André Durand - Navigating a Moment of Change, Disruption & Inflection in Identity & Security

Our next speaker is a well known speaker to all of you probably please welcome you all from being identity. Hey, thank you. Goodin Morgan, eight hours ago, I was sprinting across the Chicago airport and never occurred to me that I would miss my flight. I had like 15 minutes to make it about a half a mile. It was a whole group of us sprinting across the airport, dropping laptops and stuff.

I am a, I'm an optimist. And so it's great to be here. And what a great conclusion from Mia identity is all about access and the, and the opportunity to have a prosperous life. I love that definition. So this morning wanted to talk about, you know, personal experiences and in disruption. So as I said, I'm, I'm definitely an optimist. So I don't always see the disruptions when they're coming at me from the side, but it does happen. And so my first experience with disruption was way back in my career. It was 1996 and gotta look here and here I had a little bulletin board company.

We created an, an online photograph database for bulletin boards, and of course by 1996, the internet, you know, was already kind of quickly on, on the rise. And I remember getting a phone call one day from a potential prospect and they said, so is this a web server?

And, and do I access it through a browser? And I knew things had changed, changed radically and changed extremely fast. And so that was my first experience to disruption.

Again, 1996, maybe we would've seen that company. Obviously the internet had been going for a while.

I, I didn't see it coming. However, you know, I'm not alone in having these disruptions impact businesses, businesses much larger, you know, than our little bulletin board software company. So I'm gonna flip through, you know, a couple of the disruptions that many of us have experienced this one, you know, was certainly pretty personal watching my daughters on Netflix all the time, making sure that they're not in my account so that they've got the kid friendly menu is of importance.

But, you know, look at some of the disruptions that have occurred before you guys all remember this company, they had a good run. 1888 to 2013 is when they filed for bankruptcy. Now I'm sure by 2013 they were experiencing, you know, I'm sure.

Well, before that they were experiencing a lot of pain, but we had the DSLR cameras hit. And of course we've all seen the miniature version of those, how they've been disrupted by the phones. And this isn't a recent graph. I'm sure the blue extends far below that by these, by this time camera phones or the cameras on our phones have become pretty good lately. And they always say the best cameras, the one you have with you. And so catch capture those special moments. Let's see here, click on the right. This is an interesting one. This has made our lives a lot easier in Denver.

I just heard the other day, my, my wife was in Austin, Texas, and they said they had voted to temporarily stop service of Uber on like Monday at eight o'clock. And she, she was with an Uber driver that morning. And I wonder what kind of revolt that's gonna, that's gonna have in the city. But so this whole notion of the mobile phone and the GPS and my identity connected to an account and how convenient it makes us for, you know, for us to move around and the disruption that it's having to the kind of public transportation or the regulated transportation industry.

Here's an example of another chart. One of the big taxi companies in the us kind of its stock price, as you kind of see the, the rise of Uber. So this whole notion of the rate of change has a lot to do with your survivability in disruption. That's a big one. Like I said, in my first exposure, it all seemed to have happened pretty abruptly.

Literally, within a matter of months, the world changed on us. Our business model became obsolete. Our technology became obsolete. Here's another graph. This is looking at really the rise of broadband and in essence, the impact or influence it had on our ability to download applications and music and books. And of course that one happened fairly quickly and we saw whole franchises literally disappear overnight. So if you step back and look at it and you say, okay, disruptions are occurring around us all the time. What can we do about it really?

You step back and say, well, are there signals or signs that I can look for so that I can plan for them? And so I thought about this for a little bit, and having been involved in the computer industry for 25 years, I thought I would just kind of share a couple of observations and they're obvious you guys have all experienced them. We don't ship many of these big four inch yellow page books around these days. I think that stopped a couple of years ago, showing up on the doorstep. They had a good run, 150 year run. It really was a dynasty.

I had a number of friends in that industry and they printed money for many, many decades, but then Google hit. This is, this is actually the first image I could find on the way back machine December 2nd, 1998. Prior to this, there was just, there was a website with two little links and, and like a disclaimer that says, this is beta, you know, kind of use at your own risk. And then this showed up about a month later. And of course this changed everything, right?

Obviously, and look how far that company has come in the last couple of decades. So no business has been left unchanged by the disruption of digital. And even today, it's amazing how the term digital transformation and digital enterprise resonates true in so many businesses. So when it's all over, nobody will escape. Here's another one. I think in 20 years, we'll talk to our grandchildren and say, believe it or not, I used to drive the car all by myself. So I think our days are ultimately numbered here.

If you really look at the economic and safety in other drivers, the entire notion of autonomous vehicles, it's pretty overwhelming. You talk about productivity improvements in the workforce and how do we continue to eek out more productivity really think about what life was like prior to the mobile phone and the mobile computing that we have. It's completely changed. It's virtualized every single second of our lives, maybe with the exception. And that is if you're a good driver and not texting when you drive of the time you spend in your car.

So think about the billions and billions of hours that people spend commuting to work in other places. And imagine that all of that time gets freed up in the future. I saw an interesting graphic the other day, they were showing an intersection and in the intersection, you know, just a, a standard kind of cross intersection. They said in the future with autonomous cars, there'll be no stoplights. They'll just do that through one another. It's like one of those figure eight race car tracks, if you've ever seen it. And the last car gets slower and slower and slower and bends around.

Next thing you know, he's trying to weave through the other cars at the front exciting times. So autonomous vehicles, I, I really think that this is a pretty profound event or disruption that's coming our way and the entire trend of, you know, either manual or do it yourself to autonomous, as everything gets smarter, you know, this is heading our way. And speaking of manual, we don't think of this often, but I met a gentleman. This is probably a decade ago. It was at a conference similar to this, and it was a random event.

I was just sitting at the, in a, at a back table and there was a gentleman really long kind of gray hair and a gray beard, and a lot of stories to tell. And he turns out he came from the telco telco industry and he was just sharing with me almost in sheer disbelief. What an amazing thing it was that when you pick up a phone and you get a dial tone, you can punch some numbers and make another phone ring anywhere in the world.

And he said, Andre, if you only had any idea what it looks like in the closets to actually make that happen and how messy it is and how much we had to go through to make that possible. It's all things that we take for granted, right? That have ultimately changed. And so the entire notion of automation is a really big deal. So I actually still have this phone. We have box of all of our old equipment and a few things I just won't get rid of. I won't get rid of my first iPod, still got the hard drive. It still works. I won't get rid of this Nokia phone.

I remember the days where the battery used to last a week. And, but imagine this in 2006, Nokia was the world's largest handset manufacturer. And then along came the smartphone. And so the trend of smarter and the trend of multipurpose, how many times have we seen these single purpose devices? And they become multipurpose devices over time and the single purpose devices become obsolete. So this is obviously a big one for smarter is better.

You know, we take our broadband these days for granted, but I remember gloating to my friends about my Hayes, 9,600 bod modem. And I'd say, watch this. You can actually see the photograph download and I can get it within a minute. That was amazing. So faster is always better. Smaller is better. And on the heels of, let me move forward here. And on the heels of Moore's law, where a processor is now the size of an ant, we can do some pretty amazing things. We need to resolve some of the power issues here, but this entire notion that everything is gonna become smart.

Everything's gonna have a chip. The internet of things is coming our way, and it's gonna have a profound, profound impact. So we spend a lot of time physically connecting things. But if you step back and say, what has wireless connectivity really done for all of us? It's really pretty amazing. And so I think anything that is today tethered that tomorrow will become untethered in some fashion is gonna be a really, really big deal. So this is an interesting one, you know, I just like most of these images, you just go to Google and you find some images.

And I typed autonomous and I got this one, but interesting concept. I heard a quote and the guy said the essence of strategy is to figure out what you would do. If what you do for money becomes free. And really what he was talking about was the disruption of your business model.

He said, that is the most disruptive thing you can do. So looking back to my first company where the bulletin board software had value one day and the next day, it didn't, it wasn't that I was obsoleted in our business model is that it was worse than that. I was simply obsolete in that particular case. But if you think about the automotive industry, again, another dynasty right over a hundred year dynasty are approaching.

And, and this whole notion that we're packets and cars are just packets moving around the actual highway. And this notion that with your identity on your phone, in the future, maybe we just rent cars by the transaction. And maybe the unit economic is a mile or kilometer that is not so far fetched, frankly. And while I love owning things and I love having our garage and I love having my car in the garage, they say this new generation of people are perfectly happy, not owning stuff, using it when they want, when it provides utility and getting rid of it when it doesn't.

And so here would be an interesting question. And I know the automotive industry sees this a little bit. GM made an investment in lift about a 500 million investment.

If I, if I recall recently, but imagine if the business model did change and no one bought cars and auto manufacturers essentially put out cars and changed to a transaction business model, you just got in 'em when you needed them. And you went where you wanted to go. That's not so far fetched. So why do we resist change? And especially when we're so cognizant of these disruptions and the notion that when all of those things combined can have such a profound impact on what we're doing today.

And so here I have a, a mindfulness coach that I emailed who spent the bulk of his career, you know, just kind of studying and asking the question, why do we behave the way we behave, especially with change. And so rather than butcher his comments into my notes, I thought I would just re read the two paragraphs. He wrote back to me just the other day. So he describes this notion that we actually have two parts of our, our brain. He calls one, the squirrel brain, that's the squirrel that says nut. And it chases the nut. It doesn't think a lot about what it does.

And then we have a conscious part of our brain called the frontal cortex. So here's what he says. The first function of the brain is basically designed for survival. It is the function that moves behavior from conscious to unconscious control. This function largely falls to the limbic system and the basal ganglia near the center of your brain. It is responsible for your ability to drive a car or speak a language without having to relearn it or pay conscious attention to it.

Every time this function of your brain produces conditioned resistance to change and innovation, because it assumes that everything you currently do is critical to your survival. This is why we feel uncomfortable and object to change. Even if our current behavior is not serving our higher goals or purposes, the other function is that of exploring and purpose driven innovation. The key area for this is the newest part of the human brain in evolutionary terms, the prefrontal cortex, this part of the brain can consider behavior relative to goals, values, purposes, and effectiveness.

And it's part of the brain that allows us to question and evaluate whether our current behavior is working for us as well as entertain alternative possibilities. The limitation here is that this part of the brain by itself does not have the capacity to motivate or sustain behavior. It does not create feelings or store routines.

The key is connectivity between these two functions of the brain, the stronger, the connection, the greater the chance we have a balancing innovation with expertise, and the connection is built by the practice of awareness and curiosity, observing and accepting that human beings have conditioned resistance to change is key. And asking questions about is what is most important, what is effective and what it is under our control that will move us forward. So it's really interesting, really, really interesting. So what is the typical human reaction to disruption?

Again, this is actually pretty easy to find and, and pretty obvious. The first thing we do is we panic. And depending on how quickly the change hits us, you feel this, this is an emotion for me. When I get hit with something, I start to sweat instantly. I feel cold at the same time, I'm sweating. So it is a very human condition to go through this reaction. Stage two is not that dissimilar. It's followed by lots of emotions. We tell ourselves a lot of stories about how it's not changing about how it's not fair. We feel as if we're not in control of circumstances.

Fear is actually one of those underlying pervasive emotions. I actually heard another great quote. That options are the way through fear.

They say, as long as you feel that you have options, you don't feel trapped. And so cultivating options is a way to make it through disruption. Stage three is where our rational brain comes into play. And this is where we think through what are our options and what can I do to make it through this disruption. This is all about finding a new equilibrium.

We, as humans are always seeking equilibrium. Have you guys heard of this guy, Randy posh or seeing his lecture? So really fascinating gentleman died in 2008. He was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. The doctor said he had six months to live and he was a, he was a professor at Carnegie Mellon. So he did, they have a tradition of what they call the last lecture when teachers are leaving the profession. And his last lecture really became, you know, quite famous, I guess, on, on YouTube. This is back the day I had over 10 million hits.

And so I, I went and watched it, but I just loved some of the quotes and some of the life philosophies of, of this gentleman. He, he definitely did not lie down in the face of something pretty severe.

And, and he left us with the legacy or the gift of his messaging. I love this one. We cannot change the cards we're dealt, just how we choose to play the hand. And so how do you play the hand when disruption is occurring? One of his, one of his pieces of advice is that you accept and that you be open and that you be embracing of the change. That is the way in which you move from you, transition from the fear to the notion of options and a path forward.

I think this whole notion of letting go of one paradigm so that you can grab another, I, I, I've heard this phrase reversed, I've heard the phrase. You better have a new paradigm before you obsolete the old one, Both equally good in my mind. So we have a new paradigm emerging insecurity and in identity. And I think to grab this new paradigm, we need to let go of an old paradigm. It's interesting that the security industry and the identity industry are so separate, and I've spent a lot of time thinking about this.

And I, and maybe just appreciating that as humans, we're all extremely different. We view problems through a different lens. We're almost predisposed to react to the same situation differently. It's one of the reasons they say innovation is so tightly, coupled with diversity, you want lots of different people from different walks of life, looking at the same problem, and together, they can come up with an innovative solution in this particular case, the fact that the security industry and the identity industry have been so separate, I don't necessarily think is serving our purpose.

And so whether your profession came from what your kind of traditional security and you've evolved into identity or vice versa, I just always encourage the people involved in the identity industry to reach across the aisle and better appreciate and understand the mindset of kind of a more traditional precept, because only through that, can we begin to converge what we need to converge to go where we want to go? And simply put, I think the future of security is as simple as enabling the right user into the right stuff. That's it full stop? Let the U let the right users in.

How do we enable that? How do we enable businesses to do that? So this was the view of security. We had a network, we put everything of value on our network and we put a wall between it and everything else. And so in this view of security application security and network security are kind of one and the same thing, or shall I say, network security was a proxy for application security because the applications were on the protected network. If that makes sense, okay, but this world has changed.

And this is the disruption in, in our world in that the things that we were protecting, the applications, the data, and the users are no longer on our network. And what that means is that the proxy for security as being network security is less effective than it was before. And maybe this is an extreme view of the world, right? But I didn't have a lot of time to mess with my icons and make a move. So obviously there's gonna be stuff still on our network. We wanna protect, but there's also gonna be stuff in other places, and we're gonna want protect that as well.

And so I view identity as the steel thread that connects all the pieces again. And it does so in a logical fashion, not in the same fashion in which we used to physically put everything within our control. And so this is the world that we see are that, that, that, you know, ping has been working towards for the better part of a decade.

And it is my belief that to manage through this disruption, because it is occurring to understand how to build an identity infrastructure, to put your back behind open standards and identity that can link or federate all of the different identity systems that we have to reconnect users with their application to give enterprises the policy and access controls that they need, irrespective of where the assets reside. I think that is the future. And so with that, I just kind of share one other little story.

And so I, I met an entrepreneur about a year ago. It was a very short conversation again at, at a conference, right towards the end. And then I got an email from him 11 months later.

And, and I got on the phone with him and he was just sharing his journey. He was, he sold his company about a year ago and, and it was his life changing event.

And like, most people, he traveled, bought some stuff, watched his bank account kind of grow. And he said to me, the first time he got his bank statement and it was bigger than it was the month before he was ecstatic. But then his, the months wore on month, two month, three month four, he actually found himself in kind of a weird, almost depression. And he said, he realized that for the first time in his life, he was getting stuff, but he wasn't doing anything for it. Or at least in his own mind, he didn't deserve it.

And that was his moment when he recognized that what really makes him happy is this notion of a happy, struggle, happy struggle is one that's not so hard. You can't overcome it. It's not so easy, right? That you don't, that you don't appreciate it at the end of the day. So I would just suggest we are all involved in a happy struggle. This is a struggle that we can all overcome. And I want to thank everyone for being here today, the opportunity of KuppingerCole to speak. It's my pleasure. Thank you. Thank you so much.