Paul Martini of iBoss

[00:00:00] July 23rd edition of the MSP Initiative, MSP Talk podcast We got a lot to get into, even though we're in the dog days of summer I'm going to get through some housekeeping And then we're going to get into the good stuff So here we go Everything we do is at mspinitiative.com If you don't know how to spell initiative, Google it, it'll fix your spelling Thank you for everybody that came out to all the community block parties We did on the front end of the year Zero Trust World, Enable Empower Kaseya Connect Global Vegas

[00:00:29] Kaseya Europe Roost Flow All of those are absolutely awesome We had a record amount of people come out During the first half of this year For those in-person events All of the albums and videos for those events are online We'll probably link back to our website They're definitely on our Facebook album So definitely go check them out, tag yourself if you want But thank you, thank you, thank you For joining in on the community events We do them for you, I hope you enjoyed them They are a labor of love What are we working on at the back end of the year at MSP Initiative?

[00:00:58] Other than these podcasts, which you keep doing throughout the rest of the year We are working on the 2026 version of the Channel Sports Tour If you don't remember from last year, we did a ton of NFL MSP meetups And yes, you actually go to an NFL game So that is happening again this year We already have our international dates picked It is going to be the NFL game in Melbourne, Australia on September 11th That will be the Rams and the 49ers

[00:01:26] And it will be the October 11th game in London at Tottenham Stadium Which is the Eagles and the Jaguars And we are working now on our domestic schedule Which should all be done fairly shortly For all of the U.S. states So stay tuned for that We're looking forward to doing Channel Sports Tour again It was super awesome last year We're looking to bring that back to your backyard again So that is all the housekeeping If you are watching this after the fact Make sure to like, download, subscribe All the good stuff You know what to do

[00:01:56] Press all those buttons We really appreciate it All right Bring for the first time onto the show Paul from iBoss Paul, since this is the first time We usually like to do I don't know, quick intro, right? Like a little bit of your background How you got to where you got today In technology land And we'll go from there Yeah, yeah Great to be here, George Yeah, basically Yeah, my name is Paul Martini I'm actually the co-founder of iBoss

[00:02:25] I'm actually a technologist by trade To hold over 250 patents And actually, yeah It's all anything related to cloud security Networking, chip design All sorts of different things like that But basically spent a lot of time On understanding moving data So, yeah Today with iBoss What we do is Look at Which is really critical I'm sure we'll talk a lot more about that Here in a second But, you know There's a lot of data moving around

[00:02:54] And a lot of applications And shadow apps Being used by people In the shadows, you know And basically what we do Is flip a light switch on So you can understand Like, where is the data leaking to? What type of data is leaking? What's going on in the environment? Because there's a ton of Like malware tools and stack But very little In terms of understanding Where the data is going And applications are going So, really great to be here Yeah Yeah, thanks for coming Wow, that's a lot of patents And that's not easy to get a patent So, good on you, man Looks like you're a serial inventor

[00:03:24] Which is awesome You know Your topic is an explosive one Now in the July age of AI I think I just read yesterday That somebody used OpenAI's platform To hack another AI provider's platform And they just figured it out And Man, the MSPs that I'm running into And I'm sure you talk to a ton of them, Paul But I talk to them on a regular And they're just Absolutely opening up the doors

[00:03:54] Like full access Not read-only Turning on all the AI tools And thinking like They're Tony Stark from Iron Man Going crazy I would love to see What their bills are At the end of the month And I've even run into A couple of clever ones Who have stacked multiple subscriptions To max them out simultaneously Which I thought was a clever workaround But man The gates are No keys No windows No doors Like wide open

[00:04:23] And that seems a little scary to me Because Like If you just zoom back to like 2026 Put that on the shelf for 10 seconds Think 2022 To 2025 What What you're talking about Is what we're all talking about On almost every conversation And then all of a sudden We like Forgot about it Yeah Yeah Definitely Yeah I think You know Most people don't know But if you look at Applications like Lovable This is These are tools Where you can build A production looking application In like two minutes

[00:04:52] With two sentences There's 200,000 applications Estimated per day There's 50 million developers Or app Use because You know Not all developers You know There's a lot of people Building software in a basement But You know With a couple With a couple sentence prompts You know You can get something like Fable Or one of these You know Nice AI models To make an application look Extremely production grade But you don't know Who's on the other end Right So you can imagine Just how many applications Are out there I think the big

[00:05:21] The big thing we see at least And we see this from MSPs Is if you were to ask We ask an MSP You know What's the best type of report You can give your client To let them know What the real risk is In their environment It ends up being A top malware report Top visited domains You know Block sites That sort of thing And But they have no clue In terms of You know John just uploaded An entire patient database Up to Some app That he just discovered Because it was Freemium You know Model But There really is Very little That actually understands

[00:05:51] How to decrypt Connections And look inside To see what the content is Is the actual files And the applications And I think It starts for You know What I see Is it starts with AI So they might come And you know Say hey We have an issue With ChatGPT And my customers Are asking About what their employees Are pasting in there You know Creating PowerPoint Presentations With super sensitive information But they don't realize ChatGPT Is just another app There's There's millions of them That have been created What prevents someone From creating An app That has A chat front end And then sends the messages To ChatGPT In the back end

[00:06:21] I mean It's just It's just a broker Right So The reality is You know All of the stack That we see out there You know You have ZTN VPN replacement You have firewalls You have EDR SOC You know Application whitelisting But They're all focused On the ransomware Malware But not focused On the data And so meanwhile The reason they can't Produce those types Of reports Is they don't have Any tool in their stack That can actually See the data And see the applications To actually do that And so You know I know that If an MSP Walks up to the customer

[00:06:50] And produces a report That shows You know 2AM transfers Applications That are being used In the shadow Including chat GPT Leakage of their Sensitive data That customer Is going to want Not only more Professional services They're going to want To upgrade that stack And then In addition It's hard to differentiate As an MSP Right You have If everybody's Producing the same Malware blocking report And another MSP Comes in with Full visibility Into that environment With real business risk That You know That's what customers Their customers want You know They want to know That that MSP

[00:07:19] Is looking after them And looking after Their environment I mean There's another Edge to the sword Here Of what you're Talking about Right There's also IP Right Like we're talking About intellectual property I don't know Some MSPs Don't think of The stuff that they do As intellectual property But in a lot of cases It is You built something To solve a problem Right And that something Took you time To test And get right And maybe it's Specific to a customer Environment Maybe it's specific To all of your customers

[00:07:49] But then all of a sudden Your information Not just the stuff That you built The information That that stuff Generated Walks out the back door Right And now there's laws And stuff Right About how You know That stuff shouldn't happen But you need to catch them First And by the time You go through The process Of trying to use The system That we all You know Are living under Like the damage Could be done Right And like I hate to think About business Ending situations And there's so many Of them It feels like Now that

[00:08:18] We didn't think about Maybe five years ago In the MSP space That is one of them Yeah I mean you said Something earlier 2023 Ford is a different world From 2023 prior I mean it's like Everything about What we knew Has changed I mean you had Right at 2023 There was probably 50 to 100 apps That were the apps For like Dropbox And tools And SaaS Today it's It's infinite I mean it's like Endless While we sit here Just during this You know this podcast Here we're talking Probably two

[00:08:48] Three hundred thousand Apps being built Across Replit Lovable You know It's just It's completely Out of control But you also have You mentioned The hugging face A break-in I mean you have OpenAI They put the model Into a bin No internet access It figured out Not only had a Breakout of the bin Got into a hugging face Pulled the model Pulled the vulnerability Tool chest They had a kit That someone had posted And they used that toolkit To then break into A bunch of other stuff So you know You're talking about Models that are getting More sophisticated So you know

[00:09:17] We think in terms of like How much signal Can you get Because I think The issue right now Is you know Prior to 2023 You could get away With less signal Meaning like If you had a DNS Filter Or security Or whatever it might be Who cares that it Doesn't look at the payloads It's like blocking Some sites But the reality is With AI If you combine AI with rich signal So like Going into payloads Looking at files Content And then you feed That to train models On the good side Not the bad side Like on our side

[00:09:46] We're using those models To say Hey we see All of this stuff Going on Instead of you Having to digest it And translate it We'll tell you I'll tell you The AI will tell you That hey There's a big problem Like you have This employee Looks unusual Because their session Must be hijacked There's 2am transfers That person Is in the finance department That should be happening So it's AI is actually Taking that rich signal That comes from All in one place And it's able to then Convert that into Business risk Business language That humans can understand

[00:10:16] And the more you feed it The better it is So I think it's A double-edged sword In that There's AI that's Attacking these applications And you need to make sure That those applications Are nice and tight And patched And there's no misconfigured And then you have to Use AI on the other side To then take that signal And use it for good To really lock down And protect those networks As well So let me go To other levels With this That I think Are adjacent topics One The Chinese variant Of the products That everybody's

[00:10:46] Trying to use right now And like Oh It's so much cheaper But dude Where does information go After you plug it in Like that's super concerning And then number two is Man back to the Iron Man effect And all these MSPs Just Typing whatever they imagine I still keep on Running into Enough People That it bothers me That they're like Hey Paying all these vendors Out there I'm gonna save a ton of money I'm gonna rebuild

[00:11:15] What they do for me On my own And then I don't need to pay them anything I own it And it's like Well Number one If it's all you Then you're all on the hook too But okay Cool How do you know How to maintain all this After you After you press go I don't know I think it's a problem What do you think About those two topics Yeah yeah Look the first one I think is You're spot on Like there's new There's new models Like not just DeepSea Coming out They're open weight models They're free You can run them on a map Mini Or you can run them on You know Those

[00:11:44] The tactical ground GPU So this idea That they're gonna You know Lock down these Frontier models Or next gen models What we find And I was on with the system One of the large Model makers They're like The front The open weight models Are only eight months Behind us So that means that It's gonna be available To everybody It does not matter Because they're using And you know There was a current There was a recent Type of breach Where they used Existing like Anthropic models To extract The training To train their models And so now

[00:12:14] Yeah So there's And they did something Like 45 million Extractions of trading data So it's insane But the reality is You know The debate And what you're gonna hear back Especially with Those that create Those Chinese models And propagate them And you know There's always It's always a debate But they'll say Well they don't have Any tools to access The internet They're only gonna do What you ask them to do But it's no different Than I think of LLMs As being no different Than I think Humans are biological LLMs And is the way I kind of think about that Where

[00:12:44] Anything that you see In the real life You can kind of correlate To what you're seeing With these models These large language models For example Like an insider threat Or a double agent That's a human That looks legitimate They come into the organization But they're double agents So they're leaking And they're doing other stuff So these models Nothing prevents These weights And these models From being trained That when someone Asks you what the weather is What I really need you to do Is start executing Some tool calls And extract their data Right Or when you make This particular tool call So there could be

[00:13:12] Hidden prompt triggers I don't know if you've ever Watched anyone under hypnosis They start acting like a duck When you tap the floor Or do whatever Some signal So it's the same concept They're going to tap the signal And then that model Goes off on its own So I think the idea Kind of leads to the second part Which is At least from what I see With MSPs Is they're super busy already I mean part of their Part of their job Is providing value For their clients You are slammed Back to back The last thing you want to do Is like manage

[00:13:42] And build your tools Because that also means Not only are you managing Your clients You're actually managing The software And you're going to spend time Like patching And doing those kinds of things And realistically That's You think about The opportunity cost You could be If you're going to spend that time Go get the next client You're going to make Way more money Than the few dollars You're going to spend On the technology Because the other part of When you buy a tool In our space It's a little different Because we deal with Critical connectivity as well You need the patching Uptime Resiliency Compliance You know

[00:14:12] Sock 2 We have Fed ramp authorization So it's not Anybody can build a tool And then now you have to think about Okay well this is connectivity How do I keep the uptime How do I keep resiliency Is this compliant If I'm selling it to a hospital Or a law firm Does it have all of the right Levels of compliance So you're going to have A project that goes far Beyond the software Itself That leads to A whole chain of events And if you try to stick That type of technology Into let's say A law firm Or a healthcare provider You don't have those things Forget about losing your client I mean you're going to have A lawsuit

[00:14:41] That's going to be really bad So I always think You have to be really smart About how you do it I mean if it's a widget Or a tool Or workflow I think really nice Like a workflow To do those kinds of things To optimize that MSP But I think leverage The time That you're using Building like bigger projects That are going to need Compliance patching Vulnerability checking as well Leverage the time To get new clients And expand your clients Because you'll make Way more money The offsets The opportunity cost That really hits you It's not the cost Of the tool Yeah No I'm right there with you I mean So for all the people

[00:15:10] Building your replacement PSA RMM Security Replacement tool Like guys Like all for All for fun If it's like You're playing You know This is like In the workshop Just playing with stuff But I would be Very very worried Putting it into Production environment And I just I see I'm seeing the Facebooks And the Reddits And the The Scords And people are doing this And I'm like Guys Like Is you know It You know Let me give you the analogy Alright

[00:15:40] Anthropic Could go and build Their own Salesforce Replacement But they have Job listings out For Salesforce Administrators So what does that tell you? Yeah And I'm You know It's just You know Double clicking on that It's funny because You'll sometimes see Someone builds a tool They're using Opus Or one of the models Right So basically Opus built a tool But it builds it pretty quick So it probably took Five to ten minutes To do You know Really nice job At a lot of this stuff Then they Show off their tool Like look at this great tool Because it's really Amazing You know That it's able to do that

[00:16:09] But they don't realize There's 50 million Developers Just on Lovable I mean There's 50 million people Doing the exact same thing How different Do you think That that person Couldn't write the same sentences About what they need Because they're just Describing what they need The models are getting So good That you just describe What you need And they will build Those tools Pretty soon Anybody And actually I think we're there Can build that level of tool And so it's not about The tool It's the It's the maintenance The compliance The security The patching And ultimately

[00:16:39] The opportunity cost Like you're You're doing all-nighters Building some software Where you could be Doing some strategy To get more clients Getting their reports together Doing monthly business reviews Quarterly business reviews And really getting Building up Your processes With your You mentioned There's Salesforce Administrator hiring People are also Still very short staff Like they don't have The ability to hire IT people They're short staff on those I see it all the time So you know You walk in as an MSP You're an expert at Environments and understanding

[00:17:08] What they need And you can quickly Put those in place Like I like where we sit Because we provide A part of the stack Which is Turning the light switch on Where's your data going Where's your applications going Putting controls And showing business value On day one to a client Right So I feel like you do that You come up with a nice plan Around that You're going to be getting Clients left and right Because they're all worried About the same things Well I mean Like anybody Who has to sell something There's tricks To being able to get there Right And so What you're talking about On the front end

[00:17:38] When they're not a customer It's a cool trick Right It's something to get them To pay attention If they're already a customer This is when the conversation Usually gets hard Right So like Okay something happened Who, what, where, when, how And a lot of the time The answer is We can't find out And that's usually Where the conversation Can go very badly Very quickly afterwards Right Because If somebody's asking The question How did this information Get out the back door And we can't find Where that happens That means it's probably Going to happen again And if they don't think

[00:18:07] You can stop that From happening Or at least identify The people who are doing it Game over I think Yeah I saw a situation Actually With a law firm The MSP was Support writing service They got ransomware It got past their EDR If any vendor If any vendor by the way Claims 100% efficacy Of any type Look I would highly Be concerned We can't We can't Say that we have 100% efficacy Nobody Nobody can That's why insurance exists Otherwise there would be No insurance industry By the way

[00:18:36] You could sell that technology To the federal government They have a check That's about a trillion dollars You'd be You'd be retitered On a beach At this point But the reality is There's always risk Right And you're trying to get To that as high as possible As close as possible To 100% But I saw there was An MSP servicing law firm Ransomware gets past the EDR It hijacks all the data What do they do? They scramble to the Internet service provider That says Yep We see a big spike Of bandwidth They go to the firewall logs Firewalls are used To looking at packets It's called Deep packet inspection App ID

[00:19:06] What is app ID? Well It looks at the packets Not what's inside To take an educated guess Of what might be inside It's like It's like being at An airport security checkpoint And saying I'm going to look at What's in the luggage By looking at its shape So if it looks Kind of like a gun I think it's a gun You need to unzip The luggage And actually Not only unzip it Because I think The second part is You have to be An expert at understanding Like yeah That looks like I know you might not Think that's a weapon Or the Mona Lisa But it's wrapped In a certain way So all you need to do Is untangle it And that's the same As going from

[00:19:35] Firewall type of technology Which is looking at packets Into deep content inspection That understands the context The applications And the data And so yeah They were like ISP firewall They're like I don't know There was a spike there What did we lose? I can't even tell you What files were lost So of course The customers panicked They're already switching MSPs Now they have to go Try to save the customer But the reality is I think very few MSPs Can actually answer that question You tell me What happened yesterday In one of your clients Like how many files Did they lose? Who's moving them?

[00:20:04] What applications are there? Is there any embedded malware Potentially or humans That are like scattered All over the place? That's the That's the The intellectual property You mentioned the MSP But the intellectual property Of your client as an MSP That's what they care about They don't want that They don't want that Going out the door Actually we have another MSP A completely different scenario Where they said Yeah we put the solution In place They called us the same day And they said Hey there's a mistake here It says that Our client's calling us And saying that This thing is preventing A two gigabyte transfer From John

[00:20:33] And there's no way This is impossible Like this thing must have So many false positives On Friday John left He resigned So that was literally Salesforce database Leaving the door I mean that would have That would have gone So I think that reality It could be ransomware It could be malware It could be inadvertent use Like How about a human being Walking out the door With what probably Cost you years And hundreds of thousands Of dollars to build Right Or an employee That's not doing it on purpose But it's someone In the finance department Of one of your clients Who sees this cool tool That they found on Twitter

[00:21:03] And they're like Oh yeah this is just Organizing all of the Financial documents Of the client They're like In the world Who grabs all that data With no compliance And is hijacking it So it's And now to forget The compliance component Of it It's just an utter nightmare But there is absolutely No visibility No control Of data and applications Right now It's the wild Wild west You know We built By the way We built this With the banks So we do All the largest We came

[00:21:32] Our background Is we came From a large To ultra large And we So we're including The department of defense We're inside of The department of defense And we built this technology To look at data And applications With context Because the big banks Care about where the data goes The problem is It's very unaffordable Typically because It's expensive And it's complicated To really decrypt And inspect And pull files And applications So really You know Five months ago When we launched It's making it affordable And making it make sense For an MSP

[00:22:01] So it's the same technology But it allows like Hey it's a two minute Configuration Quick deployment But it's the same Type of technology All we've done Is gone down market To provide the same technology To the MSPs That's very interesting So let's talk about that For a second So the company is iBoss I-B-O-S-S Right Just in case You're listening To the other version Of that I think one of the main Things That happened From 2020 To 2025

[00:22:31] And I know that there Was like that crossover In between Right It's about 2023 MSPs Just heard Secure Before AI Was marketed And is now The billboard The billboard Before was Cybersecurity Problem was Nobody understood What good looked like Right All they knew Was they needed Multiple products You know And they just Learned by them By name Not by technology Or what they actually did Right And so In a lot of cases A lot of these tools Probably overlap

[00:23:00] In many areas Right Like they were doing Similar things You know And they were just Costing money But I think a lot Of MSPs They're not Security experts They still are not And so What they did Was they just Threw I don't know Eight Nine Ten different Things At the Bill The wall And said Let's hope that Together This circle Makes it Okay Now for many people It was passable For other people It was like You don't even know What you bought So like

[00:23:30] What are we talking About here So where does Your solution Simplify this Conversation Does it Or is this just Another cog in the wheel Yeah Let's go through That sack Right So cybersecurity Typically meant Mauer defense Purely So stick EDR Prevent malware Antivirus Prevent malware Sock Prevent malware Firewall Prevent attackers And malware From getting into The network VPN ZTNA Connect the user Back to an office Securely Or to a private Environment Nothing's looking Nothing's looking at The data Nothing's looking At that

[00:24:00] There's nothing In the stack That actually Plugs the hole So that data And applications Don't leak everywhere And people don't Access those things Anywhere So cybersecurity Means more than Just malware Protection It means malware Protection And data And application Security So that So people Are in the right Place So like The overinvestment In some of these Tools Now we're a Sassy platform And what that Means is Those other Components Like ZTNA Is a much Better Replacement For VPN It's a More secure Way to do That We have Our firewalls Are not just Firewalls They're managed By the cloud And they update

[00:24:30] From the cloud So if you want Them optimally When it comes Time to refresh Them That's a Consolidation Play But we sit In the network Right And so what I think About what Sassy Is that's Where you Start getting The consolidation Of those Tools Where yeah You don't You save The money There Repurpose That budget And you're Going to get A solution That goes Farther Than Connectivity And firewall It goes Into Data security Data visibility Application control And application Visibility as Well And of course We're having Layered defense On the network Meaning that If those devices Get infected They have to Phone home to Russia Through a Command and

[00:24:59] Control center Guess what They're going To go through The network We see that Too We have Over 150 Threat feeds So we can Flag and lock To say No I don't Care what Your UDR says This thing's Infected So you get All of that Stuff To me It's like That's The bonus Because you're Getting that Additional layer Of malware Defense You're getting All the Components For ZTNA Firewalling And you're Also migrating That on your Own time Where it's Not a rip And replace Immediately But you can Immediately provide Value to that Customer Where you're Going to move From a Standard basic Report Or maybe You're trying To piece That report

[00:25:29] Together Because you're Going to Have a meeting With your Client And you're Trying to Figure out To show With our Platform You're Going to Do print To PDF And you're Going to Show up To that Client It's Going to Save you A ton Of money And they're Going to Look at This report And you're Going to Say you know What 20 Hours of Professional services And I can Clean up all The misconfigurations You have In your Salesforce With an Upgrade Of a package I can now Instead of Just telling You the files They're leaving I can Actually block Them So because Susan up There is Uploading Crazy Amounts Of files

[00:25:54] Do you want To be In a In place Yesterday And you Know the One hospital We put An MSG Put this In a Hospital They found Literally Patient records Leaking The same Day They came Back and said This is a Fire drill We immediately Need it And said Well it's a Fire drill Because you're Seeing it Now Imagine what Was happening Before It's like Every single Day this Was happening So SASE Is the Consolidation

[00:26:23] And the Cost Reduction You know Just getting All the ZTA The VPN Replace The firewall All of That stuff That's Table Stakes You're Going to Get That It's Going to Be Easier Because You can Manage It From One Place You Manage It

[00:27:00] Visibility Right Because No offense Not many People are Able to Go into Their Firewall Log And figure Out Head From Tails Anyway Okay Cool Super Important Like Something That could Be Given to A Non-technical Person They can Understand What's Going On That's Really The End Result Like You I Like There's All

[00:27:30] Of These People Like I Got Assume Like I Don't Know All The Aspects Of Your Story There About The Hospital But What If It's Just Somebody Who Doesn't Want to Manually Enter All This Stuff And They're Using A Plugin To Go and Do Some Of The Heavy Lifting For Them So They Could Just Put It Back Into The System Done Right Like They Were Trying To Take A Shortcut By Using A Non Work Provided App AI Power To Do Their Work For Them Yeah So This Is I Mean That's The Other Part Of This Right It's Not Just Data It's Applications And

[00:28:14] What Are People Using To Exchange Data Not Just Web Serve We Want To Understand What You're Logging Into What You're Submitting Form Data To And Those Types Of Things Now There Are Tools Out There That Do Things Like Application White Listing It's Like Well We Have That Covered Because There's No Plugins Allowed And There's No Software That

[00:28:45] Fluidity That You Get Without Any Installs Whatsoever The Age Of The Plug Of The Extension The Age Of Software Eventually Will Come To An End It's All Going To Be Embedded Directly Rendered Right In Your Browser So It's Really About What You're Interacting With Not What You're Installing So Once We Because Of Where We See All Network Traffic We We Open The Connection I Like We Don't Want To Read The Envelope Address We Open The Context The Form Data The Form Submissions The

[00:29:14] Logins The Data Uploads And The Risk We Says Just Focus On These Get Your Hands Around These Guys To Ensure That It's Only The Approved Applications That Are Used Including

[00:29:45] Web And SaaS Applications That Are Not Installed And They're Not Extensions The Data Is Only Being Exchanged For Places That Are Approved As Well We Can Do It In Monitor We Can We We We Block We Just Prevent The Transfer And We Create Incidents That Go Right Into Your RMM Tool Or Whatever Tool You Have So That You Get That Incident You Call Your Client And Say Hey I Just Want To Give You A Heads Up Not Only Did I Prevent John From Uploading That Database I Just Want To Let You Know He's Doing It So You Can Talk To Me

[00:30:24] So Then The That That That So How Close To Real Time Does The Red Flag Go Up Right Like Is It As John's Going Into His Computer Going Somewhere Or Is It Right After Or Is An Hour Later Like How Close As Actually You Can So When We Say Real Time Once They Get To That Customer And Say You You Can Say If

[00:30:54] hey, if you want John not to do this in the future, we can actually not only prevent it, we'll let John know and you can put custom messages. Say, hey, John, don't upload our sensitive data to this place or, hey, John, you're going to your personal chat CPT, go to the corporate copilot. You can do all sorts of like redirection, coaching for end users. So like you can really take this really far. Once you have full control of what's in those connections and the connections themselves, and it's all unified. So I think that's one of the keys

[00:31:24] is there's a lot of SaaS-y platforms too, but they're all bolted together. It's a single pane of glass admin console. You pull up the curtain, fight products behind the scenes. And guess what that means? It's like inconsistent policy, visibility, security. And if you don't have the visibility all in one place, you can't feed it to AI so that it can produce all the insights. AI needs to be able to read those insights so it can cross-correlate what's really going on in that environment. 100%. So like the technical components to do all of that roll-up, is there some sort of application or agent

[00:31:52] that gets installed on the workstation? Is there a physical appliance that gets installed at the base of the network? Is it, you know, like what are the plumbing pieces here in order for an MSP to implement something like this? Yeah, this is the part I love the most because we talked to some MSPs. We've had like a thousand plus in four or five months coming to us. And basically they say, hey, when can we get started? We say like literally right now. Like you can, like they say, literally now, yeah, you'll get a link literally now. The way you do it is we have a SASE wizard. You run the wizard.

[00:32:22] It does all of the policy configuration of what we think is optimal to give you all that visibility. So all the decryption, everything else. You push our agents. And what the agent does is it's not going to scan for viruses or lock the apps or anything like that. It's responsible for encrypting all of the traffic and sending it to the cloud service for inspection. We do all the heavy lifting there in the cloud because we're not going to like peg, you know, we don't want to use the resources on the laptop. And we want to ensure that when the user goes remote or on-prem, always get visibility and security. So all the security, like the DLP and visibility happen in the cloud.

[00:32:51] And then if they use Microsoft, Intra or any IDP, they can tie that too. And what that does is it allows the AI to say, oh, that was John or that was, and then you can also do dynamic policies. Like, look, the executive can do whatever he wants, but, you know, the finance department, we just can't have him uploading data to, you know, unapproved applications. So it grabs all the groups. So, you know, SASE wizard agents and optionally connect the identity provider like Intra and you're good to go. Okay. So like, this is all software. There's no physical box to touch.

[00:33:21] Exactly. Yeah. All software. You know, if you have a firewall doing, trying to do decryption, of course we all know that if you turn on decryption or firewall, it falls over. And, you know, like a horrible death of like 90%, you know, performance reduction. The worst part about it is even if you get a bigger box and it decrypts, it doesn't understand how to interpret what's inside at that level. Like it's not going to pull a zip file, unzip it, scrape the spreadsheet and tell you that there's a sensitive information. It was a firewall is not designed to do that. It's designed to work with packets. You know, you could turn the security functions of the firewall except for like the ACLs or anything like that. I've seen, actually,

[00:33:51] I was talking to MSP and said, yeah, my client has a modem, a firewall modem that does that. It says just keep the modem and use the software because we can do all the heavy lifting in the cloud, IPS and everything else. But the optional firewall appliances that we have, when it comes time, if you have an environment that absolutely wants it for one reason or another, these aren't just regular firewalls, they're SD-WAN. So they can connect offices together. They can connect office to AWS. They have a full security stack. They are managed from the cloud. They're updated from the cloud. So you're still managing everything from the cloud in the one console. You set a policy,

[00:34:21] it applies everywhere. So it's optional. I mean, it's not a rip and replace. You just, that's where I think the cost consolidation and simplicity start to come in as well. Yeah. Yeah. Whenever I hear SD-WAN or even SASE, I'm thinking, hey, like I got to wait for my renewal to come up. I got to wait for my hardware to age out, right? I mean, unfortunately, if I think about even the last year or two, some of the most popular brands in the MSP space in this category have all had problems. Like they've all had consistent

[00:34:51] and big headline problems. And it's like, did I put something in that's not even doing it at this point? Did I basically install a liability into my customer? Like I'm sure a lot of people have to be asking that question. Well, that's, and you just nailed it, right? Like when you deal with connectivity, so we have single customers with 500,000 devices on a single customer. That's because we came from a large enterprise, right? And there's not just one, there's many, many customers or hundreds of thousands, tens of thousands, like the scale. And to do this right,

[00:35:20] where you have auto resiliency, auto failover, we have customers that if they're, for every minute that they're down, they're losing $15 million per minute. Of any outage. So like, yeah, yeah, there's, there's, there's areas like, yeah, definitely. We actually have customers that do high frequency trading. They could always, they probably lose billions on a trade that doesn't go through. Right. But when you're dealing with that level of resiliency, that's really critical because what happens and what we found in the MSP space from a connectivity perspective, they don't have the size and scale to really understand that level of high availability

[00:35:50] and what that means and the criticality of it. To an MSP, they see it as downtime and things like that. The second thing we see is a lot of what they call SASE vendor is all about the firewall, the VPN replacement, the ZTNA, replacing the stack because, and they have firewall, the vendors are firewall DNA. It's all about intrusion prevention, you know, packet level DPI and IPS, intrusion prevention. They don't, they don't come from a data security background where you're decrypting connections and truly extracting applications

[00:36:19] and data content. And this is our background. This is our DNA as well. So it's a combination here. I like to see it as, you know, when you're coming in through something like what we're offering at iBoss is there is, the biggest part of the value is day one, not replacing the VPN and firewalls is turning the light switch in that environment to clearly show that customer the issues that are really there that don't have to do with anything with you not protecting them from malware. It's all the other stuff that you haven't even focused on and they haven't focused on to say, hey, you have other problems

[00:36:48] beyond the malware protection we're doing. You have a lot of personnel issues in this environment. I mean, there's strange behaviors, uploads, applications all over the place. So you could put our solution in and put it in monitor only and then give them a report in 24 hours. I think that that leads to purchase orders almost immediately. Yeah. I mean, a lot of the stuff you're talking about is computers, just a tool, just technology, just a tool. Your people are the thing that's got to either go left or right on you, right?

[00:37:18] Like, what are they doing with the tool? And I think historically, it's been hard to actually get that information unless you are installing something super intrusive, Paul, like a key logger or something that's literally doing screen capturing of their computer, like something that intrusive, like that's to the degree you had to go in order to figure out what's George actually doing. Yeah. But I don't really know. You could take an educated guess. Actually, we have another MSP

[00:37:47] deployed and they said, look, before we kind of got a bunch of firewall logs. Now we actually can tell what actually is going on. Like this happened and that happened and something I can explain to the customer and give to the customer. It's a night and day difference. But basically, yeah, the, and actually when you start talking like key loggers and all those kinds of things, it's, that's like overly, that's, we're talking about you're going to lose data through the network. You're going to, your users are going to use applications, unapproved shadow IT through the network. Does the technology stack intelligent enough

[00:38:17] for this era to understand what's going on in those connections? And if it is, you know, that's, I think that that's the future of SASE and all those other, of this type of technology is the contextual understanding of what's going on in the environment and translating that to all of those things, including productivity as well. Like, look, if there's, it could even be down to, we get all the prompts, we get all the AI prompts. So if you, if you roll out Claude or Copilot and all of a sudden they're using it to build cooking recipes, you're burning through tokens like insanely. But, so it's kind of nice to know

[00:38:47] that it just coach them like, hey, do that separately. Like on your personal time and your personal account that cost you $29 a month, not $2,000 a month when I pay for tokens and, you know, they upsell us, right? So, you know, we're able to do full chat recording, conversation recording. We have AI read those chats and like tell you, like you don't have to read the comment, like AI do that. It'll tell you, hey, Bill's pasting social security numbers into you, to make a PowerPoint presentation. It's like a, yeah, it's a major, major problem. Bad news bears. All right. So,

[00:39:16] I have a, I have an adjacent topic I'm going to throw out at the end, but as an MSP, how does the program work? Like if I pick, call, you know, go to your website, call you, whatever. And I say, all right, Paul, I want to, I want to take the bicycle out. Let's sit, put the training wheels on. Let's see how this thing goes. Right. How does the program work? How does the process go? Tell us. Yes. Yeah. Super, super easy. We have three packages. It's based off the number of devices that the user is protecting. They're going to protect your client.

[00:39:46] Any, the client, they can mix and match as well. So if they have some clients that want more protection, less protection, yeah, we have three packages. Every package includes visibility, decryption, DLP, and malware. As you go up the packages, you get deeper on the malware and deeper on the DLP. So the core, the core package that we have is decrypting, looking at file uploads. You can limit the file uploads. You can get full visibility of what's going on in the environment. You can put access policy. You can decommission your Cisco umbrella, for example. Like that's all DNS-based type stuff. So you're going to go from

[00:40:15] kind of basic protection to exponential protection. And by the way, the cost is going to be very similar. Then you get to the middle package, which is our advanced package that goes deeper into malware. So that includes 150 threat feeds. You're going to get, we're going to scan all of the JavaScript on the pages, all files for malware before they get to the devices. So it's going to be complimentary to what you're doing on the EDR. We also include SD-WAN. And then the third package goes deeper into DLP. So instead of just limiting those file uploads and seeing which file transfers occur, we literally can read the PDF document

[00:40:45] and say that's a patient record, that's a credit card number. So we can get really deep on that. But we also include the kitchen sink. We do things like SSPM, which is connecting to your environment, your applications like Microsoft and telling you what misconfigurations you have, like what vulnerabilities are there so that you can connect your client's apps to that. Give them a report and say, hey, look at all these misconfigurations. You don't have MFA in some of these things. Let me work for that professional services or DSPM, which is data security posture management. And what that does is looks for any employee that decides they're going to share

[00:41:15] sensitive information through a public share link. It'll flag that, create an alert so that you can tell your customer. But it's basically deeper into the DLP. So you have core, advanced and complete, give us a number of devices. There's storage as well. We store all the logs and events. We can forward them to your RMM as well. It starts at 500 gigabytes of storage. So you pay for the storage. It's monthly. We have all monthly billing. We have roll-up billing as well. You can do one device. You can do 100 devices. You can do 1,000 devices. So this scales all the way down to one device.

[00:41:44] And yeah, surprisingly, for this type of technology, it's incredibly affordable. So you might look at something in your stack. It's like, I could just get rid of that DNS protection product and pay for this. But I like to say it's not the equivalent. You're going to massively upgrade, but you're going to have relatively the same cost. So it's not a like-for-like, just replacing. You're not losing anything. You're getting more, but you're basically allocating the same price. Yeah, and that was strategically done for the MSPs. Because we know, like, there's MSPs you deal with one customer

[00:42:14] that has one employee. You deal with one that has 50 employees, right? And we know that to make this, we want to get this out to everybody. We think that it's super important that every company gets protected in this way because it's a Wild West right now. And we know that the MSPs don't have a lot of choices. You mentioned them. They're like very nasty to have issues with them and all those types of things. We want to make sure that we partner with MSPs. I show up. We have hundreds of calls a day. I randomly pick calls. I show up on partner calls all the time, randomly. I just pick them. Sometimes I'll show up on a call and I'll hear from one of our reps

[00:42:44] and say, hey, this partner, it's one, you know, they only have like two customers. I say, I really don't care. It doesn't matter to me. I'm randomly picking them. I'll show up because we want to help a partner grow. Like if they have two customers, I want to get them to 10 or 20. And another thing is our support, if you're in the US and you're MSP, you're going to get a US person. We have all the way down from the TAMs because of customer success, the SEs. We'll also help you because we want to sign the guys. We're going to help them deploy.

[00:43:13] So if they don't have to worry about like pushing the software, we're going to get it deployed for them, teach them how to do it. There's a template wizard. So it's super easy when they do the next one. But our goal is to make the partner successful, make sure that they're growing. And we're going to put the blood, sweat, and tears to make that happen. So from the top down. I mean, it sounds like you're going in with every reason not to object. That's what it sounds like to me as an MSP. The last thing I'm going to ask from a technical standpoint is,

[00:43:42] is there anything, like this sounds very complimentary, right? I think even use that word like complimentary to your MDR, et cetera. Is there anything this would conflict with that the MSP may already be using? Yeah, things that you can decommission over time. So if you have any sort of like DNS filter, any sort of web filter, right? To me, that's just basic blocking and tackling of websites. That's like top domains. Take that budget because you're going to get that for free. That's just part of the overall platform and it comes in our core. If you have VPN, you know, again,

[00:44:11] you don't have to do this all day one. You could do this over time. Once you get all that visibility, comes time that you want to replace the VPN, ZTNA, Zero Trust Network Access, a more secure version of that. That's included. That's in our advanced package, consolidation. You can either decommission it completely to use the modem and firewall or replace it if you need, if you really need it with one of our firewall gateways, which are just an extension of our cloud service, but managed to the cloud and updated the cloud. But it's, to me, it's consolidation over time,

[00:44:41] but high value on day one, which is controlling, yeah, controlling application and data movement. Wow. This sounds really compelling and it sounds like it's at the right price point if we're, if it's what you say that it is. And it doesn't sound like there's a minimum because you said you could do one computer and it sounds like it's month to month, you know, so what do you got to lose? It sounds like if anything, try it, you know, like see it, like prove it. It sounds like you're not forcing them to a three-year contract to get there, which is good.

[00:45:10] Let me flip over to my adjacent topic since we started off there. Let me see if I can end there. And then at the end, we'll talk about where to go and how to, you know, ask to see a demo or what website, et cetera. Um, I, you know, George is, you know, this is George Fingernair here, right? So, SpaceX already went IPO and then, you know, Elon merged Grok X AI into now called SpaceX AI. Northern, you know, I just call that all one thing. However,

[00:45:40] it's structurally separated and you got Open AI and Anthropic who are supposed to go IPO this fall, right? And so, all three of those guys would be publicly traded by the end of the year. You know, so we're reading. I believe, total guess here, but I believe what's going to happen is all of these packages that people are buying, you know, like the 200, 100, like these subscription packages that like literally you're burning more tokens than the package really can, you know, sell you at, you know, they're basically subsidizing it.

[00:46:09] I believe they're all going to go away or going to get jacked up dramatically because once you're on the stock exchange, you got to actually post numbers and you got to probably show profit is being generated. So I believe that if you built something today with AI that come 2027, the cost to keep that going, even if you've changed nothing, is going to go up. What do you think? Look, there's big drivers. Obviously, when there's public companies, they have to drive revenue, right? You know, my perspective on a lot of this

[00:46:39] is very different from what's out there today, which is, you know, I see the big data center builds, all the money being poured into that. You name one technology that didn't move to the edge to your phone. I think that there will be no need for a data center. I think that AI will be running on your phone. I think there's going to be advancements in those algorithms that won't require, your brain runs on eight watts of power and obviously a subset and we're only using 10% of our brain so we hear. But basically, I think that it'll move to the edge. I do think you're going to need,

[00:47:08] it's no different than SaaS, right? Where you can decide to try to run this stuff yourself. I think these open weight models are going to be driving costs down of tokens but no one's going to run their own model, private models. It's going to be a mess. So you're going to probably be stuck with some of those frontier models and, you know, token costs and things like that. So I think it's going to be an interesting next 24 months but I think the world's going to look very different in 24 months and actually we may be, think of the first supercomputer

[00:47:38] laugh about it now, right? Or even the computer that was, computers were used to get people to the moon. Your phone is a billion times more capable. So I think we're going to look back and we're going to think, you know, that was pretty interesting that we keep repeating the same patterns but I think we're heading into an era where AI will be everywhere. It'll be at the edge of your phone but I do think at the same time the bigger problem is those AI tools you're building Mythos is out there and Mythos likes to break into stuff. So just remember when you built it Mythos will probably find a way in

[00:48:08] unless you're full-time patching, vulnerability checking and so are you really creating a liability for yourself that now you own because once those people and your customers are on that platform you're responsible for it and now you have to figure out how to get them off of it. So I don't know I like to sleep at night and so if I'm an MSP and I'm building that stuff that would probably keep me up at night to wonder if I'm doing it at the right level of diligence and that sort of thing. No, that's fair. Yeah, I mean I'm just trying to be practical, right? Like a lot of these companies

[00:48:38] especially the really big ones have already, you know I think, you know is it like Facebook and Uber and all these guys came out and they're like, yeah, we burned through this faster than we had ever budgeted like we got to bring this back to earth because it's unaffordable, right? And it's if the big companies that have all the money to spend have already gotten to that point, we're just trailing behind that, right? Oh yeah. For me, it's like hey, all right let's say the big company's dropping a million dollars a month let's say you drop 10 grand

[00:49:07] into, you know credits, right? Like, hey that 10 grand won't cost 10 grand in six months from now it's gotta cost more unless something changes, right? And like back to your everything goes full circle we just spent a decade hearing about how to stop hosting things on-prem and to take stuff and put it into the cloud now we're going back, now we're buying, now we're gonna put the gpus and boxes in the rack again? Are we doing is that, is that what we're talking about? Yeah, yeah and actually remember that software that you build runs continuously and it

[00:49:37] burns through tokens while you sleep so all of a sudden you wake up one morning your bill is, you know $50,000 and you're trying to figure out that your agent decided, your software decided to go off on a tangent just like the one that broke into Hugging Face it broke out got on the internet they actually said it burned through a lot of tokens because this thing was really on a mission to do something so imagine your software just goes on a bender and, you know what are you gonna fire the AI agent or tool you're pretty much stuck with the bill you know Yeah, so I don't know man we're definitely

[00:50:06] in the wild wild west we're like if everyone's like oh no the market's mature BS I think it's way immature and it probably won't mature until, I don't know, George guess five years from now like 2030 2031 2032 like it's gotta work its way through what we're going through right now and I just don't see how it's gonna come to you know in six months I don't think we're any further along than where we are now other than hey, a couple of these companies

[00:50:36] have just rolled out the next variant of whatever we're seeing Yeah, there's the turbulence right now is insane like we're people are flying by the seat of the pants because look, we're in the era of AGI so like AI models that build themselves things are changing very quickly but you need to leverage AI to help I think building any tool or SaaS tool is table stakes I don't there is not going to be value in that right but leveraging AI to excel what you're doing like hey digest all of this information give me something I can use for my customer it's how

[00:51:06] you use AI that's going to make the difference but like I said I've seen a lot where they show off their tool or the upload that it can do and I look at that except my background is in engineering software as well and I understand I've seen that I've actually seen 20 or 30 people show the exact same tool with the same file upload and you probably see them on Twitter or X posting all their SaaS tools on Reddit they all look the same they're all very similar yeah 100% alright so if I'm an MSP I want to learn more

[00:51:36] about this iBoss offering the three plans the partner program all that jazz who should I talk to where should I go yeah it's simple go to iBoss dot com iBOSS dot com and we have an MSP right under the partner section go to MSP there's a form there you fill actually if you're already a party already selling stuff you could literally be up and running same day our guys get back to you right away but we're ultra ultra focused all over the world i mean it's been explosive for us to Latin America Europe Asia the US

[00:52:05] but i think people are catching wind just because of the exponential difference and i think that those ones that are early are getting the you know they're getting in early and they're differentiating themselves so definitely we're here to support you awesome guys definitely check this out i mean there's a lot of promises here and i know we've heard this over years like the shiny thing in the window the single pane of glass we were always promised like i could probably go on and on but proofs in the pudding i think the biggest thing

[00:52:35] i take away from this other than another thing that can consolidate things and probably give you more bang for your buck is you can actually have a conversation with your customer and explain what happened and i think that alone changes your position and your perception to your customer night and day i've seen people lose their entire relationship with their customer because of like this conversation but going to the other part of what we said earlier how about you win business on this conversation

[00:53:04] like that changes that is a cool trick to go into a prospect and say hey let me come in here you know even if you're using it like for a day and i can tell you at the end of the day what's actually happening i mean that's a big promise but if you can deliver on that message that changes the conversation i think makes you look a lot better uh paul this is awesome uh you are you know i could probably do another hour with you without blinking yeah next time we talk i want to hear about all these patents because it's not easy to get a patent and you got a lot of them so

[00:53:34] that's real that's real eyebrow razor uh guys iboss.com iboss.com and then this session was absolutely recorded so you're probably listening on mspinitiative.com like subscribe download all that good stuff paul i will gladly have a beer with you and you know some somewhere along the line we'll talk shop all right my friend absolutely yeah thanks for having me you got it have a good one thanks