? That’s very tough for humans to go through. And walk across your customer base and say, hey, these people are logging in over here to send an alert. So that’s a good part of a bad part. There is. It’s not smart enough to know at times that that’s, you know, that that’s an anonymized. Yeah, that’s not really impossible travel that’s coming from here.

00;27;17;06 – 00;27;44;02
Speaker 2
So we just we tune that. And how many, how how many, files they do we message for or we, we monitor for mass file deletion mass file uploads because that shows. Yeah. Criminal you know, potential you know, criminal activity. Right. Where we’re taking data. However people have their phones linked to their OneDrive. If you’re an engineering company or you’re a construction company, you might be taking pictures of a house that you just finished.

00;27;44;04 – 00;28;02;18
Speaker 2
And I was going, oh, there was just all these files just uploaded, but you just took 30 pictures of a house that you’re going to sell or you’re going to put on your website for marketing. So I good told us that there is a mass file, upload. Wasn’t smart enough to know that they’re a construction company.

00;28;02;22 – 00;28;11;22
Speaker 2
Yeah. So train those behaviors. We, you know, do that. That’s how currently you should be handling your process.

00;28;11;22 – 00;28;15;16
Speaker 1
I you know, it’s.

00;28;15;18 – 00;28;42;00
Speaker 1
Every day I piss and moan about having this two factor authentication authentication stuff pop up on my phone because my team is accessing something else. I’m going to stop pissing and moaning about it. Now that you’ve told me about the impossible travel, I thought it was just the system being a pain in my ass. Not realizing that what it’s actually doing is saying, like, hey, you’ve got to log in Clifton Park, log in and connect to the A logging in Queensbury, a logging in Ballston Spa, Greenville.

00;28;42;07 – 00;28;47;20
Speaker 1
You know, like it’s all these different geographies around the area. And it’s actually flagged that I never knew that.

00;28;47;20 – 00;29;11;17
Speaker 2
Yeah. And even MFA can be defeated. Right. Yeah. You know you can get do you get a session token. You can get in between that. You have a limited time to log in. But if that does happen, that’s still going to tell you that, like, hey, if that person is monitoring, know because a malicious code that’s on here and then they’re going to launch it from, you know, a data center that they have and, you know, Los Angeles that’s still going to that’s going to log that addressable travel.

00;29;11;17 – 00;29;33;13
Speaker 2
So you still have that looking for that. And it. Right. So you’re able to look at all these events going across multiple platforms. So right now, our monitor and we look at, you know, not only email cloud and the endpoint so that all those accounts are correlated. So it’s called seems system or so something like that.

00;29;33;13 – 00;30;03;08
Speaker 2
And it works for management. Right. So it will look through all these systems, all these alerts across firewalls across, you know, across desktops across here called platform. It’ll it’ll take all those accounts, correlate them and say something doesn’t add up here. And then that also keeps timestamps. Right. If you have if you have an event and you have to provide forensics and your type of industry, we have the timestamps that go across where all this stuff happened, how and exactly how it happened.

00;30;03;08 – 00;30;11;03
Speaker 2
So you know, the who, what, when, where, why all of that? So that should save you some money on your forensics. You know, all those, you know, all those types of events.

00;30;11;03 – 00;30;11;14
Speaker 1
Yeah.

00;30;11;18 – 00;30;31;29
Speaker 2
So I as good of those aspects. I can do all those things now very cheaply versus, you know, back in the days working with the banks, we used to have to train, you know, same solutions for months if not for years going through logs manually. Now I is doing that on the fly in minutes. Right. I’m alerting you.

00;30;32;01 – 00;30;40;29
Speaker 2
It’s parsing white noise from these are actionable, activities that need that need human interaction.

00;30;41;01 – 00;30;41;11
Speaker 1
Yeah.

00;30;41;18 – 00;30;43;02
Speaker 2
And then you go through and.

00;30;43;05 – 00;30;50;21
Speaker 1
So it’s like any tool. Right. But you know, a hammer, you can build a house with the hammer. You can also hit somebody over the head with it. Yeah. Thanks. Right.

00;30;50;23 – 00;30;55;07
Speaker 2
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So I can be, you know, to be productive or constructive. Yeah. Or destructive.

00;30;55;09 – 00;31;15;27
Speaker 1
Yeah. So, so I know we’re getting short on time, but I do want to, spend a couple minutes talking about this amazing new office that you’re in. Yeah, right. This place is really cool. Beautiful fun. Obviously you got a coffee shop next door, so that helps with productivity. But, tell me about the new location.

00;31;16;00 – 00;31;19;20
Speaker 1
About what the new location is doing for you as a business.

00;31;19;23 – 00;31;43;05
Speaker 2
Yeah. I mean, so this is the dream of this business has never been about making money. It’s always been about, you know, people and outcomes. I generally, I like helping. The life skill set I had was technology. I used to love going in and fixing problems that people couldn’t figure out, right? I love the needle in the haystack and finding that and then getting to the bottom of it.

00;31;43;08 – 00;32;04;08
Speaker 2
And, you know, we existed in Washington County for, for a long, long time. Yeah, I grew up. I’m a third generation, raised a fourth generation there, and always wanted to do it there. I’ve always had my eye on this building. I’ve inquired about it a number of times over the years, and I wanted to build a corporate headquarters in Washington County, and it’s just not in the cards right now.

00;32;04;09 – 00;32;26;04
Speaker 2
You don’t have to have the structure to do the things that we need to do to make that dream a reality. So, like I said, when I was talking to somebody else, I said, sometimes you get to, you know, create the dream and sometimes you get to join someone is dream. So when, Brian and Ben, I saw their, you know, their article, you know, and and saw them, you know, say, hey, the place been bought and they’re going through stuff out here.

00;32;26;05 – 00;32;42;19
Speaker 2
Talk to them. And went through, you know, kind of, you know, walked through the building with Brian and, and Brian, he does most of the, you know, it’s part of the creative process around here. I got some knowledge building. And so he and I walked through and we started exchanging some ideas and we’re going, yeah, you could do this, could do that, you can do this.

00;32;42;19 – 00;33;05;22
Speaker 2
And, and, we were like, you, you know, this is the time, you know, we we we’ve look at everything that goes, you know, this is more central to our customers. This is, puts us 15 minutes closer to 300,000 people a month, you know, to our talent pool gets bigger. Yeah, well, put us up to a nice short drive to the park area.

00;33;05;22 – 00;33;32;11
Speaker 2
Albany area shorter, you know, drives to our customers. So from a business perspective, that works well. Yeah. Right. The dream that we wanted to create was a mixed use building where we had other businesses that would be synergetic to our employees and create a good environment for them. And this, this place created that, right? You know, have a stinky’s coffee next door and have having, you know, you can get your haircuts here.

00;33;32;11 – 00;33;38;01
Speaker 2
You can, you know, and then there’s some other stuff, I guess, Prime, I would want me to, you know, some other things that are coming in here. I’ll leave that.

00;33;38;02 – 00;33;38;24
Speaker 1
I can’t talk about it.

00;33;38;24 – 00;34;03;03
Speaker 2
Yeah. Talk about that. Right. But they’re just, you know, it’s good culture based on and as you asked earlier, like, what have we been doing to this business? Was we pivoted. Right. So in that discussion, we kind of just talked about the customer outcome based facing that we did. But one of the other things that we’ve addressed as a company in the last 3 or 4 years, five years is culture.

00;34;03;05 – 00;34;15;25
Speaker 2
Culture is one of the most important things to a successful client. Outcomes are employee retention has I mean, right now we only have one person on the staff that’s been here less than a year. And I think that’ll be up in like ten days.

00;34;15;25 – 00;34;16;06
Speaker 1
Yeah.

00;34;16;08 – 00;34;37;23
Speaker 2
Everybody else has been here for three or 4 or 5 years. Six years. And that’s familiar faces for our customers. That’s good tribal knowledge. We know where everything is and our customers. But that speaks a lot to the culture that we’ve created here. We’re we’re looking for great human beings first. And we’ll train the skills. We will use our tools to enhance their skills.

00;34;37;23 – 00;34;57;15
Speaker 2
We will train them. We will get them better. This allows us to do that, right. This gives our team more full choices, closer to, you know, get your car wash right next door. You know, gas right across street time is a form of currency. And that dream was to do that was provide an experience for our team to just.

00;34;57;17 – 00;35;11;03
Speaker 2
Hey, during my lunch break, I’m going to get my haircut. I don’t have to do that after work. I can go spend more time with my kids and get the ball game quicker. I can, you know, grab food right here. I can have food DoorDash here. I can have Instacart right here, put on my car, drive home, grab little Timmy, grab.

00;35;11;03 – 00;35;31;09
Speaker 2
All right. And, you know, time is a form of currency now. People want everything yesterday. This puts us closer to our customers so we can serve them faster. This puts us into a more centralized location for our team to have a better experience for them to get here quicker. You know, get to some ancillary things that they want a little quicker.

00;35;31;10 – 00;35;52;18
Speaker 2
So Ben and Brian again, you know, tip the house to them. They did a great job. Amazing job. They were very accommodating to, you know, if you ask Brian, he might not have gone. Now we got a long while, but I’m saying but we we can we do this because we do that on the ceiling I want to yeah, they did a perfect job of accommodating us and making sure that we’re going to be successful here.

00;35;52;18 – 00;36;12;01
Speaker 2
And I always love the space and the team loves the space. And we’ve had so much traffic coming into this building from people going into these. And yeah, these guys have been great. Or, you know, the salon next door to us, they’re great people. The, you know, barbershop down the way. They’re great people. Yeah. And so that’s that’s been that’s been awesome.

00;36;12;04 – 00;36;30;25
Speaker 2
And we, we really love the space and we love the exposure. So and we couldn’t be happier with the decision. You know, even though there was some reservations of, you know, leaving the hometown on the home guarding but I think from a business perspective, that was right.

00;36;30;26 – 00;36;39;27
Speaker 1
Makes a lot of sense. Well, it’s an amazing location. And again, you know, car can out there. I mean, there’s got to be thousands of cars go down that.

00;36;39;27 – 00;36;43;01
Speaker 2
Road every day. I think the traffic study they did was 32,000.

00;36;43;04 – 00;36;52;03
Speaker 1
32,000 a day. But that whole know, I mean, this whole corridor has become really like that busy and happening, you know.

00;36;52;03 – 00;37;09;09
Speaker 2
Well, and that’s what you talk about right? From an economic standpoint, economic development standpoint. Right. They they built the, you know, sewer water down through here a few years ago. And now you’re starting to see all the new buildings pop up. And it’s just yeah, that’s just something that’s that was really the, the, the determining factor for us.

00;37;09;09 – 00;37;22;26
Speaker 2
And like I said, we’ve looked at this building for ten years. And when you see what the job they were doing, well they’re like, yeah, we need to be here, you know, and that’s that. Like I said, I’ve done a great job. And, we’re looking forward to the, you know, last ordinances, you know, getting built out here.

00;37;22;26 – 00;37;41;28
Speaker 2
And, adding more value, you know, to our team, to this, you know, to this community that’s really welcomed us, you know? So, but the A-list, the local chambers have been really accommodating and, you know, we’re really welcoming, you know, to our door move. So that’s been great as well. So.

00;37;41;28 – 00;37;53;02
Speaker 1
Yeah. And, plans for Fitzgerald Brothers here for Saint Patrick’s Day. I mean, it’s, a stone’s throw down the road, for corned beef again.

00;37;53;04 – 00;37;55;12
Speaker 2
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Doesn’t bother me for the quarter.

00;37;55;12 – 00;38;04;05
Speaker 1
We got those companies that we have got. Well, listen, I really appreciate you taking the time. I know you got a lot going on, so taking an hour out to talk to us.

00;38;04;07 – 00;38;05;18
Speaker 2
Very gracious. Your time as well.

00;38;05;18 – 00;38;16;12
Speaker 1
Absolutely. Thanks. It’s. I’ll tell you. I mean, we’ve known each other a long time, but watching your business and what it’s done over the last 20 years is amazing and is pretty much every business owners.

00;38;16;12 – 00;38;17;07
Speaker 2
Dream, so far as I’m.

00;38;17;07 – 00;38;24;27
Speaker 1
Aware. So, you know, being able to grow and go and provide for families and people and team and community and, you know, it’s what it’s all about.

00;38;25;01 – 00;38;40;03
Speaker 2
That’s that’s the main thing, right? You know, being able to get back and watch to get help. You know, like I said, I take a lot of pride in, you know, making sure our team is taken care of and, you know, and that we give everywhere that we absolutely got. And so, yeah, there’s that we’ve known each other for a long time.

00;38;40;08 – 00;38;49;20
Speaker 2
You know, you’ve you’ve evolved through different. We all do. Yes. And that’s so and this is a good thing about getting to be old man right. Yeah. Yeah.

00;38;49;20 – 00;38;50;26
Speaker 1
Look back at road.

00;38;50;27 – 00;39;11;24
Speaker 2
Yeah. We know the path. We all the struggle on that. Yeah. And your podcast is great. You know I watched a lot of it online and then get to see you guys, you know have other people tell their story. Right? Because it’s, it’s amazing how many of us have been small business owners, have very different but very similar paths.

00;39;11;24 – 00;39;29;17
Speaker 2
And I think it’s a very good educational piece that you guys do to say, hey, this is what the everyday American goes through every day and a business owner goes through when there’s so much cannon fodder. The national news, you get a good local source there where you guys go through and it’s like, hey, I know you look at all this nonsense over here, but these are real people.

00;39;29;17 – 00;39;57;15
Speaker 2
Real the real thing. That’s really real struggles. And they’re still doing everything they can to help each other out. Yeah, they’re doing those things. I think if people get to focus more on this type of stuff, this type of content, you know, the the greater good of everybody and not red or blue type stuff, that’s that’s awesome. And so I’ve been glad to watch you guys, you know, bring some real good quality content about real people doing real things with real struggles, with real results.

00;39;57;16 – 00;39;57;20
Speaker 2
Yeah.

00;39;57;21 – 00;40;16;06
Speaker 1
So I, you know, it’s I was just on with, jacket a the other day and, you know, saying that I truly believe that if we all just focus on making our local communities great, if everybody did that, then every community would be great. And what a world we built on that. Right? So like, I really believe for the.

00;40;16;06 – 00;40;16;25
Speaker 2
Hose right.

00;40;16;25 – 00;40;19;14
Speaker 1
Off of that, just focus on.

00;40;19;16 – 00;40;37;10
Speaker 2
Your local group and just that’s it, you know what I mean? And I’m not saying like national things aren’t, things to be worried about, but it’s what I’m saying as part I mean, if you focus that on your circle and your. Yeah, you know, helping your local people. Yeah. It’s it seems like things are a lot brighter.

00;40;37;13 – 00;40;41;20
Speaker 1
To help your neighbor. You help your community buy from local businesses. Makes everybody.

00;40;41;21 – 00;40;44;05
Speaker 2
Less doom and gloom, more, you know, more.

00;40;44;05 – 00;40;44;22
Speaker 1
Uplifting.

00;40;44;25 – 00;40;46;17
Speaker 2
Right upwards. Onward. You know.

00;40;46;17 – 00;40;47;09
Speaker 1
So I love it.

00;40;47;12 – 00;40;48;16
Speaker 2
Thanks again. I appreciate it.

00;40;48;16 – 00;41;07;24
Speaker 1
Yeah. Appreciate you. Appreciate everybody. Of course, for listening and watching. You know, you can find all of our episodes of buying local buy us, podcasts on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Rumble and YouTube. Please like, subscribe, leave a five star review. We like those a lot. And, thanks, everybody for listening. And you’ll hear from us next week.