Samir, pleasure to see you. Thank you very much. Always love what Qualys is up to, and I'm excited to hear what's happening here.
Same same here. We're excited. We always love to innovate. That's the way we do things. So, looking forward to every Black Hat.
So, I'm sure people know who you are.
I hope so as well. But maybe just a quick word about your role.
CEO of Qualys, and what that means to you at the moment.
Yeah, I'm the CEO of Qualys now, but I've been at Qualys for 23 years. I started as one of the initial software engineers on the scanner back in the day when people used to scan once every 90 days and gave 90 days for IT to fix everything. Now, we're talking about 90 seconds, but it's been a great journey, and I'm excited to lead Qualys from an innovation perspective, changing with the industry, and helping customers create solutions that really make their life a lot easier.
Yeah. Yeah, Qualys has been a leading innovator for this industry, for sure, dating back many many years, of course.
So, what are you seeing in the market that leads you to how you look at innovation at Qualys today?
It's interesting in many ways. The basics of cybersecurity have not changed, even though the new technology that keeps coming changes. But no matter whether it's a brand new technology that comes, whether it was virtualization, was cloud, now it's AI, it's going to be quantum in the future, the basic questions that cyber teams have remain the same. Where's my stuff? Nobody knows, right? So, that's the big challenge. Second is, once I kind of figure out my inventory, what is my assessment of my inventory? Third thing that comes out of that is, no matter who you are, you will never be able to fix everything that comes out of an assessment, which means that prioritization is important, whether it's AI or cloud, prioritization becomes important. And then at the end of the day, you can do all of that and you can build dashboards, and like I like to say, you can have dashboard tourism, but if you don't fix it, it's of you no use. So, our ability to remediate has always been there. I think what has changed now is the speed at which all of this is needed because the speed that technology is enabling attackers to use frontier models and to be able to do things that actually are helping them get quicker and faster. And so, it's a game of cat and mouse.
Yeah. When I was building software, it was always the dashboard. Where is it? Where are the reports? Where are the dashboards?
That's not going to help you in 90 seconds.
Yeah, it's not. Because today if you look at the CISA board asking government agencies to fix things in 3 days, if you look at people talking about zero-day remediation, can I get things fixed in the first 24 hours? You just cannot do that by having somebody look at a dashboard. And so, some form of autonomous remediation is going to be very important. And again, forget the technology, whether it's AI or this or that. I think when the attackers are using AI, and you know, when your board is saying, 'Hey, how are you going to fight autonomous AI-based exploitation?' Your response cannot be, 'We're going to hire more people.' Your response has to be we're going to enable some form of autonomous remediation capability as a roadmap. And that's where that dashboard is not part of that. You got to be able to make decisions to fix things quick and fast.
Yeah. Just like, you know, Qualys, hopefully do it justice, but just like Qualys initially helped security teams scale, vulnerability management are in that same position now, especially looking at AI.
Yes, very much. It's about leveraging that technology for an outcome, right? So, back then it wasn't about the fact that, you know, SaaS and we were the first one in SaaS and cloud. It was that using the SaaS and cloud technology, we enabled a scale that was not possible back then or with on-prem solutions. People were able to actually scan their stuff every hour, 4 hours. So, now what we are doing is really enabling that scale leveraging AI to say, 'Yes, you can detect, prioritize, and get things fixed in the first 24 hours.' Because of AI.
Yeah. Those are the three pillars.
Those are the three pillars, yes.
