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Good afternoon, ladies and gentleman, welcome to our equipping call webinar, digital transformation wise security and privacy matter. Creating business agility by this design, this webinar is supported by Dell security. The speakers today are me Martin Kuppinger I'm, founder and principle Analyst Analyst at Ko Cole and tracks haw. Who's an identity management expert at Dell security.
Before we started some general information, some housekeeping information, keeping a call is an Analyst company providing enterprise it research advice for decision support, networking for it professionals through our research services, our advice services and our events amongst our events to sort of set a spotlight on our upcoming European identity and cloud conference, which will be held next week in Munich. It's our 10th anniversary and definitely a conference, which is worse to attend. Some guidelines for the webinar are muted central. So you don't have to mute or mute yourself.
We are controlling these features. We will record the webinar and the podcast recording will be available tomorrow. You also will provide the slide X for download, and that will be a Q and a session at the end of the webinar, but you can end the questions at any time using the questions feature and the go to webinar control panel, which you will usually find at the right side of your screen. So the more questions we have, the more interesting the Q and a session will be the agenda for today is split to three parts.
The first part I will talk about how security and privacy body sign first, the business agility, allowing organizations quickly responding to change in regulations, perceptions, and business processes. And the second part, then Jackson haw will talk about how the digital transformation affects consumers, corporations, and their customers, and what to do for fully realizing the benefits of the digital transformation. As I've said, the third part and the closing part of this webinar then will be the Q and a session where we then will answer you questions.
I want to start with picture, which is relatively old. I've used in a number of webinars, not a presentations, but basically what happened over the past years is that we moved from a very traditional it model, which was very intrinsic, very focused on the enterprise. It towards a model, which is far broader, where we have a lot of our applications sitting in the cloud where we have far bigger user populations. So we use work as consumers with customers in a fairly different way than a few years ago.
And where we have mobile computing was a lot of devices in use where bring your own device already is reality in many organizations. So this has changed and this is just one change, which fits very well to what we also see as an overall change in the organization. But basically we have this, we have to deal with more identities. And this is part of the, the overall story.
And when we look at the reality from an identity perspective today, and from a security perspective, then it's not only about sort of a few employees and a few partners, but, but mass is far more prospects leads customers than we had before. And this is what leads to something I've before the term digital transformation became really prominent.
I used to, to talk about something, I call the new C the agile business connected. So businesses have to be agile and they have to connect. And this ABC, it means whatever term you use. Our business models must become far at agile. Our business processes must become far at agile because we have changing partnerships. We have more competition, a global competition, new layers in the competition. We have other types of communication channels. Our organization has to change cetera, et cetera. And we are connected to far more parties not to speak about things.
So the things clearly are something which comes in here as well. And basically the digital transformation really means we need to create businesses which are at agile and connected or hyper connected. On the other hand, in this change, we have to balance agility and information security. Our target must be in fact, not to end up with a sort of a balance in the sense of we give up agility for compliance and security, we should find a way to move away from balancing it, to combining it achieving activities for information security.
And my strong belief is that this is exactly one of the things we can do today. We can increase our business agility by doing security, by doing privacy, by doing identity, right. That's what I will talk about in the next minutes. So combining the agility, new business models, new forms of collaboration on the other hand, mitigating our reputation, risks, our regulatory compliance, our information security challenges. And when we want to succeed in the digital transformation, I personally believe we have to find ways and these ways are here. We can do it.
Find ways to combine agility and security, privacy, et cetera. Before I go more into detail on that, I want to quickly look at eight fundamentals for the literature transformation fundamentals that I've defined roughly one year ago. And I don't want to talk in detail about all of these, but I will look at some more detail on some less details. So the transformation effects every organization, I think very important to understand there's virtually no industry, which is not affected.
If you're publisher of books, if you're in the music business, the transformations already here in other areas, manufacturing, cetera, we see more and more affecting these businesses. It's here to stay. So it will not disappear. It's something which is not just a password, not just a hi, it's something which is here to stay. It's a fundamental shift, which will not disappear. It's more than just I U T it's also very important to understand. It's not about just connecting things or a little bit of smart manufacturing.
It's about changing our business models, changing our in fact, in many cases, our entire businesses. If you look at all the discussions around the automotive industry with new players, trying to enter the market with autonomous driving, all the other stuff, it's really a very big and very fundamental shift. One aspect I would look at more detail is digital transformation, mandates organization change everything, and everyone become connected as well.
Something, I'll go look at it. More detail, security and safety are not a dichotomy. Security is a risk and an opportunity. That's something I not look at from, from a petition transformation, fundamental perspective, but where I will talk about more in detail after I've gone really fundamentals, because this is basically the main theme of my presentation today, identity is the glue. So to be secure, we need to know and manage who or what may add access to what, when the, what can be a thing that could be service an I API, whatever.
So the digital transformation mandates organizational change. This is a very important thing to understand. We need to be innovative. We need to invent our businesses, or at least look at our businesses. Are they sustainable for the changes we are observing? We will have to be able to go to, for, to, to, to have a rep go to market. We must have missed the opportunities we have here. We must look at continuous improvements, development, operations, and security and business. It integration will go well beyond alignment alignment.
So, so over the past years, we had a lot of talk about business. It alignment. It's not about alignment. It's about integration. It. A lot of it functions will and have to move into the business departments. So we also will have new and changing roles in the organization. There's a lot of talk about the chief business development office already. There's the CIO, which either might manage the traditional business, but then also traditional OT business integrated it. He might also become more C P the chief business development officer.
He might call the chief innovation officer, the CSO who has to be in charge of security across everything, because we are connecting everything. And so we have to have one holistic view on security, across things, across operation technology, across business it product. It has to move into the business and the rest of the, it needs to get fully service oriented, getting rid of silos. So there's no place, no room for silos anymore. In the future, our organization will change. It has to become far more service oriented, far more flexible.
The other thing is that everything and everyone become connected. So that's the picture I already had displayed. And right now we are facing an even more complex scenario where people are connected versus organizations. They are part of acting on behalf of they're owning and utilizing both devices and things, devices and things might communicate directly, but also back to organizations. So we have a very complex scenario of communication, which is definitely bigger and more complex than ever before. Far more syncs and devices.
People who are communicating, who are connected and far is a communication. The background based on APIs. So the apps, the backend services and, and the software is syncs. We might call it single letter or whatever, which are communicating through APIs. And this is really then this new ABC, this agile business connected within all these discussions around transformation. We hear a lot, a lot of talk about security versus safety, where people from the OT say, okay, we have the need for safety of humans and equipment. People shouldn't be injured by something going wrong.
We need the reliability. We need the availability. If your production line stops, then it costs you a lot of money. It costs you far more money. Then when your HR system is not available for some hours, if your production line stops for some hours, that's really about money. On the other hand, you have it, which looks at the classical CIA confidential integrity, availability of information. So that traditional it security. And there's some discussion around if we, for instance, try to patch systems to be secure from an it, it perspective.
We might risk safety from an OT perspective, because we don't know how this patch affects safety, reliability, the availability at that end. On the other hand, if you look at the brave new world of smart manufacturing, we have people which are using devices, which access services and which ops there was a small, something went wrong, which access services, which control manufacturing. So we connect people to business processes, to the production line. We open things up. We are under attack here. There will be frequently be direction communication.
A system and attacker can connect to is at risk something we shouldn't under ignore. So once you have a system connected, and that's what we do in smart manufacturing, then it's under a tech. So we have to merge OT and it security and the sync security. We have to move to a holistic understanding. It's about safety and security. And we also will need to think about architectures in the operational technology area. So my perspective is that we need to see far more software defined operational technology, where we have more flexibility regarding configuration.
And don't rely on very old technology where we get far more flexible. So identity is the glue and access control is what you need. I think this is also very important at the end. It's about who can access, which of these things, these devices, these systems in the operational technic area, the systems in the business, it area, whatever who or what can do it. And it leads to something I've defined a while ago, which are seven fundamentals for future identity access management, which are it's Martin units.
We have to understand, we have to manage the identities of every thing and everyone, we will work with multiple identity providers in future. When we look at the externals, the customers coming in with the social organ, etcetera, we'll also have more attribute providers which provide additional information so that this not no longer a single source of truths, such as our traditional corporate directory users will switch. So they might use Facebook login today and might use another login tomorrow, multiple a indicators as well, because they use different devices, different a indicators.
And if they access via an app, if they access via device again, different, we need to understand who owns, which thing, which device, et cetera. And we need to understand the context. And so this is basically what, what I see as the, the, the fundamental things which are happening and which we have to do around the digital transformation. And then we frequently end up with this security discussion. That's where I wanna talk about it the next few minutes.
So what, what frequently happens is then that security is acting and understood. Sometimes it acts on this understood. Sometimes it's only understood even while it doesn't act that way, but it's sometimes security or frequently security is appear notorious naysayer. So we can't do this because of security. The thing we, we should be very clear about is there is no hundred percent security never, ever. There are always ways, including blackmail, cetera, to bypass security. So the limit of security costs for security moving towards a hundred percent is infinite.
And we have to understand that at some point security becomes too expensive. What we need to understand is the risk mitigation picture. It's sort of the same, the other way around. We need to understand that the cost of risk mitigation. And if we move toward 0% risk, again, the limit is infinite. We need to understand what is the cost of the incident? What is the cost of the risk mitigation? And we shouldn't spend more money on risk mitigation than an incident could, could cost. This is balancing it.
So that's, I think one aspect, which is very important when it comes to security, not try to build a perfect security, but try to find a balance security, understand what is our risk? What does it cost to mitigate? The other thing we have to do is that's where really agility by design then comes into play. This is where we look for, how should our systems be constructed? And if we create systems which are by design secure and support privacy, and we make this, these systems configurable.
So we can, we say by design is secure, but we can open up security. We can share information. So look at the privacy part. And so really by configuration answer the question who may access which data and which condition, then we are moving towards actually by design. Because what we can do is we can start with a close, basic configuration. We can move to open to maximum openness. And if regulatory demands are changing, or if we have in one country, different requirements than in another country, we just, just can configure our system here.
When it's about information exchange with partners, the business case is changing. We can become more restrictive or more open by configuration if our risk perception changes, because let's say our competitor experienced an incident and we say, okay, we have to be more restrictive regarding security than we can just configure it. And when we can do it by configuration, then we are quick and economical in the adaptation through configurations instead of slow and expensive adaptations through changes in coding.
That's where we, where we doing hand currently it's most systems only use a small portion of that potential. And then when business comes and says, oh, we have this regulation in that country, we want to enter the market.
And you, I say, okay, it will cost us a month to change our application. Then you have an issue with the time to market. If you're just say, okay, no problem. We change our configuration. Then you really support agility by design through security and privacy by design. So identity management security by the design digital transformation. These are three things which are connected to each other.
So digital transformation means new business models, new types of things, and devices with identities, new interactions with customers, we have to support and security by design provides the flexibility for these challenges, governance of data, access and identity management really then manages the relationships between human things and devices provides the ownership. This is really where we, if we do this right, we get better.
And what we really can achieve is that we move from an actual state, which is sort of a high risk, lower agility state towards the state, which is high agility, low risk by security, by design, by identity access management, by integrating all the various pieces of security with that, I will hand over to track for his part of this webinar track. It's your term. Thank you. Thank you.
Well, good morning, everybody. It's morning for me still. And I just wanted to mention how Martin was talking about security being disabled, or sometimes with the CISOs and folks like that. And that has been the rationale for Dell securities, new marketing campaign around the department of yes. And turning folks into, especially the security folks into answering yes to questions instead of no, to all the questions, but we'll leave that for another time. But I thought that was just an interesting segue. And let's get started as mentioned by Martin earlier.
I'm Jackson Shaw, and I'm with Dell security solutions. And I'm gonna talk a little bit about digital transformation. I'm gonna talk about it from the perspective of what I've been seeing. What's happened to me personally, and also with respect to some of the things that we're doing here at Dell security solutions. So I think this, this top line statement is the most important thing it's, to me, digital transformation is about transforming the customer experience. And I've got some examples that I wanna take you through.
I think each one of these sort of subtitles or, or, or subheadings is important. I think the biggest one, again, from my perspective, and especially when you think about identity management and security is top line growth. I've been doing identity and security for, you know, far too many years. I started at one of the companies I worked at 1993. And even before that, if I dare to think even further back, but, you know, identity and access management and security have always been expenses on the balance sheet.
And I think that there's a tremendous opportunity with digital transformation, especially with digital transformation, as it relates to security and identity to enable top line growth. And I'll talk a little bit about just my, my personal experience with that. I think all these other things are important. Customer understanding customer touchpoints are, are extremely key to this. Now I know everybody knows Amazon, but I mean, if you, if you think back, these are one of the first, this is one of the first companies involved in digital transformation. They've changed everyone's life.
They've changed my life. I'm sure they've changed your life. Whether it's through streaming content or shopping.
I mean, even where I, I normally live, right, right now, I'm in Quebec, Canada, but when I'm back in the Los Angeles area or the Florida area, you know, you can get groceries delivered to your house. It's, it's really amazing. So this is, you know, one of one example, Uber is another one.
I, again, Martin Martin was talking about the opened your coal conference. That's coming up next week. I'm going to land in Munich. I'm gonna call Uber. I don't need any euros in my pocket. I could just go and do that. You could see how it's disrupted other companies like yellow cab in San Francisco. And even here in my hometown of Ottawa, just outside of Quebec, they just literally finished allowing Uber to compete against the taxis.
And it's, it's been very disruptive here. And as you well know, being very disruptive around the world, this one I found a little while ago, I thought it was very interesting. I was looking for a YouTube video to, to configure, help me configure my Del Sonic wall device. There was a website out there called fiber, and that's kind of slang for a $5 bill and pretty much everything. I think in fact, everybody that's on this website for $5 will do something for you.
In this particular case, this gentleman, he's a certified Del Sonic wall technician, and he will help you setting up your Del Sonic wall firewall. There's all kinds of examples under fiber. And I think it's pretty amazing, again, to be able to go there and get somebody who can do an edit of a document for you for $5, or could help you with part of your resume for $5.
I, I think it's something that will help to change the services services industry over time. Now, this one is my personal experience. I was kind of blown away by it. I just finished last Friday, this past Friday, driving 5,000 kilometers or 3,100 miles from Los Angeles up here to my cottage. And along the way, I typically stop at a different branded petrol station or gas station to, to fill up when I can, but I didn't have a choice.
And I, I happen to pull into an ExxonMobil station. You'll see my trusting navigator in the picture there Monaco she's been with me for the last seven years as I drive across the country. But let me give you an example of what I just saw or tell you what I just saw. I pulled up to the Exxon station and they had this little sign up on the top right there that says pay the way you want. And I thought, well, that's interesting.
Let me, let me check that out. So I quickly downloaded it. And I found out that from the app, I can authorize the pump I'm standing at and that I could pay with apple pay.
Now, to me, this was, you know, a, a changing moment because one of the key things around paying with a credit card at a Petro pump or, or gas pump is it's one of the prime targets for credit card skimmers. So the fact that I'm able to do all of this directly from my iPhone and not have to use a credit card, not have to use cash or go inside was, was pretty amazing for me. And I think the thing that really did it for me was the fact that at that point in time, I said, I'm not gonna go back to the previous guest vendor that I preferred. And I'm now gonna stick with ExxonMobil.
They've rolled this out to 6,000 pumps in north America. They've got another 2000 on the way. And I think it's an awesome experience. And a great example of how this app is talking is, is, is enabling top line growth. They've got me as a customer. Now I'm a brand new ExxonMobil customer. This is very, you know, customer centric. It brings it directly to the customer. It's very secure because it's using app apple pay and the secure on cloud. And if you know how apple pay works, it uses a randomized credit card number based on the, the, the, the card in your, on cloud. So extremely secure.
So from my perspective, absolutely what I wanted from Exxon Mobil's perspective, absolutely what they want. At least, I assume they want my money and they want that direct customer experience with me. So as I drove away that first time I said to myself, wow, this truly is digital transformation and action. And I think if you think a little bit about these things around you, you can see, see this happening. So I wanted to talk for a second about how digital transformation will affect software vendors like us.
You know, my, my role as a product management person here at security solutions is building our software and digital transformation is, you know, really changing us. I won't walk through every one of these things on the table or on the, in this table, but I'll mention, you know, something like user experience in the past, we didn't care so much about the user. I wouldn't say we said, who cares, but it wasn't as big of a priority for us.
Whereas now, user experience of people who use our softwares mission critical, we really want to default to yes, in our philosophy and talking to our customers, we want be an enabler, as opposed to the, the person who says, no, we really want a, a collaboration or a culture of collaboration with our customers. Ex extremely important. We spend a lot of time on the road talking to customer that came back from a road trip last week in the UK next week, I'll be speaking with customers when I met the KuppingerCole conference in Germany.
Again, very important to have that collaboration and to be working as it says at the bottom, the business model, relationship and partner with the customers. So digital transformation is definitely something that's changing us internally here at Dell. So as I mentioned, the user experience, it's all about collaboration. We have a new product.
In fact, we just released this product in January, but it's, it's, it's still evolving. We have a couple more releases coming this year. It's called safeguard. And that is a product that was built from day one, working with our customers. We went out and spent time with them to understand how they use the product, have them test the product, have them see the mockups. It was really transformative from us for us.
And we've built what I consider a very beautiful user interface that our customers really enjoy using as opposed to having to struggle using it, which has been kind of in many cases, the traditional way that software has been, has been, has been built. You know, we've realized that efficiency and lower TCO are not enough.
The, the companies are demanding from us and from, from their other vendors that you helped you help to drive top line revenue. As I mentioned, that's what happened with my ExxonMobil experience, but that's exactly what we're trying to achieve. Very much of a lean forward aspect. We want to be risky. We wanna be pushing the envelope. And another important thing that I speak to my team and the developers quite frequently about is the API economy.
How do we enable our software products and how, and how do we enable our customers to leverage APIs, to build things on top of our software, to extend our software in ways that we would never know. And this is really critical if you are working with vendors or you're buying software to understand what APIs are available. Because I think that the more and more customers have APIs available to them, the more and more that they can achieve with your software.
This is, this is critical because as a product manager on my own, I cannot think of all the things that my customer might want to use my product for. So having this API economy enables a customer, you guys, to be able to do additional things that we may not have thought of. So it's extremely important. And as I mentioned, collaboration and long-term relationships with customers is really important partnering with, with a customer.
And I ask you guys all to think about this from the other side around, if you are, if you've got a relationship, whether it's with Dell security solutions or with another vendor, do you feel that you're collaborating with them? Do you feel that you're involved with them on a long term perspective and partnered with them, helping them develop their software, helping them test their software, providing feedback on capabilities.
Again, this is an important aspect of the digital transformation where you've got this one to one relationship with your, with your product. And it's directly with the product team. Not necessarily just through the folks who do service or the, the support number that you, you, you phone into. So I know Martin covered a little bit about this, the, the evolution of identity and secured in light of digital transformation.
I, I've got a, a little bit to talk about here because I, I do, I do think it's, it's important. You know, as I mentioned, you know, I've been doing this for a little while and the, the whole rationale for identity and access management in, in the beginning days. And certainly before year, 2000, as I'm showing here on this, on this chart was to provide basic security to a customer. They were typically looking for things like, how do I make sure that, you know, when Jackson has left my company, that he no longer has the accounts that were provisioned to him.
And then as time moved on, it became an aspect of lowering operational costs. And we as vendors and us customers spent a lot of time looking at identity and access management solutions as a means of lowering operational costs and a, a great example there, of course, is something like self-service password reset. If I can let my end users reset their password, then my help desk doesn't have to be involved and I have to have less help desk people. And if I outsource my help desk, as a lot of companies do, it will cost me less, less if I don't have them resetting passwords.
Now we're sort of in this third transformation and that's really about transforming customer outcomes. It's again about how do we transform our customers to be providing a top line revenue growth perspective for us. How do we have an individual relationship with our customers, a one-on-one relationship, whether it's through the app, as I now have with the Exxon mob mobile app, or whether it's through just working directly with my customers, how do I transform those customers and really bring them into this digital, this digital age, so to speak?
I think security is the key to digital transformation. There's literally no doubt in my mind about that. And I know Martin would agree with me and Martin talked a little bit about that.
You know, this, this aspect of the security envelope as I call it, which is, you know, what are you actually putting? The, the, the rope around to protect needs to be pushed out, to include the cloud. It has to be pushed in to include B Y O D.
And I, I say that because another key of digital transformation is any device, any place, you know, whether I'm using my iPhone or whether I'm using my Dell issued laptop, I need to be able to access things from wherever in this global economy. Here I am today, up in Quebec, Canada, I should be able to use all my systems appropriately and without having to go through a lot of Ole. So we need to push out to the cloud. Everybody's using the cloud. I know I've been on a number of different cloud properties today.
It has to be pushed into include all the devices a customer might be using, or end user might be using. And it has to be strengthened overall to respect privacy, opt out or opt in data sharing. And end-to-end encryption.
I mean, there, isn't a day that goes by where I'm not talking to a customer about how they protect their cloud properties, how do they could protect their private information? What are the, there's all kinds of things going on that around security that involve these areas.
And, you know, as a, as a firewall vendor, one of the things that I say is, you know, firewalls need to revolve to no trust. And I don't mean zero trust, which is a specific networking term, but no trust.
And, you know, when you look at a firewall, there's typically a bunch of ports on the back of it. And when you plug into one of those ports, the general assumption is that whatever is on the end of that port is trusted except for obviously the connection to the internet. And I think what I've come to realize is people are plugging in more and more things into their firewall. And the in quotes, trusted side of the network that have a great potential to compromise security.
And I mean, things like IOT devices, web cameras, all the new heating and, and cooling control systems, which have wifi in them and allow you to control them remotely. All of these things, including wearables, you know, my apple watch and, you know, other devices that people are gonna have on their body will be on your network. And how do you, you know, how do you secure yourself? And the only way ready to secure yourself is to have this attitude of, I don't trust anybody on my network. So the firewalls have to, you know, evolved to that.
And as I say here, there's gonna be no trusted side of the firewall anymore. Certainly, you know, here in my home, I have a, a Del Sonic wall firewall, and I don't trust anything on it, but I do make sure that I run through it. The new reality is you've been breached. This is just the way it is. It's not a matter of time it's that you will be, or you already are, and you may not even know it. So multiple layers of defense are absolutely required. And these layers must follow your envelope. It's not enough just to have, you know, user behavior analysis on the network.
What about what's going on in your cloud? How do you know someone hasn't been into your cloud storage? We're starting to hear a few of these cases now, where there are things being planted in the cloud and being brought down to your, your local network. So a lot of issues still around security, and we still need continued evolution of security, generally speaking. So how are we trying to help with the digital transformation? We basically are helping our customers to, as we say that this is our, our, our, our marketing phrase, govern every identity and spec every packet.
I mean, that's literally what we are doing. We have context to where solutions that are integrated into your security infrastructure. I'm very happy of the fact that I work for a company that has both hardware and software in particular hardware firewalls, because it gives us a great opportunity to integrate into those things, to provide, as I say, here in the third bullet point, real time inspection of firewall data, for those of you that might not be aware of it, there is an industry standard called IP sec, S E C I P S E C.
And IP sec is a standard for providing firewall data to a third party. We take that data, we analyze it and we can develop context and risk calculations based on that. We can interface that with our identity infrastructure.
As I say, in the fourth bullet point, our next generation firewalls, our identity aware they provide to us the visibility of remote network application and cloud access that's occurring within my organization or your organization, so that your identity products have visibility, governance, compliance, and certification of this access.
So I can see that somebody is using Dropbox and flag that, and have that show up in our identity manager product so that a customer or a supervisor knows that an employee is using Dropbox, whether it's allowed by the company or not allowed, we can sort of see that end, end view and see where people are going and start correlating around. That that helps us, that helps our identity, sorry. Our identity solutions become network aware. So it does allow us to tighten up security of the most trusted assets in your organization.
It allows us, as I said, to see what people are doing to report on what people are doing, and then you can send compliance reports and things like that. G is Jackson allowed to use Dropbox, those kind of things. And we do other things also like include firewalls and network devices within our privileged account management solutions to give you a, a very strong way of protecting your internal network.
And, you know, all these things are really critical with respect to the digital transformation. They're critical because as I said earlier, you can't provide all these new services and new capabilities and new touch points to your customers, to your partners, to your contractors without strong security. And as I say, and I'll say in conclusion, we want to help our customer open their own department of yes, we want our security customers to say yes, when the business comes to them and says, we wanna start enabling digital, digital transformation for our customers.
So with that, I think that was my last slide. Indeed. It was. And Martin, I'll turn it back to you. And maybe we have a couple of questions to answer if we were yes, Thank you, Jackson. And right now it's time for the Q and a. So if you have any questions to track or me, please enter them in the go to webinar control panel so that we can pick these questions track. I want to start with one question, which is a little bit about the relationship of cloud and digital transformation. So which role will on premise it play from your perspective in sort of this age of digital transformation?
Well, I'm, I'm gonna play fortune teller for a moment, or as you said earlier, to some degree, we get to play Analyst. And I will say that I think in the long run and I, I don't know Martin, if the long run is five years or 15 years, but I think in the long run on-prem software is going to be less and less prevalent.
I mean, we are starting to see that happen now, but you know, in a certain number of years, maybe we'll be down to, you know, only a small percentage. And I think, you know, my it's my belief that the it departments of current companies today are going to be much more involved in looking at strategic vision. They're gonna be hiring people are much more qualified and capable and looking at things like, you know, digital transformation strategy and whatever is the strategic innovation of the day, you know, to help generate this top line revenue.
I think there'll be less people working sort of in the, you know, meat and potatoes. How do I secure this? How do I provide remote access? Because I think a lot of that will be gone again in, in a certain number of years that I don't know.
But, you know, in a nutshell, I would say, it's my belief that the on-prem or the folks that are working in an office building employed by a company are gonna be much more strategic than tactical in the long run. Yeah. I think that's something which is interesting and maybe allows me a quick hint again to our conference next Tuesday at 2:00 PM in my opening keynote level. Talk about the new role of the CIO and CIO O for sort of looking towards 2020. And there will be a lot about this shift on, on of this. On the other hand, what I see is that some parts.
So if you look at more, the operational technology given that manufacturing will stay inside the organization, a lot of operational technology stuff will remain on premises sort of by default, but for business, it, I I'm fully with you. I think we have an unstoppable evolution towards and drift towards the cloud. That's from our perspective, absolutely through which other than, than raises the question on how can we protect if we don't have the parameter. So what are your main thoughts around that?
Well, that's, that's a great question and you'll need to come to my panel on, on some innovations going on in, in the industry. But I think that there are a number of companies that have been evolving over the last few years that have some particular capabilities here that most companies are gonna be interested in. If they have cloud properties, they're typically called cloud access security brokers, and they have some interesting capabilities where they can directly see again, without having to go through a firewall, they can directly see what an end user is doing on a cloud property.
Let's say for example, like Salesforce or Dropbox, and then provide reports back. And I think this is a very interesting area. I don't know if it's a separate market or not, but I do think it's a very interesting area. And I think it's also very interesting from the perspective of the API economy, because customers are gonna want to tie into this because they're gonna want to be able to integrate these kind of cloud access security brokers with their own products, instead of having to have multiple different identity systems, sort of in security systems out there.
But I think that's a, that's something that folks are looking at. Okay. I'm I'm a little bit, no, no, that's kept, I think we will see a lot of clouds, security progress in the future. The question is, is this not more, more, more sort of an, we solve a problem because we're not able to better control cloud security by, by implementing something like that. So sort of integrated security out of the box probably might be the better thing.
The other, other interesting question. And I think that's, as of now, if you have more questions, please enter these questions right now. Atactually what do I wanna control? The other interesting question I, I have is how, how do we need to deal with our existing identity systems when it's about sort of not managing only whatever 20,000 or 50,000 or 100,000 employees, but millions of cons customers and consumers?
Well, there's, there's two, there's two ways customers have handled that today. And I'm, I'm sure you're familiar with both, but one is some customers have gone out there or some companies have gone out there and purchased, I'll call it yet another identity management system just for their consumers. I'm not sure if that is the best solution, but at this point in time, also, there were a lot of vendors who never had that level of scalability in, in their mind when they built their identity management systems or identity and access management systems.
So I think we're gonna see a gradual evolution of the sort of more legacy identity and access management solutions it's through, you know, really brand new versions or just evolution, being able to accommodate those millions and millions of identities. I don't know that on the long term, there's gonna be a place to have sort of two separate sets of these solutions in a company, or to have a vendor that doesn't address both of these worlds.
Okay, perfect. I think we've already answered all the questions. As I've said, the podcast recording and slide X will be available on latest by tomorrow and thank you for your time.
Thank you, Jackson, for your presentation, hope to see you. Most of you in the, at our upcoming conference next week or in one of our other webinars we will do in the next few in next visit the next month. Okay. Thank you. And goodbye. Thanks everyone. Bye-bye.
