Ahead of the Curve - the Customer Demands it, the Market Demands it, do You?

The astute viewers among you will probably notice I'm not lasar Andreessen, he's just tying his shoelace backstage and it takes him a few minutes, bless his heart. So he'll be out in a second. I wasn't part of the advertised agenda, but those of you who know Lasar will know that A, he only speaks nor English, which means he needs a translator at all times. And secondly, he tends to go a little off script. So he needs adult supervision. Any of you who know me will know, I'm probably the worst person they could have asked to provide adult supervision in this case.

But, you know, needs must. But really excited to speak to you guys today. So I'll also, now, I think he's finished tying his shoelace, so give him a very warm welcome cause he's got a very fragile ego. Lasa Andresen.

Hey, Good to see you, LASA. Thank you.

Fraser, kind of like brilliant introduction. Yes. Can you talk to HR tomorrow?

Oh, yes. Yeah, no worries. Absolutely.

So, and of course, yeah, you think I I will go off script. I mean, I wouldn't put it past.

It, It, it never happens. No, of course. We can't going talk about, kind of a little bit ahead of the curve. And I'm old friend of mine, just, he used to say kind of like, I don't wanna be where the puck is. I want to be where it is going. That's what we come into. But before I kind of arrived here on Monday, I had this strange nightmare. A nightmare. Yeah. But you do look like you haven't slept very well.

That's, that's another reason for that. But anyway, so we had this nightmare kind of like, kind of what if kind of from Im perspective if really, really strange things would happen.

And I, I couldn't sleep. I was totally kind of like cold sweating. And I ended up only kind of like bringing five of these to you guys today.

So, So these are your five nightmare situations. What if the worst was to happen in the identity industry? Absolutely.

And I'll, I'll stop with the, the least one. Okay.

Okay, then it's get worse and worse. Yeah. Is that okay?

Well, I'm a little stressed already, but I'll let you proceed, I suppose. So that's good. Let's start with number five then. Number five, what if kind of like social logins from Facebook and Google was not about only about kindness and convenience. Can you imagine? I I I I for one trust Facebook and Google with my data implicitly, I, I don't think that, I don't think we, we don't have to trust them.

This, this is not a real nightmare. Come On.

Like, and kind of like Facebook sound like proofing and verification bulletproof. Absolutely. Yeah.

Yeah, Absolutely a nightmare. So, well, I'll, I kind of like, I got, got away with F1 and then I had another one.

Oh no, on four. I was thinking, whoa, think about if the relations relationship databases didn't have any concept of relations, that'd be really bad. Wouldn't that be awful? Yeah. Oh God. But of course that's, that's not true. It's only kind of like a nightmare.

So, well, it it's gone away. Does it get worse? A little bit.

I, I, maybe, maybe just a little bit, just up a notch. So number three, can you imagine if your IM vendor just got acquired by Thomas Bravo?

Oh, how would that feel? That's only a nightmare. Never. Don't worry Guys.

Doesn't, doesn't doesn't mean it's happening. Don't, don't stress. And now we soon go into the worst one that come like almost kept me all night. And this is of course about single signon. What if comes like single signon, like everyone just share one user account with perfect. Oh no protocols. Everybody used the same one. I think that'd be great advice to kind of, and not a lot of implementations you can save tons of money. So anyway. And finally It can't get worse. Surely it can't get worse Just a little bit. Oh God.

So can you imagine if you spent your entire security budget and your IM vendor has reached several times, ah, what a nightmare. That will never happen. The stress honestly, Lassa anyway.

No, maybe you should go back on script. Yeah, maybe we should I have five More.

No, no, no, no. We'll stop there. Thankfully, these are just hypothetical nightmares. Definitely haven't happened. You can all breathe a sigh of relief. But all jokes aside, it's not necessarily just a laughing matter, no Ab of course security, it cost a lot of money. And you look back on 2022, kind of average cost for a breach was about like 4.3 million. And there was a lot of those. It was like 4,100 contract number of breaches. And if you add that all up, it actually comes up to 18 billion. And you know what you can do with that? What? You could probably acquire four truck eight times.

You could acquire four drop eight times. Yeah. Wow. Saw that.

That's, I could think of something a little more exciting to do with my money, which is to buy Malta. Oh, I've been there. Yeah. I love that place. Yeah.

Well, but that's me, what I did there, but it was fantastic. I'm glad you had a nice time in Malta. I mean it's, their GDP is surprisingly close to that number, the, the total cost of breaches. And you know, the other thing about Malta that's really interesting, no, like a lot of other places it's full of consumers, huh?

So Ah, Yeah, Malta's got a lot of consumers and the thing about modern day consumers is Lassa, and I dunno if anyone knows this in the room, consumers today are very security conscious. Did you know this? I thought I was in a line of people in front of me at the bar Alta.

Oh, I see. Well it may also be the line.

Oh, okay. Anyway, so yeah. But the modern day consumer is very security conscious. Trust is a big deal. We all know this. A data breach causes a massive ripple effect, huge damage between the relationship between customers and the organizations that they work with. So it's really no wonder that we focus so heavily on security as an industry. Right? It's an important thing. Yeah. Because the trust that we have with our consumers is so important. But it's not just consumers, right?

I cannot be you that these guys also have, all of them has a at least one phone, a list, a lot of them have a car, a lot of them have a home, all these devices, things, services they're using and guess what? All of them.

And that, all of that stuff actually has an identity. And there's no difference between an identity on a car or an identity on a human being. Kind of like you, I think have mom and dad. Yes.

Okay, that's good. And a car have a manufacturer kind of like you have a caller, you have a social security number, a car have a VIN number. There's no difference. It's just attributes that kind of like describe something.

So, so what you're saying is that I as a consumer have all of these relationships, but actually I have things and they have relationships and it kind of sounds like, you know, once you start mapping all of these things in their relationships, it gets a little confusing. And now I'm just gonna go out and say it. If I'm an identity professional and I take one look at that, I'm thinking to myself, it's not worth it. I don't want to touch it, I don't want to go anywhere near that, that web of, you know, orange lines.

But the thing is, all of this, all of these connections represent a huge opportunity, right? Absolutely. So we can't ignore it forever, you know, as an industry we have to work at making this complex world simpler. I totally, I think you get two things out of that picture.

Yes, absolutely. It's, it's complex.

Secondly, wow, there's so much value unlocked here. And the third thing I think we need to redefine how we actually do identity. Like it has been extremely kind of like strict, it's been, everything's been defined in schema, no dynamic things in there. It's been very human-centric. But there's more kind of like things, APIs, cars, things out on the planet and they all have relationships. They all bring value and they all have, are connecting to each other. So of course if you have a car, you have a car, yeah, I have a car.

I'm surprised I can drive, But, and of course relationships to that car is actually, you're an owner to that. A lot of people of course have kids and maybe your relationship to the kid, your father or you are a mother and all this information, all your kind of like connections, metadata and relations can tell you so much and more. And then you can really, really turn identity into business assets instead of only being the liability. And I think that's a very different way of looking at it. People only buy for two reasons.

It's, it's kind of what I normally say. It's either greed or fair and greed will always conquer fear. So actually unlocking a lot of these value on our force security needs to be there. Nobody with their brain on the right places actually deploying an unsecured service.

If not, they know what they're doing. Sure. But even if you have compliance to everything, it's totally secure. And if you don't make any money, your company is gonna go bankrupt. So you need to look on both sides of the coin at the same time and be in making an operation which makes money and are effective and unlock a lot of data that already exist in all these silos of identity data. Okay. So what you're saying is companies need to focus on security but not throttle themselves and they still need to make money. It's revolutionary stuff.

Lasar, I'm surprised no one's said it before, I have to admit. But you know, in all seriousness, we've all heard these kind of sentiments before. So what is it that people actually need to do? What do we need to do as an industry? First of all, I think you need kind of like look in all these identities kind of like form a holistic view out of it and base your decision on knowledge, kind of like who's connected with what and how. And not only static data, also dynamic data. And it's a lot of connected data in there. And I think it's very, very important that you make this data actionable.

So you actually can come out with recommendation. You can make a lot of money and looking cars for instance, they are kind of like data center on wheels. There's so much sensors in that. And if you have dynamic data, for instance, reading the tire pressure and, and that could be exposed and sold to everybody out there that would like to sell tires, that could bring you a lot of money. And so you not only have static data, the color of the car, we all have all these sensor data, the mileage, the gasoline, the tire pressure, that data you can bring together.

You connected with the identity, the car, the owner, the manufacturer, and start selling that data. So turning actually identity data into a marketplace. Yeah. Another use case worth mentioning, we all understand it says there group and family and network connections, we all kind of understand this concept as it relates to things like Netflix and Amazon. And we understand the idea of, you know, sharing an account and recommendations and things like that. But what if we could take that data and use it to learn more about our customers and provide more advanced relevant products and services?

So an example that I can talk about is within the insurance industry, okay, in insurance with an insurance policy, you typically have one policy holder, but that policy may have several other beneficiaries, right? These are people who are attached to the policy, but the the data on them is not operational. If we could somehow elevate the context of those relationships and you know, action them, we could do things like give those beneficiaries access to and oversight into those policies that relate to them.

We could also use that information to build a better picture of that family relationship and offer new products and services that make sense for them, which I don't know about you. Sounds like a pretty big opportunity to me. kind of like with my insurance company where I, I have a boat insurance, I have a house insurance, I have a car insurance and I have a travel insurance. I have even our insurance in my children. Yeah. And I don't have to be treated like seven different customers. That's kind of Yeah. Yeah.

If, if there's any insurance company in the audience here that'd like to do that, I'll, I'll switch. Yeah, definitely. I would love to do that. Yeah. And another example which you just mentioned about the cars, you know, we all know vehicles, planes, they produce an enormous amount of data. And it's not just the data and the data science that is valuable, but actually who has access to that data. True.

You know, who can analyze that data to provide additional services who can purchase that data now or in the future? This kind of access to data is an enormous opportunity.

And, and like you say, if you have fleets worth vehicles and country's worth of vehicles and you can provide a, you know, actionable data to businesses, that's a huge opportunity. You know, that was otherwise previously unaccessible. And it's really, it's really use cases like this that get us really excited at indie kite ones that are not squarely focused on security, but actually go a step beyond and start thinking about, you know, how can we, how can we monetize this? How can we create new revenue streams? Right? Totally.

And and again, back to, to the, to the car and I've got this lot of ecosystems out there and you as a owner of the data have really fine grain control of who's seeing what at what time and what context. Yeah. Then you can actually turn again, identity into a business asset and not only be a liability, again, of course need to be secure, but secure is kind of, security is a basically a table stake kind of. Yeah. It's like plumbing in your house. It's kind of here, it really should work. It should be really stable cause you don't want to throw it out, but the value is not there. It's true.

The value is to actually what happened inside the house and what you're doing, who you are inviting and what you're doing. Yeah, absolutely. And I guess if there's one thing that we really want you to take from this presentation today, it is just that, you know, like Lassa said, we understand security is incredibly important. We all have to focus on it. But if we're already spending all this money on security, why not take it one step further and action the data that's, you know, the goldmine that's basically available to us and start doing these exciting use cases.

That's all we want really is for identity to be exciting and sexy and revenue driving and all of these great things rather than people just thinking of as identity folks as drains on resources. Right? Do you mean kind of like making this crowd sexy? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Wow. I know.

Yeah, that's, that's not a nightmare by the way. I believe that'd be awesome.

So no, I think that's exact what we want to do. And, and again, it's not a different type of software. You actually have the same platform, the same infrastructure that are dealing with the security side, but also kind of like creating access to different data based on context in real time so you can monetize it. So it's kind of the same thing. You just use it for two things instead of only one. Absolutely. So challenge to you all to think about it in a new light.

Very, very quick plug. We will have a technical session tomorrow, so if you want to see a little bit more of a deep dive, do please come and see that. But otherwise, really appreciate you guys listening and hope you enjoy the rest of the conference. And by the way, talk to the HR tomorrow.

Oh yeah, sorry. Yeah. Thank you very much. Thank you guys.