57. Why the "R" in Managed Detection & Response is so critical now. With Guest Nick Enger

Subscribe to the Next Level BizTech podcast, so you don’t miss an episode!
Amazon Music | Apple Podcasts | Listen on Spotify | Watch on YouTube

Join us today as we talk Security, Managed Detection & Response, and most importantly, the Response! Nick Enger tells his story as he goes from working at the golf course, to internships, to starting out early with ATC when it got launched in the basement! Nick, now CTO, Evangelist, and Thought Leader drive home the importance of MDR, how it’s sold, and how we can better add value to the customers.

Transcript of episode can be found below.

Josh Lupresto (00:01):
Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech,

Josh Lupresto (00:15):
Everybody. Welcome back. We are back talking about the good, the fun, the dark world, potentially of security. But today what we’re talking about is, is managed detection and response. So the critical thing, we talk a lot about it as MDR. And so today I wanna talk about the r I wanna talk about the response and why that’s so important on with us today, we’ve got the wonderful, the amazing Nick Enger of ATC. Nick is a cto, he’s an evangelist, he’s a thought leader. But most importantly, he’s a fantastic partner of ours. So Nick, want to welcome you on, man.

Nick Enger (00:50):
Hey, thanks for having me. This is exciting. Hey, you get a different voice when you do the podcast. I love it.

Josh Lupresto (00:55):
I know, man, I just turns it on.

Nick Enger (00:59):
. It’s awesome. Happy to be here. This is this is exciting and this is a topic that is timely for all of us in the agent community.

Josh Lupresto (01:07):
So let’s jump in. I wanna start off with hearing about where you came from. You know that some people have linear paths where they, they start out doing what they wanna be doing, and, and they, they just continue on that path. Some of this, it, this world sucks us in. And, and people start out completely unrelated to this at all, and then you can just never get out. But I would love to hear and, and have everybody else here. Where did you start? How did you get here?

Nick Enger (01:30):
Yeah, I, I have a rather unique story on how I landed where I am. So growing up, I, I, well, I reside outside of Cincinnati on the north side of Cincinnati, in the suburbs. Grew up a place called Westchester, Ohio. And I had worked at a country club growing up, and I worked there like 12 years old, 11 years old as a caddy, and kind of worked my way up through the, the heritage club life and, and kind of worked my way into doing the cart barn to bartending and working private parties. And I actually I ended up working there all the way through college. I, I decided to stay in Cincinnati and went to the University of Cincinnati and paid my way through school of working at this country club Heritage Club in Mason, Ohio. Well, one of the members of the country club happened to be David Goodwin with a company by the name of Advanced Technology Consulting.

Nick Enger (02:28):
And this is going back 18 years now. So 18 years ago they were working out of the basement of their house. And it was Dave and a guy that was supporting Dave’s efforts. Again, working out of Dave’s basement Clayton Connor, and I, I was I was 20 years old. I was going into my junior summer, actually, I was going into my, the summer before my senior year. And Dave approached me as I was working at the club, and I, one thing led to another, and I said, yeah, I’m looking for an internship if, you know anybody, just kind of, kind of threw it out there. Didn’t know anything about what Dave did, but just seeing if he kind of expanding the network. Well, next thing I know, I’m, I’m interning in the basement of Dave’s house, , learning about the technologies that, that they are consulting upon.

Nick Enger (03:21):
And at the time, I mean, we were 18 years ago, right? So we, we were talking more, and admittedly we were more of a, a brokerage. We were, we were really saying like, what are you spending on your long distance today? And let me get you two to three other options, or What are you spending on that internet circuit today? And lemme get you two to three other options. And that’s really where the business was at that time. And I was always growing up I was tech savvy. I was, I was into technology. I always had the latest and greatest cell phone. I, I wanted to have the, the latest and greatest technologies. I was always intrigued by, by the networking and the, the next generation of whatever was coming next. So when I got involved with atc, I got to, I got to hear about all the new technologies and voiced over IP and how cool it could be, right?

Nick Enger (04:13):
Mm-Hmm. And how it’s gonna change the world. And I was very green. I didn’t know anything that we were really selling. We were talking about PRIs and all these legacy services. But at, it was 2007, and I was, I was knee-deep into voiceover ip and I, I learned everything I possibly could about voiceover IP at that time. So I worked there for the summer internship, ended up staying and paying my senior year working at ATC part-time and, and going to school part-time or full-time, I guess you would say. And at the end of it, I was, I was getting approached. I graduated college and I, I, for whatever reason, you know, the universities’ kind of pitch you to going to the big companies mm-hmm. , like the Fortune 100 type companies. And I had all of those offers, and then I had little old ATCs offers. And working out of a basement of a house, it was either P&G or GE or ATC in Dave’s basement. And that was a tough conversation with my parents. , talk to them If Valley, I’m gonna roll the dice.

Josh Lupresto (05:21):
It’s a good idea. It’s a good idea, I promise.

Nick Enger (05:23):
Yeah. And my parents, you know, they, they grew up with the they worked at the, the fifth, third banks and the large machine tooling companies, and they, they were the big companies. And working for ATC with three employees was like just off the grid for ’em. Like, they, they were like, what are you doing? But they let me do it. And I, I haven’t looked back since, and it was the best decision I’ve ever made in my life.

Josh Lupresto (05:45):
Love it. I love that. Any, any great business, any great start. I, I love when there’s a garage, when there’s a basement, right? Because it just, it’s, it’s boots strappy, it’s hungry, it’s aggressive you just, you figure it out and, and you make it work. So kudos to you for, for taking the leap. And, and it’s, it’s I can validate it’s been a great decision for you,

Nick Enger (06:05):
. It’s been a fun ride. It, it really has been. I mean, we started with the three folks in the basement and just grinding it out. And we, we, once voiceover IP kind of came around we started getting a little momentum behind us. Like we knew what we were doing. We cut our teeth really early on. We found the pitfalls of voiceover IP and how to implement it. And with that, we expanded a little bit. Like we kind of started shifting our model a little bit from that brokerage where we, we weren’t providing any value, but cost savings to this model of like, we’re providing strategic value to these clients. Like, and it was, I found huge benefit, or huge reward, I should say, on the impact you could make within a business from an operational efficiency standpoint or just operations in general. You’re changing the way they operate.

Nick Enger (07:01):
And I found that incredibly rewarding. So with that, I mean, from the voiceover IP days, and then we started expanding into, to larger voice networks and larger contact centers and data networks became hot topic with the MPLS environments and later SD WAN and sassi. So we started adding a couple employees. We added a director of marketing to kind of help tell the ATC story because we were good at what we did, but we didn’t have anybody really telling our story for us. Right? So our director of marketing came on board then, and he’s been on with us for going on 10 years in July this year. So it started off as, you know, the three amigos, and it was the four amigos working in a basement. And now it’s like we have 16, 17 IT ninjas out there that are, are helping. And we’ve, it, we’ve had to modernize the operation, the, the organization as a whole to, to effectively scale. But it’s been so exciting, it’s so fun. And the technology’s ever changing. You have to, as you, you can attest, you have to be thirsty for knowledge in this industry. You have to be learning to learn on the bleeding edge and implement on the leading edge. Yeah. And I, I can’t emphasize that enough. As soon as you stop learning, you, you stop growing.

Josh Lupresto (08:19):
I, I agree a hundred percent. And, and I want to, I want to get into a little bit on you know, early on security exposure. Before I do that, I wanna call out something though. Cause I think you guys do such a bang up job. We, we’ve been able to be in the trenches together on some pretty cool deals. Yeah. And you guys have you know, you’ve obviously expanded far beyond the original days of, of what you do, right? Expanding this into other advanced services now. But can you talk to me a little bit about, for anybody that’s not familiar, who ATC is now, you have a really methodical, very granular, very polished, the way that you work with customers and present the value prop. Maybe you can just talk about that for a second and then we’ll jump into some of your early exposures into security.

Nick Enger (08:59):
Perfect. Yeah. Happy to tell the story. So we are what we consider a next generation IT consulting agency and professional services firm. We specialize in four core areas, voice, network, cloud, and security. We go very, very deep in each of those categories. We have a 23 year proven process that we follow for every single engagement. We call it the delta process. And it, it walks the client and us through a methodical, like you mentioned, very methodical process of making sure that we’re scoping services correctly, evaluating the current environment accurately, making sure that we clearly delineate the business requirements for every single engagement before we engage a vendor. So we have a team of consultants on our, our staff here that walk these clients through the process for every engagement. And it, it’s proven time and time again that if we follow that process, that it’s not only successful for the client, which is number one always, but it’s successful for the vendors that are at play.

Nick Enger (10:09):
Because at the end of the day, if we, if we aren’t doing right by the client and we aren’t doing right by the vendors, it’s not successful for us. Because at the end of the day, we’re, we’re the ones having to support that. And we’re the ones they call upon saying, why did you recommend this solution that didn’t make sense for us? And I think that the, that that’s the three-legged stool, right? Like all three parties have to be whole in that. And we’ve been pr it’s been proven through that process that all three are successful in, in being satisfied if we follow the process. And it’s been proven time and time again, as soon as we step out of that process and don’t do it that way, it falls apart. Right? So we, we’ve we’ve really hammered down on that that process and making sure that we follow it for every engagement.

Josh Lupresto (10:53):
Awesome. Love it. Let’s, let’s talk about your early on exposure to security. I, I would love to hear first on, you know, you, because we’re gonna transition this right to, to something more recent. And, and as you mentioned, right, the technology’s gotten crazy complicated and it’s evolved and, and, and it’s fun. And, and we’ve had to learn all that along the way. Take me back, walk me through one of the first opportunities that, that you worked on, or one of the first chances you had to really learn about this idea, the, the broader security landscape. Where was it? What did it look like? What, what was the technology like, and really what were the problems that you were trying to solve?

Nick Enger (11:27):
Well, I’ll give you a little, a little story of how I’ve evolved within a T c on that, that aspect. Very early on in my career, I had the ability the opportunity, I should say, of working with a very large hospital network. And it was a, an opportunity that was a, a UCaaS opportunity back in 2009 that it was more UCaaS related. They wanted, wanted to revolutionize their 110 locations in a big hospital footprint, about 5,000 users at the time. And it ended up growing through acquisitions. But through that process, we were also dealing with a, a network modification. It was a, a rejuvenation of legacy point to point into a traditional multipoint multipoint solution. It was more of a, a layer two type solution, but it was any, to any with that, that transformation, if you will. They were talking about security.

Nick Enger (12:26):
And this was, at the time I was in over my head on the security conversation. I was just a, a fly on the wall trying to learn as much as I could during that endeavor. I learned so much about networking so much about the network stack, how all of it fits together, how all of the routing works, even how BGP and the, the disaster recovery plans based on BGP routing, all of that, how all of that worked. And it gave me a different lens where I was just talking to them about ucas and maybe a little bit of contact center back then. Now I was having a conversation about like, real deliverables in the security framework. So, fast forward a couple years, we were very lucky. There is a vendor in our backyard in Cincinnati that is one of the early on MDR, before MDR was MDR.

Nick Enger (13:21):
Mm-Hmm. the name of the vendor is Vigilant. And they, they happened to be way out ahead and, and they happened to be in our backyard, like literally in the same 10 mile radius of us. And they kind of took us under our win, under their wing and showed us what security was really about, like what, what they had to offer and what’s different in the marketplace. It was a different conversation. It wasn’t about firewalls, it wasn’t about antivirus. Like it was all of a sudden like that, those were table stakes. And I started seeing that, and I started like, okay, yeah, why would I wanna sell a box for a firewall that’s only, at the time, only as good as the firmware that was on it at that given time. Now we’ve transitioned since that a little bit, but like the antivirus, like, it was just a license that was just kind of out there and nobody really had any visibility into, well, these guys were like talking about putting network taps in and talking about like, ingesting things. And I’m like, who’s eating what, ? And at the end of the day, like, they were so far out ahead, and it was like getting our minds right about the security topic and what’s the differentiator between MDR and like the traditional security aspects. That was really eye-opening. And that was going back, like looking back, that was like 2017, 2016, where MDR was, wasn’t even being sniffed. But we could, we got out ahead of it. Love

Josh Lupresto (14:50):
It. When you, if if we pause at that, that spot in the learning for just a second, and, and let’s say I’m a partner and I’m listening to this, and maybe I feel like I’m that way now where I’ve, I’ve gotten up to speed on what’s happened in the last, you know, few years, but maybe these last 24 months, I haven’t, I haven’t paid attention to how aggressively the technology has grown and innovated. What, when you’re opening up that conversation with a customer and you’re having a talk track like that with kind of what you picked up on and what you learned from Vigilant about having a little different, how do you feel that that, how does that help your relationship with the customer evolve? Does it, you know, does it solidify the Delta process? Does it just show that, wow, I, I gotta think of you guys for everything. Like what, what does that, what does that lead to?

Nick Enger (15:38):
Yeah, I would say we, we are very good at having business discussions. Like we, we talk high level about business impact, what’s in, what’s hindering their growth? What are they worried about? What if something like X, Y, Z were to happen to your business, how would you respond? What type of, like a lot of folks nowadays are having compliance, does having a business discussion about compliance and regulation and are, do you have anything that you need to adhere to? I mean, it could be, you could be working with a jewelry store and they now all of a sudden have a PCI compliance. They don’t have any idea how to comply with, they have no idea. And just helping them through that process. It’s more about gaining the trust that you really care about their business. And that, I couldn’t emphasize that enough. I mean, you have to build the trust that you care about their wellbeing, the business’s wellbeing and the business growing for you to gain the trust to even ad advise that client.

Nick Enger (16:44):
And I, I would say, like, we’re a fairly technical group. Our group is an, has enough of the technical aptitude to go pretty deep on the, on the security questions on their own. But the, the person just starting out, they don’t need to be, just gain the trust of the, the client and bring in the, the great folks that Josh and, and the team have, and really the, they can have the, the, the tough questions, the technical questions and, and not get exposed. Like not knowing something. Yeah. There’s no one out there. I I, that would be another thing. There’s no one out there that knows everything about security, including your customer.

Josh Lupresto (17:24):
Yeah, that’s a good way to put it. I love it. Gain the trust. I, I, I, Michelle that you care. I think that’s huge. That’s a good, great way to put it. Let’s talk about the evolution of this product set. So, you know, we, we grew up, we saw Norton and McAfee and, and, and some of these consumer grade endpoints, and we called it antivirus. And then it seems like it evolved and there was anti spyware, there was ad where there was all these things and the names kept changing. And then, you know, then it sort of combined a little bit and AI got embedded in the backend. And then, but we didn’t really know how AI was helping us or how we could quantify it. And now here we are at MDR you know, we, we, we passed over EDR endpoint detection because we realized it’s really hard to do on your own. But now we’re at MDR managed detection and response. What, what’s your opinion on it? It feels like, you know, maybe we do this again in 12 months and XDR takes over the world, and it’s another acronym. But what do you think about that journey? Why has this over the last five years really solidified to be an MDR journey? And what are you seeing out there when you’re talking to customers? Why does MDR peak interest now?

Nick Enger (18:36):
Oh, man, I could go a bunch of different angles on this. I mean, really the, what is MDR, right? Like, it, it’s changing so much, so quickly on a daily basis. I think I could ask two or three or four different vendors to give four different answers of what the actual MDR product set is. I think it’s evolving and changing with the times, because I feel like one, there’s, there’s different buyers out there, there’s different ways of consuming this product. And I would, I would expand on that. Like the, the enterprise, the large enterprise, they have a team of security architects that know the tools that they want to buy. They know exactly the, the, the gap that they have within their enterprise that they’re trying to fill for, and they know the vendors. So they’re looking for you to help procure that.

Nick Enger (19:26):
And they’re wanting to make sure that they’re procuring it in the right way for the mid to large size business, or maybe even small enterprise. They don’t have 25 security architects on staff. They don’t have a SOC internally. They’re looking for solutions. They’re looking for advisement. And I think that that’s where the MDR piece comes into play. Now, I, I can make the argument, MDR has a couple different components. I think the MDR has the endpoint component. And I think that that next generation antivirus that’s evolved into the endpoint component of this, it has to have the visibility, it has to have the, the defense mechanisms to stop a threat on the endpoint. I would also make the argument that the new MDR products have to have a network component. So I think that that the same reasons, they have to have the visibility and this, the ability to stop a threat when it happens.

Nick Enger (20:21):
And I would think that the, the MDRs of today must communicate between the two and have a central repository of all security events that are occurring on those, those two pieces. That would be what a SIM would be providing to you. And then I think you need some type of group that’s going to respond to those events. So when things happen and we shut something down, they need to respond accordingly. And that is what your SOC is going to do. And that SOC could be internal, or it could be out external, it could be outsourced as a service. And those four components, there’s others, don’t get me wrong, but those four components are the bare minimum in my mind, to set up the framework of an MDR solution. And I think that, I know there’s vendors out there that do that as a complete comprehensive solution to a customer that can be productized and consumed as a whole. In addition to that, you could take it a step further and take in the start consuming the AWS and the Azure and the Google suite. You could also take it into ingesting other logs such as your firewall logs and things like that. I think that that’s taking it to the Next Level. I think at the bare minimum it, it’s endpoint, its network, it’s SIM and its SOC. That’s how I would define it. I don’t know if, if that resonates with the, with you.

Josh Lupresto (21:50):
I agree. You painted a good journey, I think, to, to help, to help underscore what these components are, because I think that’s part of the, the, the partner discussion is how do I understand where they are, what they need? And so I love the, the vision that you painted about what an enterprise, you know, where their mindset is versus kind of the mid-market and, and those, and I think you’re right. I I, I do agree with those components. And I think part of the time, if we understand at least what those components are or some sort of framework, then we can figure out, Hey, do you have these components now? And we can ask, yeah, which of these are on your roadmap or on your journey, right? Or have you thought of this? And then we can certainly stop and say, okay, I would love to have a deeper discussion with you about that, to figure out where, you know, where we can augment.

Josh Lupresto (22:32):
And, and so I, I, I think that, I think that’s important. The one thing I want to go back to that you brought up a great point on I would love to hear your, your opinion on this is, is if we flashback to kind of what traditional antivirus was, where it was signature based, meaning, okay, I know the thousand or a hundred thousand or whatever viruses are out there, they all look exactly like this. I’m gonna look for one of those, and then if I see them, I’m going to quarantine it and tell you I did something great for you. Thank you, Norton. Thank you. Mcafee, right? Yeah. For bogging down all of our computers forever. Yep. But now if I look at, to your point of what that’s evolved to, and we talk about layering in ai, it’s, it’s not, you know, having the network connection, like you mentioned, enables a lot of that, well, what do I do when it doesn’t match?

Josh Lupresto (23:15):
It’s more about find out what’s normal and tell me when something’s not normal. And so, you know, we as, as, as tech nerds get to see this stuff every day and, and, and look at these products, see what’s real, really dig into it. I’m curious, from your perspective, when you’re in a conversation with a customer, I wanna talk about the hard part of this conversation. How do you help them understand that they need help? What have you found really the most successful part of that? Because we talk a lot about, you know, staffing shortages, and you brought up a great point that people don’t have all the people and they don’t, nobody knows everything. How do you drive that point home that, you know, here, I understand the evolution, I understand the product sets. Is it going over the four things you just mentioned? Or, or what’s that talk track?

Nick Enger (23:59):
Well, it’s a couple things. One, I would, I would always walk ’em down the path of you don’t have the in-house resources to be able to manage SOC 24/7. If you did, I would, I would walk ’em down a mathematical formula of saying, here’s the average salary. Here’s how many hours you would need these people. How much is this gonna actively cost you to do this? And I inevitably would get the argument, well, they’ll just wake me up out of bed . Yeah. Until you don’t. And, and it’s a serious scenario. The, the piece that you brought up, the AI and the machine learning behind the scenes, that’s the difference on that endpoint that we were talking about from a protection standpoint. And I like how we’re gonna get into the weeds now. I love it. Like there’s no way for the legacy products to keep up with those, those signature changes that are happening real time in the newer products.

Nick Enger (24:50):
They’re ingesting a whole bunch of signature sets behind the scenes that are getting released. So they’re getting fed in all the time and getting pushed out to the endpoint in the path as we were doing passes and things like that. We, we, everything’s happening faster. So like waiting for a patch to go out, that doesn’t do us any good, because it’s already been exposed to, to whatever bad’s coming down the pike. So it’s, it’s all about that ai, the machine learning, but at the same time, getting the signatures out to the endpoint as quickly as humanly possible going into the AI and machine learning, like it needs it, it starts to learn the progressions of the organization as a whole. Is it normal for me to have users all of a sudden in Europe? Is it normal for users to all of a sudden show up in Japan? Is it normal for Nick to log into X, y, Z server at 3:00 AM while he is traveling in California? All of those go into that AI and machine learning, giving responses back to the organization. Is this a, a yellow thread, an orange thread, or a red threat in how fast we need to respond to these things? Because as we mentioned earlier, it’s like it’s happening faster and faster in the re ordinary business out there. Cannot keep up with it.

Josh Lupresto (26:12):
Yeah. Great points. So as we’re, as we’re into the weeds, I want to talk about maybe a more recent opportunity. So the, the, the thing that we always joke about in here is that, man, these, these customer environments never end up looking exactly like what we were told. They might, you know, what the problem might be. And I love that because that this helps us underscore like, did you think of this? Did you think of this? And so can you walk us through an example of somebody that you’ve come into, what you were told the problem was, what you found out they really had, and what you, you know, how you ended, ended up helping them. What, what kind of technology did you put in place?

Nick Enger (26:46):
Oh, man, there’s so many. I, I’ll leave, I’ll, I’ll wax a little more philosophical in case they hear this. But I, I will give you a couple different examples here. So we walked into an opportunity that it was, they, they had it figured out. I don’t think he, I bet every agent out there has, has been in these types of meetings, right? Like, I got it covered. We don’t need to talk about security. Yeah. And then after we go through our, our Delta process, and part of our Delta process, and I encourage everybody to do this, is we do it an audit and assessment of their entire environment. And they might say, no, no, no, you don’t need to audit what our endpoint is. You don’t need to audit what firewall versions we are on, or how old our firewalls are. Yeah, we do.

Nick Enger (27:34):
Yeah, we do. And just keep pushing, like, yeah, we need to get a full capture of everything holistically that’s going on within your environment so we can advise you holistically of the best solutions to go forward with in uncovering all of those. And then we do this across the board, whether we’re talking about voice, whether we’re talking about network, whether we’re talking about cloud, or we’re talking about security. We’re gonna get really, really granular on getting an understanding of their current environment. Well, after they said we, we got security cover, we don’t need to do anything. The CIO kind of comes over the top and says, yeah, why don’t we take a look at that? We want, we wanna make sure that we’re buttoned up the best we can. And we came across it, and again, I’m not gonna throw too much out the firewalls, were end of life, end of support.

Nick Enger (28:20):
We uncovered an entire network opportunity by talking about the security conversation. Then we talked about from a compliance standpoint, what do you need to comply with? What type of regulations are coming down on you guys? Oh, by the way, you need to do MDR. Like, we haven’t even touched on the cybersecurity insurance aspect of this. During this conversation, the CFO happened to be in the room. He says, I just got our cybersecurity insurance and it’s gonna double next year. And I have four pages of questions that I need to respond to. Can you guys help us fill that out? This is all in the same meeting.

Josh Lupresto (28:58):
,

Nick Enger (28:59):
The CFO goes, okay, we need to do this. This is this, this MDR was one. Multifactor was one. Yeah. Like all of these things that the cybersecurity insurance is saying you’re gonna get dinged on and double for the following year, are things that you can take advantage of by just making yourself more resilient and more buttoned up from the cybersecurity posture. So after we went through the laundry list from the cybersecurity insurance audit, as well as our own internal audit, we uncovered that this is a perfect fit for an MDR SOC as a service. And they ended up going down this path with us deploying all of this, got their, their assessment done by the cybersecurity insurance company, and it didn’t raise a penny. Yeah. And they spent less money on the MDR platform that we deployed for them than the, the cost for the cybersecurity insurance was ever going to be love By deploying technology, they reduced their cybersecurity insurance.

Josh Lupresto (30:01):
Love it. Love it. Great stuff. Okay.

Nick Enger (30:05):
The CFO is ecstatic. Same with the the CIO.

Josh Lupresto (30:08):
Yeah. When you can, when you can come in with something that appears on the surface, you know, as a knee jerk reaction to be a net new cost, and it ends up, you know, besides the brand building and, and protection and all of that happens to save money yeah. You’re a hero. You’re, you’re in that deal forever. Absolutely.

Nick Enger (30:23):
I just, I actually just talked to that CIO yesterday. I had dinner a group of folks at dinner, and I asked, how’s it going? How’s, how’s the SOC as a service and a SIM and all of that? How’s it all working? Phenomenal. Is what he said. Phenomenal for a guy that’s he has thousands and thousands of users. Phenomenal.

Josh Lupresto (30:44):
Awesome. Love that. Good stuff. All right, as we, as we wrap this thing up, let’s look forward. You know, I, at the rate that technology changes, we can’t look forward too far. But advice, curious from your perspective, if you look out 12 months-ish what do you think changes, right? Anything else? Trends for us to pay attention to different areas you wanna focus on? Kind of curious where you think this thing goes. Take that anywhere you want.

Nick Enger (31:14):
Oh, man. It could go a lot of different ways. , I don’t know if there’s gonna be a right answer to that one. What’s hot on my mind, right? Like, I, I feel like managed detection and response is going to expand. I feel like it’s gonna grow a little bit. I the next in my line is identity access management, PAM: privilege access management, things like that, that can kind of shift the conversation a little bit. Like we start talking about zt n a, we start talking about getting really granular with our networks, who needs access to what and why? Like, let’s have like real discussions about that. From a security landscape, the, the manage detection response is going to get more robust. It’s going to expand in, I, I, I feel like the ingestion points we’re just going to grow and we’re gonna have more visibility, more granularity, and more fast responses so we can get out in front of this thing. I feel like we’ve been a, from a security posture, based on the toolings that we have, we’ve been very reactive. We are starting to get to that machine learning and ai, that it’s just starting to get proactive. We’re almost there, and I feel like we’re on the cusp of it. And it, it’s, it’s gonna be exciting.

Josh Lupresto (32:36):
Couldn’t agree more good stuff. Fun to pay attention to. I’m certainly excited to see what comes next. So Nick, hey man. I appreciate you coming on doing this with me, buddy.

Nick Enger (32:46):
This was awesome. Let’s do it again.

Josh Lupresto (32:47):
All right. Deal. K all take us out. All right everybody, I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering. This is Next Level BizTech podcast. Wanna thank Nick Enger of ATC, thanks so much for coming on. Till next time, everybody.