Exciting News: dotnext Europe Announces Keeper Security Partnership!
We’re thrilled to announce a new partnership (or Parnership… we like to prove we’re humans by leaving mistakes in… Honest) between dotnext Europe and Keeper Security! As two leaders in cybersecurity solutions, we’re joining forces to enhance digital security and empower innovation like never before.
dotnext Europe and Keeper Security, a leading provider of zero-trust and zero-knowledge cybersecurity software protecting passwords, passkeys, privileged access, secrets and remote connections, are uniting to elevate the standards of digital security.
This partnership represents our commitment to fostering a safer digital environment while furthering collaboration and innovation within the tech community. Together, we’ll pave the way for a more secure future, ensuring that businesses and individuals alike can thrive in today’s digital landscape.
Visit: www.keepersecurity.com
What are we trying to solve?
For those that know me, you’ll know I’ve spent the majority career working in the Privileged Access Management (PAM) space. I’ve been lucky enough to work for some great vendors, with some great clients and work with some of the most talented individuals out there. Privileged Access Management was really designed with the IT admin in mind though maybe I’ll say “Traditional Privileged Access Management.” Controlling access to infrastructure, securing and rotating passwords and implementing the principles of least privilege.
The focus here isn’t really to discuss PAM but we’ll definitely be speaking more on that in future blogs, this is really to talk about the often forgotten part… Business Users!
What are business users?
Well, we all are. but what we really mean is standard, non-privileged users.
- Someone who users a normal login account, not a -admin -a or other form of admin connotation.
We’ll if they’re non-privileged then they’re no risk you may say?
We’ll leave the ever-changing definitions of privilege to another day and perhaps a big rant but think about this…
Do you class your HR team as privileged users? They have access to some of the most sensitive data you’re likely to hold but generally they all use standard user accounts to access it.
It’s very similar with finance teams, marketing, and in fact, anyone else in your business. You see, privilege should be focussed on the data that the person has access to, rather than the account they’re using. That’s just the mechanism for access.
Our business users have access to all manner of sensitive data, whether on hardware on-prem, onsite apps, SaaS apps any anywhere else for that matter. I’m pretty sure most of us don’t really know where all of our data is these days if we’re to be honest with ourselves.
Business users have a staggering amount of passwords to remember in their daily lives, and for infrastructure people, we’ve given them PAM to manage all these but for the majority of users we’ve left them to remember these passwords which leads to exact problems we protect our privileged users from.
What have we done to date?
We hear a couple of things when speaking with clients about business user password management
“We use SSO so users don’t have passwords”
Cool, so you SSO to your corp social media, your legacy apps, your SaaS app root creds? if so, fantastic.. well done and good luck.
“We have a PAM solution in place which has a password vault, we’ll use this”
How do you users feel about that? Traditional PAM solutions which are vault centric are great at managing administrators credentials. Business users are not admins, and do not work in the same way.
From my time in the PAM space I’ve seen countless programs fail because of user adoption and by countless I mean hundreds of PAM programs. The majority of failures have been driven by user experience.
We live in a world where our personal lives and corporate lives are blending together. We spoke years ago about BYOD and then covid accelerated all that. How many of us use a password manager now? Whether built into your phone or one of the alternatives to Keeper such as LastPass, 1Password or Dashlane. I’d say the majority of us do, but the critical thing here is adoption.
We expect that consumer driven experience in our work lives now, and this is why traditional PAM solutions are not best suited for this type of thing.
There may be commercial benefits in using your existing PAM solution and extending it to business users, but will your users adopt it, or just complain that tools they use in their personal lives are better?
Why Keeper
Well, we mentioned some of their competitors above and there are a few. They all have a great user experience and would be a benefit to any organisation, so why Keeper?
I had the pleasure to sit down with Keeper co-founder and CEO Darren Guccione during a recent Gartner event in London. It was one of those conversations where time just ran away from us. We were talking about some of the challenges in the market, opportunities to be disruptive and trends in the industry. We got into the weeds on technology a bit when Darren decides his CTO and co-founder Craig Lurey should be part of the conversation.
Now, Craig had just had quite a serious accident and had broken a bone in his neck, was bed bound and told to rest up. But here we were dialled into a meeting, talking about technology, ideas, showing prototypes. You don’t get that type of interaction with many vendors these days but there were 3 key takeaways for me
- These guys are super passionate about what they doing – It was honestly infectious
- They’re laser focused on user experience – With technology that literally touches everyone in an org, user experience is what will make or break it
- They understand the market – They don’t want to play a catch up game with other vendors. That’s a never ending cycle that they’ll never win. They want to put a modern twist on a classic problem and that’s an exciting place to be. Without the tech debt, these guys are free to solve some of the challenges we’re starting to see in the PAM space as solutions start to creak under the pressures of fitting modern use cases into ageing products.
People are the real assets of any company, and we believe we’ve chosen the best company to partner with in this space because they have some of the best people in this space.
Over the next few weeks we’ll be launching our MSP service as well as talking more about some of the challenges our business users face.
