The “Don’t Touch It” Problem Hiding on Your Plant Floor

Jeff [00:00:00] Technology If it's not Helping us save time, save money, save, from errors or inconsistencies.

Jeff It's not benefiting us in some way then what's the point? Right? That it should be doing those things for us. Shouldn't be making life more difficult. It should be making it easier so that we can actually move on to the things that really truly matter and the things that really bring value to whatever we're doing whether it's in the business of the operational space, whatever the case is.

Intro - Outro Welcome to the Industrial Cybersecurity Insider. In each episode, we dive into the world of industrial cybersecurity. Join us as we cover the latest trends, innovations, and practical insights as we talk with leaders and practitioners across the industry. Gear up and let's get into this week's episode.

Dino Hi, I'm Dino Boos Flocken and today we have a guest. His name is Jeff Slapp from SteelDome. Welcome to the show [00:01:00]

Jeff Thank you, Dino. Glad to be here.

Dino Yeah. So, first I guess let's talk about your journey from however you wanna do it, from where you started to where you are today, or if you want to start from today going back, that's up to you.

Dino So tell us a little bit about yourself and the role that you have at, SteelDome.

Jeff Yeah, no, I, I appreciate that. That's a great place to start. Quite a journey to say the least, the last, nearly now 30 years of my career which, has flown by in a blink of an eye. I guess I must be doing stuff that I like because they say time flies when you're having fun so...

Jeff I started very fortunately starting my career, my professional career back in the, the late '90s, intersecting with, a small technology, called VMware back in, 1998. And I, I wasn't working for VMware but I got introduced th- the year they started and, it was actually through, another, professional services firm that I was working with at the time with my current employer.

Jeff And one of the first questions that, came to mind was why would

[00:02:00] anybody wanna do this? Because, you think about the hardware that we had back in the late '90s and it wasn't, overpowered b- by any stretch right, like no- nothing like what we have today. but it was very, very, forward thinking i- in terms of the hardware that would be coming down the road.

Jeff certainly around the, the 2005, 2006 timeframe when processors started to become multi-core and we started to see this, this, this major revolution in, in, in hardware advancement. but it was very clear, very quickly after using the technology that it was not just some neat little tool, but it was gonna be a very transformative technology and of course that technology along with everything else that developed around it, whether it was a competitor or something complimentary to it, it transformed what we now know today.

Jeff It's what gave birth to cloud technologies and all the offshoots of that and even arguably the things that we do now in, in the AI space, and everything that comes down that road is just building blocks upon building blocks. So, so I, I say what I [00:03:00] said in terms of, yeah I was very fortunate to intersect with that very early 'cause, pretty much everything that I did from that point forward for the next 25, plus years involved that type of technology and, whether it was storage or compute virtualization or networking it was al- it all touched, all those, those core components.

Jeff And I'd worked for a, a multitude of companies over the, over that, that time, software companies, hardware companies, OEMs, private companies, public companies, you know the whole run. And then that kind takes us now to, what we're doing here at Steel Dome and I'm, I'm one of the cofounders here at Steel Dome but I'm head of product development here.

Jeff And what we're doing, with Steel Dome specifically with our StrataSystem operating system Is really building upon everything that, the industry and myself personally, as an operator had learned over those, 25 years prior. the things that worked, the things that didn't work, all right?

Jeff The things that could be much better than what they were. and that was both in terms of the [00:04:00] technology as well as the business, because we solve tremendous problems today technologically, but a lot of organizations that bring that technology, tend to, Break that a little bit in terms of, the business model that they wrap around it, right?

Jeff So in other words like what I like to say, with folks that I talk to, you can have the greatest technology on Earth but if no one can access it and no one can afford it then really what do you have? That's- that's a problem so we work very hard now to, to bring all of the aspects of the technology as well as, the accessibility like we say where, we're built for the enterprise but we're made accessible to all.

Jeff That's a very important philosophical foundation of our- of our organization. So, so now with, with SteelDome what we've been doing for the last five plus years is we've been building the what we call a universal infrastructure operating system, and what that means is simply, it c- contains all the core services and frameworks that you need, all the essential building blocks that you need to really [00:05:00] build any type of system that you want whether it's,a single node, single service type, system like let's say you're deploying, a file service or remote access service or logging service all the way up through, tier one production workload applications like you typically find today with, VMware style type workflow t- of, platforms that are out there.

Jeff Things that you would run your, your main line of business applications on all the way up through AI HPC superclusters and, hyperscaler type clusters, right? It's the same operating system that takes you through all of those,various pillars of- of, infrastructure evolution and everybody starts at a different point which is,you know every w- every company has got its set of requirements today, but, a year from now, two years from now, five years from now and beyond those requirements are gonna be very different, and having the right technology, specifically in the form of the right software, is gonna take you through that journey with a- a lot less pain an- and, a- a lot less brain damage and a lot less just overall burden on the staff, to be able to manage and operate it and maintain that throughout [00:06:00] its life cycle.

Jeff So that's really the- the heart around what we built around the software. hopefully that helps set the stage for- for, what we're gonna talk about obviously, r- as it relates to OT There's a lot to discuss there because there's a lot of intersections with- with the- the technology was built on that comes into play very much so in the, operational technology space so...

Dino Yeah, so let's talk about OT which is the world in which I operate in. and so we met how long has it been now? I guess it's been a handful of months th- since this year, through a mutual colleague o- of- of ours, with his unique technology that he's bringing into that unified workspace which is how we got into the- into being engaged with SteelDoe, right?

Dino and so I guess what I would ask is what have you witnessed or have learned so far in regards to the operational world, the manufacturing world compared to, the enterprise obviously the, the data center world? and re- and how a, a technology like SteelDome would be applicable in manufacturing environments or the industrial world?

Jeff it's [00:07:00] interesting and I, and I'm not, I'm not, shy to say this, 'cause I'm a very transparent individual. before I met you Dino and some of the others that have kinda pulled me into the OT space, I, I didn't even... I wouldn't have been able to probably properly define what OT was. even though I've been in the IT space for my, my entire professional career now, 30 years, I don't know if I could've defined that properly.

Jeff And, it was very interesting because in all the years that I had been in the data center operation space, right, building data centers, operating data centers, and all of the, the physical, the, the physical plant components of the data center, all of those technologies, those OT style technologies were all around me and I didn't even realize it 'cause I was so principally focused on the things that were in the rack, right?

Jeff Once you got the power and you got the path and you got the ping and the pipe as they say in the data center space, once you have that delivered to the rack, my world started at the servers, the storage networking, and everything that was [00:08:00] contained in there to run the software whatever the, whatever the platform was that we were running for a customer or the, the customers spe- specific software that they needed for their business.

Jeff And n- didn't even realize that all this, technology was around me, all this very critical technology. everything from, the electrical control systems to, to safety systems, fire suppression systems, all these things. w- Now that I s- step back I was like, "Wow, it was right there in front of me the whole time."

Jeff I just, I never, never saw it. Now, that may be a good thing or a bad thing. Maybe if you're not seeing it that means that's a good thing 'Cause, everything's working as it should be and, and you shouldn't see it perhaps. But,now that I'm deeper into this, and doing now what we're doing here at Steel Dome for the last, several years, there's a, there's a tremendous intersection here.

Jeff and really where th- that comes down to is it's really a, in alignment with the philosophies that we've had since day one, as I understand it now. And I'm I don't, I don't ever use the word expert to describe, anything that I do 'cause there's always someone out there smarter than me. But, [00:09:00] but what I know about OT today is that there are some very, very critical things that have to happen, e- every single time, and that's of course around security.

Jeff it's around,availability uptime of, whatever those services are. and a lot of times they're in, they're life critical services in some cases Yep. so being able to deliver, the software in this case, right? The thing that actually makes the hardware do something useful, whe- whether that's collecting logs or remote access or controlling, some sort of plant function within the building, whatever it happens to be, it's gotta be done reliably, it's gotta be done simply and consistently, and that's really the, the core philosophy around, what we do here at SteelDome.

Jeff so the intersection was very apparent. To, to be able to get everybody out of the weeds having to deal with, the down in the, the nuts and bolts of how a system works, right? Saving time and saving frustration and headache in deploying these applications, whatever they happen to be for a particular setting.

Jeff [00:10:00] and of course, the biggest thing, which is y- one of the biggest problems not just in OT I would suspect, but probably in, in every aspect of, o- of IT, 'cause how many times have we ever heard this: so and so installed this three years ago. Well, they're no longer with the company. We have no idea what the heck he did, so we're just kinda, figuring it out," or, "No one touches it."

Jeff they don't touch it 'cause they don't wanna break it, right? So there's, there's an inconsistency component here that's very problematic. and it's systemic around all IT type systems including OT. So when you have a platform that b- can be consistently deployed securely, consistently and very easily without burdening the operator or the folks that have to maintain these systems, and of course also making it very interchangeable so when things do have to change it's very simple to go from say one hardware platform to another, that's a huge win.

Jeff And again, that philosophy or those philosophies are inherent, throughout everything that we do with Steel Dome, so it, it makes, it makes a lot of sense, why,now working in the OT space like we are, why, why it's, it's having the impact that it is. [00:11:00]

Dino Yeah. I, I... One of the reasons that, that drew me in was what you just said, right?

Dino Because one, the industrial environment is very slow to change, right? Their life cycle is very different compared to the IT world. There are a lot of proprietary systems out there in these environments to the detriment of people that have come and gone that, that expertise is no longer there, right?

Dino Systems that have been in there for a decade or two, longer. and as we look for, a managed services program, which is starting to grow in the OT environment, we all know what MSPs are in the IT world, big business, been around for years and years and years. we're starting to see because of the complexities that are coming into these manufacturing environments

Dino I mean, we still got clients that haven't even virtualized, a lot of their control systems run HMIs. I would say, some have been more advanced, been doing it for 15 or more years. Last few companies like Rockwell have been selling their industrial data center which was a virtual platform to run a lot of that stuff on.

Dino But we still find... But it's not throughout the entire [00:12:00] plan they might have VMs. If you got 500 HMIs in your plant, you might have a third, two-thirds of them might be VMs. You still got standalone machines out there, right? At the same time, we're bringing in more applications, specifically around cybersecurity, AI being another one.

Dino it's like, okay, the plants don't necessarily have that infrastructure per se, And, and the resources and time and money to build that infrastructure to run these things on is hard to get, right? I mean, you usually have to rely on capital projects normally t- to do that. and that's what kind of drew us in, from a design group perspective, is we have to have a different approach on how we're gonna provide managed services across, hundreds of clients across thousands of plants with thousands of applications.

Dino How are we gonna manage that, right? What is that workspace gonna look like? And so working with organizations such as yours and the Kasm guys is starting to, to formulate a picture on how we might be able to do that, right? And then you might be able to expand a little bit further on that [00:13:00] relationship with SteelDome and why Kasm and, and why that makes a difference.

Dino And I also want you to be able at some point to talk about the Kubernetes piece because that's another thing that's really big in the business that we're doing on the data center side for power management systems and the building automation systems that you were kind of touching around in the data center, right?

Dino The things around the datas that are not the clean room but the stuff around it.

Jeff Yeah. Yeah. lots to unpack there. So let me start with the Kasm piece 'cause I think that'll flow very naturally into these, those other components. So about two and a half, maybe even three years ago now, have to look at the calendar but if somewhere in that, that timeframe we discovered a technology called Kasm.

Jeff And at that point in our, at our product evolution, we'd already had essentially the storage and the compute layers defined. We already knew what we were gonna be doing in that space in terms of the platform, what the capabilities were. But the one thing that we were missing which initially we hadn't even really looked at, but it became very apparent very quickly that

[00:14:00] it- it's now the essential piece to what we do because if you think about any system, you've got the storage where the data lives, right?

Jeff And that could be... It could be anything. In our world because we're a software defined storage system, right, we're actually the storage engine itself, right? We're not just ... I mean, we're actually in the IO path so we are the storage that your application sees. whatever that hardware happens to be underneath of it, it doesn't make any difference, right?

Jeff Software defined 101, right? So you've got this, you got the data on the storage and then you've got the hypervisor, the compute layers that utilize that data, right? And that, and that in today is in the form of, VMs and/or containers, right? Kubernetes, Docker, Podman, all of that support within the platform.

Jeff But then the piece that we, it became very apparent that we needed was we need the access layer, right? And that's ... And we weren't gonna go out and build 'cause that wasn't, that's not our expertise. So we had to make a decision that, w- we're not gonna go do this so how are we gonna do it? Well, the best way to do it is just to pick one of the best of breed technologies out there.

Jeff They're already doing [00:15:00] it exceptionally well and that was where Kasm came into the picture and that is, th- there's a lot of names for the technology Some people view it as, virtual desktop technology and it certainly can fulfill that requirement. we internally and to our- to our customers when we introduced this technology, or this capability, this layer, this third layer, we actually talk about it in terms of secure application delivery services 'cause that is very specifically what it is.

Jeff it's able to deliver now secure access to anywhere on any device, access to the data and the applications consistently, without all of the normal heavy lift type technologies that you would have to layer on to make that happen, right? It's all natively built in. And it was very simple to integrate that within our stack so that w- that was a no-brainer from our standpoint.

Jeff From an engineering standpoint,we- we checked the box. We have everything that we need now in terms of secure access delivering the applications whether they're behind the firewall outside the firewall both at the

[00:16:00] same time doesn't make any difference, right? And now we don't have to also worry about what type of device it is, what type of operating system they're running none of that makes any difference because all you need is a browser in order to access the applications and the data securely So...Um, so that really

Jeff That now..That filled out all three of the core components that you need in any infrastructure No matter whether you're talking OT IT in general Or any system Right You gotta have data to work onYou got to have applications working on that dataAnd then you got to have y-the ability todeliver those applications to your usersThose Those three c-components are requiredin any useful system unless it's an islandWhich are not very interestingrightYou have to have people accessingthis stuff to make itTo make it interestingSoumso thenOf courseNow with thisuhyou

Jeff knowAll of the differentapplications that we'redelivering someof them come informsofvirtual machinesSometimesit's ano--It'sappropriateto runYouknowawindowsorLinuxbasedUhOperatingSystemwiththatSpecificsoftwa repackagebecausethatshow it'sd deliverancefromThevendorandit'ssupportedsometimesyouhave theopportunityto deployitasumyou Knowa KubernetesBasedUhyouKnowcontainer [00:17:00] basedapplicationADockerApplicationandthere'sliterallymillions

Jeff to be able to utilize those, those software capabilities, right? The ability to go out and grab it and then activate it within the platform, and that's really the, the core foundation of what SteelDome is focused on is getting the operator out of the weeds on how all of that framework, right, the-the-the-the framing of the house and how the house was built, focusing on the things that matter, which is living in the house, running the applications, right, deciding on what, what type of furniture you wanna put in there and what kind of wallpaper you want, right?

Jeff The things that you're gonna be surrounded by every day. And the house is built now on best practice standards, and it didn't take you now nine months to build a platform. Now it took you an [00:18:00] hour or less, right, to deploy a full production platform. Now you can get down to the thing... the business of actually doing the useful work and generating results, right?

Jeff So we talk about time to results, time to value is tremendously accelerated, and that goes into all of these components and all these applications and all the frameworks that you need in order to even get to the point where you're deploying the application, right, which is where a lot of the time is spent, right?

Jeff Operators spend a tremendous amount of time deploying or even redeploying many times over before they get it right when you have a literal easy button, right? All of our services are pretty much just like a light switch. You just turn it on, and the work is done within our provisioning engine for you, so you don't have to worry about it.

Jeff So when it's all done after 90 seconds, you've got a full-blown Kubernetes cluster. You've got all your VM clustering and all your storage and all of your, now your secure application service delivery, services that you're gonna use through Kasm. That's all just, instant on type of capabilities, which now makes, your, your, again, your time to [00:19:00] results much, much faster.

Jeff - Those are the real value propositions that we talk about often

Dino Yeah, and, and from an engineering/system integrator perspective, there's a tremendous amount of value on that, right? To the time that you can save in not only the development but the deployment, right? 'Cause that's sometimes the bigger cost, and we never really quite know whether we're using the client's infrastructure and what that is or whether we're bringing something entirely new into the environment, right?

Dino and being able to, to, maybe control the amount of time for deployment, right, during project execution. that- that's really key to us, which is one of the things that I saw when we were beginning to look at the SteelDome platform, working with KAASM primarily around managed services and cybersecurity, which is usually what we're here to talk about is the cybersecurity, which also leads into, you know, operational integrity, process improvement.

Dino there, there's, there's some advantages on what cybersecurity technologies can provide to help re- reduce that disruption in the environment, right? Whether it's bad [00:20:00] behavior, bad actors, misconfigured devices, or just not having a really good understanding of how your environment's put together, right?

Dino I mean, the networks in some of these manufacturing facilities, it just doesn't seem like there's always a lot of thought behind how to add applications and systems to your network, right? No baseline, right? And s- and so, I c- I see SteelDome, as, as it grows, for those of you that are system integrators out there, I, I recommend you take a look at Steel Dome for the development of your control systems, packages that you're putting together for your clients.

Dino I think you'll find that it, th- there's a lot of value to what they can bring to, the scope of your job,

Jeff Yeah. And one of the main differentiators, just so everybody in the audience understands, if we were just coming out of the gate trying to just reproduce what everybody else was doing, that wouldn't be really too exciting, right?

Jeff then it would be just about who's cheaper, right? Because that's usually the conversation. The way that the system is designed is that it can be just a storage system if you just need [00:21:00] storage for the applications, it can be just a hypervisor or container-based system, or it can be both, right?

Jeff There's-- Even though they're f- each of the layers are fully integrated, i- including the, the Kasm and the secure application delivery services, right? All these things are fully integrated but they can also run fully independent of one another so that you don't have to over purchase, over buy all these features 'cause by the way we don't even license it based on features, it's based on, storage capacity for the StratoStore piece, node count for the StratoServe piece for the hypervisor and then just users, for the Kasm piece, right?

Jeff Very very simple because we decided that it, it really... it can be that simple why would we make it more difficult? Why would we make great technology and then make it impossible to understand how to license it and how to acquire it? So we wanted to, we wanted to really essentially, democratize the access to this type of technology, right?

Jeff Just not make it accessible to the largest organizations in the world but make it accessible to everybody and [00:22:00] this goes into which at some point I'm sure if it hasn't already and Dino you could probably tell me better than anybody, right? now that we're in the AI era, right, AI inevitably is gonna start intersecting these types of things and those require very specific,capable systems in terms of specifications and resources and services to be able to support those things and from what I know of OT there's a lot of logging, there's a lot of security, there's a lot of oh, watchdog capabilities that you have to have to have a very well run secured environment and AI of course as we know can do a lot of things really well but it can certainly tear through a lot of data very quickly to let you know where there's risks, where there's warnings, where there's danger spots no matter where it is in the plant or any of the systems that are related to it, to be able to make decisions quicker and t- And to possibly even save lives because a lot of this work in the OT space also encounters very dangerous environments [00:23:00] and having access to data and being able to make those decisions rapidly could mean life and death.

Jeff So I mean there's ,there's whole range of things there b-but having the right software foundation to allow you to turn those services up correctly we talk about all those components today, all the things that go into AI, but very, very little is talked about in terms of the foundation required to run them.

Jeff And that's, that's where we're coming in and trying to change that narrative an- and try to draw attention to the things that you need in order to even get to where you're talking about, at the upper layers. So very, very important aspect there.

Dino Yeah. It, A- a- and then obviously the technology's evolving very rapidly, especially around AI.

Dino and the challenge f- in the OT world is, being able to keep up. and having the resources and the expertise that you need doesn't exist at the OT layer, right? They really have to rely on, organizations like ours, because a lot of them, they don't design these systems. We design them for them.

Dino You want a new packaging line, clients don't build packaging lines. They just say, [00:24:00] "We got a new product. We're gonna put red goo in an, in a bigger can, and I need to be able to do 2,000 cans a minute," right? And then we go to work, being hired to go build the packaging line to be able to do that, right? From soup to nuts, right?

Dino That, that's, that's kind of the gist of it. and as AI comes in, as the cybersecurity is entered into the fray, they're going to have to start relying more and more on, on OT resources e- expertise outside of their organization, right? Instead of self-performing. We have a lot of clients that still try to self-perform, and it's very hard to keep up, right?

Dino Because these manufacturing environments, again, their life cycle's much different. they're kinda stagnant. They don't really have teams whose job it is to go out and research more about a company like SteelDoor, right? Or Chasm and/or, cybersecurity. Even if you build a security framework, I still don't have clients coming to us and say, "Here is the governance and framework that we need to operate in, to put in technology in my plant."

Dino it just, it doesn't exist. If it does, it's [00:25:00] It's not, complete, right? They really need us to fill in all the empty, gaps in their framework and/or their, their,strategy that they're trying to put forth. It's just it's, it's not there. And so, my view on OT is my peers and colleagues and competitors in this space are gonna have to start bringing this forward, right?

Dino And making it part of the solution because like I said, the life cycle's different. Secure by design as I like to call it, from a cybersecurity perspective do this... if you're gonna spend $20 million on a new packaging line or $50 million on an expansion or $400 million on a new plant, that's when you need to start thinking about how you're gonna group all this technology together, where these resources are gonna come from, and how are you gonna maintain it once you have it, right?

Dino 'Cause you put a plant out there in the middle of the South 40 of Iowa in the middle of some small cornfield town, you're not gonna have the expertise that you need to run that. Now, you can think globally, I still [00:26:00] come from the camp that you gotta act locally, right? Especially for all the reasons: quality reasons, performance reasons, safety reasons.

Dino you really have to know what's going on inside that facility day in and day out in order to, to execute, i- in an effective, efficient, safe manner. And, so you're gonna have to rely on, on third parties to help you just like IT has done, right? Why has IT handled all, hired all these professional services organizations to help them, right?

Dino Because they couldn't get the resources that they need and keep them and,and keep them around, right? Without having them bouncing around and losing them. we see that a lot. my view on this is it- it's not a, a technology issue as much as it is a people issue. I don't know if you see it differently or not, but in my world that seems to be the biggest challenge.

Jeff Oh yeah. Yeah. Well, people, people are ... Yeah, I've always said, there, when you-- Whether we were selling technology or using technology, it's people that do that, right, at the end of the day, right? If it wasn't for the people then there'd be not much to talk about and it absolutely. A- a- a- and everyth- And that's why when we talk about [00:27:00] having the right software, th- why we put so much emphasis on the software is because that's really the differentiating component 'cause we do live in a largely, commoditized hardware world.

Jeff software is the main differentiator and no matter what layer of the IT stack you're talking about. but having Technology that is both, standards and best practices based but also flexible. That it's not, it's not rigid, it's not siloed, right? It, it can be as, it can be as siloed as you wanna make it, but out of the box it's, it allows you to go where you need it to go based on your requirements today or the requirements they're changing tomorrow, whatever the case is.

Jeff And if you have the right software then you should be able to go through that journey pivoting, changing direction, changing speed, all the things that come at you over the years wh- no matter what happens and whether it's operational or business or both, and you should have the right platform to be able to go where you need to go without having the standard rip and [00:28:00] replace, and disruption, and migration, and all the time-consuming risky things, and all that stuff that goes with anything IT related.

Jeff y- if you have the right foundation, that makes that essentially completely transparent to the business, right? And that's, that's what we're talking about here. A- and particularly in OT like you said, standards are, very well defined as they should be, but you have to be able to change directions when you have to change direction, right?

Jeff And what does that mean? And what is ... What kind of Yeah. ... difference does that make? Yeah.

Dino And I think AI's gonna drive a lot of that 'cause the clients obviously see that coming, they see a lot of value and benefit for it, but how are you gonna be able to implement it without having a, a pretty good understanding of what is in your manufacturing facility?

Dino I, I still have clients that still don't recognize the assets they have in their environment, meaning they don't know what they are. They don't have a complete asset inventory per se, to be able to determine, "But can I use some of the existing stuff that I have?" I gotta rip and replace,

Dino e- even from that standpoint, without a, that good asset inventory I

[00:29:00] don't even know the risk and vulnerabilities that I have with the assets that I do have, and it's a push. I mean, and, and this whole IT/OT convergence you probably hear a lot about, I think it sounds great in theory, but in practice I don't really see that happen a lot, And I've s- I've said this in a lot of my podcasts and, and, maybe you've heard me say it, I don't, we don't receive correspondence with IT executives from manufacturing companies trying to figure out what it is that we're doing in our manufacturing plants every day, all day, designing and building, programming implementing, maintaining and supporting industrial environments for them.

Dino there's a-- it seems to be a

Jeff gap

Dino for some reason on that end. I haven't quite put my finger on the reason why. My gut tells me they don't want any part of it. And if that pays well then now the OT world has to grow and mature and start figuring this out on their own.

Jeff Yeah. Yeah. And, and like you said, there's gonna be, there's gonna be pressure points that are gonna require us to do that [00:30:00] faster than we have in the past.

Jeff There's no doubt.

Dino Yeah. 'Cause my com- my, my peers, colleagues, competitors, they would say the same thing. If I was talking to them it's like when's the last time you talked to a CIO or a CISO who's trying to implement AI in the manufacturing environment with the control systems that you're programming and designing and building for them?

Dino You are the machine builder So what, what are they trying to get you to do in order to assist them with that journey on AI? And I will tell you that we don't hear from them

Jeff Yeah. Yeah. and of course security is a big thing right across all spectrums of IT, it's certainly OT. You know what does the introduction of this one new service or this one new capability now due to our security posture, does this open up any doors that we missed?

Jeff Does this make us more vulnerable? This... does this expose us in ways that we hadn't thought of yet? And A-AI is gonna be part of that too because you're going to be able to, Y-you know people can't watch everything twenty four hours a day. You got to do other things. You're gonna be distracted.

Jeff People are gonna make mistakes and you gotta be able to [00:31:00] recognize and adapt those things as they occur in the environment Or you could be looking at risks to the business or to the operational environment as a whole That could be very detrimental Across the board So yeah It's an interesting era that we're in right now There's a lot of changes and they're coming fast so exciting but also Whew take a deep breath At the same time

Dino Well Is there anything that you would like to cover that we didn't cover In our discussion today

Jeff I think we hit all the major points Like I said am ,I’m very much looking forward to working With Barry Weymiller and your team And getting even deeper into the OT space And this is like I said Prior to my introduction to this space This was-- I wasn't nearly as Involved or even aware Of The breadth and depth of this particular space But [00:32:00] now it's very apparent Again I think aligns Very nicely with our core foundations Of how we approached it software Just like back in my early days Working with VM type technologies At the onset of my professional career It became quickly obvious That it was no brainer There's a lot of alignment there And that's exciting to see Because One of the things We always say As technologists here SteelDome And I've said All my entire career Technology If it's not Helping us save time, save money, save, from errors or inconsistencies.

Jeff It's not benefiting us in some way then what's the point? Right? That it should be doing those things for us. Shouldn't be making life more difficult. It should be making it easier so that we can actually move on to the things that really truly matter and the things that really bring value to whatever we're doing whether it's in the business of the operational space, whatever the case is.

Jeff And-and that's where our primary focus is a-and will continue to be right?

[00:33:00] That's-that's our goal So great t-- Great to be here with you today Dino

Dino Yeah thank you Thanks for taking the time

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