Cloud is changing the way we all work and play. Check that, it has changed how we work and play. While innovation continues and new opportunities are presented constantly across our professional and personal lives, the cloud has fundamentally changed our expectations. But the flexibility that cloud helps deliver doesn’t come without its drawbacks – an always connected world exponentially increases the attack surface for would-be hackers. That’s one of the things that is top of mind for Tehama,io, a gold sponsor of MSP Expo in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. As we approach this year’s event, I took the opportunity to ask SVP Gene Villeneuve about what’s happening at Tehama and how the company is helping overcome some of the challenges of the cloud age so users can fully realize the benefits of cloud computing. Here’s what he had to say.
Please tell us a bit about the latest news at your company.
We’re excited about Tehama.io, an innovative, new SaaS delivery platform, that enables organizations across a wide variety of industries to connect and collaborate with remote employees and third parties, and launch “ready-to-work,” compliant work environments in minutes. It is based on proven technology with intellectual property that is 15 years old.
The precursor to the Tehama solution was used by Pythian, our parent organization, and anchors customers to Tehama to securely deliver IT services by their over 350 IT services professionals to over 300 global customers in 35 countries. With the precursor to Tehama, Pythian was able to differentiate how it delivered services on mission critical and revenue generating systems and grow its business tenfold since 2004. Over the past two years, Tehama re-implemented the original intellectual property for global scale and for an opportunity to make this same differentiation available for IT services providers and buyers of IT services. In 2019, Tehama will become a separate legal entity and continue commercializing the Tehama solution.
What pains are you taking away for customers?
When organizations hire third-party IT services consultants, the threat surface increases with data and intellectual property loss risk, potential for privileged credential abuse, and malware intrusion. Tehama eliminates these risks by virtualizing and securing the onboarding, management, scale, securing, and auditing of third-party IT services providers.
We provide secured remote access to high-value networked applications. Tehama removes the possibility of administrative credential theft, subsequent data breaches, and the possibility of malware intrusion arising from endpoints attaching to enterprise networks.
For service providers, Tehama solves compliance, time to delivery and billable work, enables simple and secured multi-party collaboration, and improves the consultants’ user experience.
For buyers and sellers of IT services the other problem is access to global talent. With Tehama, organizations can securely engage IT consulting talent, no matter where they are in the world.
How is cloud acceptance changing how your customers or your company operates?
Cloud is fundamentally changing how our customers operate. Cloud provides a new platform so organizations can more quickly develop innovative and unique solutions. But, more importantly, cloud enables organizations to truly scale at global levels with the ability to access talent across the globe.
What are the most important recent communications technology innovations in your industry?
For IT service providers, cloud and elastic computing have dramatically changed how IT service delivery can be done by enabling organizations to create virtual teams.
How is mobile changing your business strategy?
For Tehama, mobile provides an expanded platform for computing, such that mobile workers can be anywhere in the world and still do work. With the rise in the Gig economy and millennials, more and more workers will demand work-from-home/hotel/beach/cottage/cafe arrangements. According to Gartner, by 2020, 50 percent of IT services will be outsourced. Mobile computing is enabling this trend, yet, increases the threat surface and the attack vectors.
Do you think the FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google) companies will ever face serious competition?
Yes, look at IBM. IBM was once the darling IT global company, but has lost its leadership position and continues falling behind its peers. AWS is reinventing the last 30 years of enterprise software on the cloud and creating opportunities for new and innovative solutions never available with on-premises computing. IBM risks becoming obsolete. There is always a small company that is about to explode and challenge leaders who fall prey to their own inertia. Facebook is already losing its luster with teenagers due to questionable user information sharing practices.
How is open-source changing technology and how your company does business?
Open-source enables innovation and collaboration and indirectly impacts our business because of its contributions that have enabled new SaaS or PaaS offerings, driving a greater need for a secure delivery platform like Tehama.
Tehama uses a number of open-source projects. We have extended many and also contributed back to the open source community with open-source projects of our own, such as Skeletos.
How can blockchain transform your industry?
Blockchain is the panacea of investment. Label anything blockchain and you’ll garner huge valuation multiples. Put cannabis, AI, and blockchain into one solution and you’ll become a superstar.
But seriously, blockchain provides an immutable and trusted record for multiple organizations to collaborate and exchange information, contracts, or payments. As the global economy scales exponentially to leverage a global talent pool, the IT services supply chain will require an immutable record to manage and hold organizations accountable for their contracts and contribution.
What implications does AI have for your business and your customers?
AI will play a key role in the future of our business and for our customers. The primary benefit for AI will be categorization, classification, and intelligent search, analytics, and association of how IT services work is delivered. With this classification, we will lay down the foundation for work acceleration, augmentation, training, and analytics to automate and assist completion of work.
Is SD-WAN changing the way you and/or your customers operate? How?
Software Defined WANs are redefining network boundaries across cloud and on-premises centers, creating logical networks without physical boundaries. SD-WANs will redefine how networks are established, secured, and monitored across enterprise, hybrid, cloud and partner networks. SD-WANs will enable our customers to more aggressively adopt cloud and hybrid infrastructure by creating and extending their networks from the inside out. Our solution, Tehama.io, will dock into SD-WANs by providing a Secured Defined Network for bringing third parties into an SD-WAN network.
What new opportunities does IoT bring your company?
IoT devices are creating more and more data, and more data means more encryption, privacy and access controls to protect the data from nefarious actors. Our company will continue providing secured access to mission-critical and data sensitive applications for third parties and global employees.
What is your perception of the The Future of Work and how new tech is changing the face of communications?
The Future of Work is an exciting opportunity, as nearly 40 percent of the global economy is driven through keyboard, mouse, monitor interfaces. With the application of AI engines and robotic process automation, we can classify, accelerate, and automate a lot of that work to make more room for innovation.
What is the greatest opportunity facing your industry?
The greatest opportunity is to change how work (future of work) is done, so that organizations can quickly, securely (protecting data, users, credentials, devices), and with compliance turn on and off global employees and consultants at the speed of a SaaS or the speed of an on/off switch.
What is the greatest challenge?
The greatest challenge is data and credential security. As the global economy moves more and more to the cloud, the attack surface has grown exponentially. Organizations need to secure, encrypt and protect their data, their networks, their users, their IoT devices, and their credentials. Nation states are also resorting to cyber attacks
What do you hope to achieve at the event?
Our primary objective for the MSP Expo event is to introduce our unique solution to service providers looking for new and innovative cloud solutions to expand their portfolios, accelerate their billable hours, create new customer projects, and obtain instant SOC 2 Type II compliance for service delivery.
Why should people come to ITEXPO and collocated #SuperShow events to meet with your company?
Companies should visit Tehama.io at Booth 112 to learn how they can differentiate their IT service provider solutions with compliant and secured perimeters for cloud workspace. Learn how you can deliver IT services at the speed of SaaS and make more money by increasing your service portfolio and accelerate time to billable hours. Tehama is a SaaS platform that creates software-defined secure perimeters around cloud workspaces (virtual desktops) resulting in isolated, controlled, audited, and collaborative cloud work environments which extend the security posture of the enterprise into the cloud.
The workspaces within these secured perimeters provide globally dispersed IT service delivery teams with secured access to clients’ corporate networks and assets, with zero trust network segmentation and a holistic security and trust framework, while offering the ability to create, control, and maintain highly regulated work environments compliant to SOC-2, GDPR, OSFI, FIPS, and NIST.
Tehama Enterprise and MSP customers can securely extend their access to a global talent pool of skilled IT labor by leveraging this secure trust framework.
We will also have an exclusive trial offer just for those who come by our booth.
Why should your session be on the list of must-attend sessions at this year’s conference?
You’ll learn all about the new threat surfaces6 and attack vectors that result with cloud and third-party IT services providers and how to mitigate these threats with a unique and proven solution used by over 130 organizations today.
Please make an interesting prediction about tech in 2019?
Cyber attacks will evolve from data and PII to attacking critical physical infrastructure like utilities, transportation, energy, banking systems healthcare. The threat is real. War between nation states will evolve from tanks and guns to cyber attacks on critical/physical infrastructure.
Gene will be speaking on a panel, Cloud-Delivered Managed Security: Fad or Future?, on Thursday, January 31, 2019 at 3:00pm. The company will also be participating at the annual IDEA Showcase event at 4:15pm the same day. If you haven’t made plans yet, there’s still time to register for MSP Expo and all the other exciting events around the ITEXPO experience in Ft. Lauderdale. Hope to see you there!
Edited by
Erik Linask
