Securing the Digital Frontier | Interview with Karen Gondoly, CEO of LeoStream

Ryan Purvis 02:01:50
Hello, and welcome to the digital workspace works Podcast. I'm Ryan Purvis, your host supported by producer Heather big now, in the series, you'll hear stories and opinions from experts in the field story from the frontlines, the problems they face, how they solve them. The areas they're focused on from technology, people and processes to the approaches they took that will help you to get to grips with a digital workspace inner workings.

welcome Karen, to the Digital Workspace Works podcast you want introduce yourself, please?

Karen Gondoly 02:02:24
Sure, thank you very much. My name is Karen Gondoly. I am the CEO of a software company called Leo stream.

Ryan Purvis 02:02:30
Great. And you want to tell us what the digital workspace means to you and your company.

Karen Gondoly 02:02:35
So for us, what it all is about is enabling users to work from anywhere, that's the great thing when your workplace is digital. As you move around, you always can access it, if you have the right tools, you know, I don't need to have my physical laptop anymore. I can log in from anywhere and get access. So really, to me, that's the key is the digital workspace really enables the modern workplace, which is work from anywhere access to what you need, whenever you need it.

Ryan Purvis 02:03:01
Great. And you before we started recording, you mentioned that security was very important to what you guys do. I mean, how does that come into what your product does different to to the others?

Karen Gondoly 02:03:10
Well, what we do so what Leo stream provides is the technical name of the product is the remote desktop access platform. It's a bit of a mouthful. And you know, in the olden days people call it VDI, which is kind of a dying term. And now you talk about desktops as a service. But for us, it's really, it's about remote access. And when you are giving people access to data and applications that they are not physically near, what you need to be doing is making sure that you're securing that access. So the right people are logging in and only getting the right access. So we allow people to architect zero trust concepts into that remote access. I mean, we're not a full we're not like a Z scalar. We're not a full zero trust appliance. But it's about giving people the tools so that they can ensure the security by implementing the zero trust concepts because really zero trust it's not a real applications. It's a bunch of concepts. And that's what we want people to do using our platform.

Ryan Purvis 02:04:06
Great. So how would somebody implement that? I mean, what would be the starting point to bring your product in? And why would they do it? Primarily, I mean, common use cases?

Karen Gondoly 02:04:15
Well, there's a few really so we do a lot currently with organisations, enterprises that have power users who are doing complex data analysis or visualisation, basically, high performance, compute, I have high performance graphics. So for these, like post production media and entertainment engineers, who wants to be able to work from anywhere, but the media industry wants to keep the data which is very proprietary, nobody wants their, their show leaked before it's ready to go to the theatre. So to make it secure, they keep that data locked away, either in their data centre, or maybe up in the private network in the cloud, and give these editors access to that data to do their jobs from anywhere means that they can hire from anywhere, provide people with kind of that work life balance that we're all talking about now. So that's just one particular use case. And what we give people, we sell downloadable software, so it's not a service, we give you our platform, and then they can instal it wherever makes sense for them. So flexibility to pick the cloud, they want to host their in from structure, maybe have some things on prem that way, again, it's about security, the organisation not doesn't just know the data plane, they own the control plane to the piece that's implementing their multi factor authentication rules, and enforcing all of their access control rules, the organization's get ahold and own that as well. And so again, security, they own everything.

Ryan Purvis 02:05:42
So so so for an end user experience. And I'm trying to remember what we used to use back in the days that I was involved in the stuff. So we would have like a remote desktop application, you deploy your iPad, they would connect you in through Z scaler. As you mentioned, you would have your own app, there would be someone's there, but then you've provided a mechanism for the administrators to manage that path in with the right kind of security, the entitlements of software, and that sort of thing. Is that is that the right understanding?

Karen Gondoly 02:06:09
Yeah, pretty close. So our platform has, there's two bits. One is what we call the connection broker. So it's where it is going to define the access control rules. It's where they're going to indicate who has access to what for how long, and what happens if that user goes idle. And then there's the gateway part of our platform, which is essentially the VPN replacement. So now, instead of opening up your network, the connection broker intelligently tells a Leo stream gateway, okay, this user is logged in, at this particular time from this particular location, here's what they're allowed to connect to. And then the gateway intelligently opens up that network traffic for the user instead of opening up the network at large.

Ryan Purvis 02:06:46
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, that's very similar to what I would have worked with as well. Well, so what is the value proposition to the business nowadays? I mean, is it about throughput? To do they are they trying to get more users empowered to work remotely? Or do you think it's still about just any device anywhere, anytime,

Karen Gondoly 02:07:02
there's a few things. One, there's definitely some of that any device anywhere, anytime aspect. But then it's also, again, about security. One of the keys is, you know, people are very protective of their data right now. And you want to ensure that you can allow people to work from anywhere, while also keeping your corporate resources secure. So a big motivator for all of this that helps a company mitigate risks associated with losing data. And then also you can, using a platform such as ours, or any other kind of remote access platform, you can mitigate the risk of loss production time, because now if a user can't come in for the day employee and can't come in, they can work from home. And that allows them to not lose that time. Because time is money, obviously.

And that's another big thing is saving money, we see a lot of people migrating workloads up to the cloud, but the cloud costs can run away from people if they're not managing. When is my compute running? Do I have capacity I don't need. And so that's some of the other things that a tool like RS provides is automation for it. So it will spin up instances in the cloud as demand grows, and then tear them back down and terminate them when the demand goes away. Because the last thing it wants to do is be constantly controlling and monitoring these things. For us. Another big benefit is just simplifying it it's about making it so that these are the poor it staffs that are now kind of getting understaffed and overworked. Having tools that allow them to easily manage multiple platforms from a single pane of glass, have ways to easily automate tasks so that they can concentrate on more important things.

Ryan Purvis 02:08:40
Oh, yeah. And I was actually an asked the question on scaling, I'm glad you brought up because I forgot about it. Because that's one of the things that that's always been the trickiest is teaming with those seasonal increases, not only from a, you know, the business is not seasonal, like, you know, accounting periods rolling over that sort of thing. But also, some businesses will have worked with UAE for many years ago, we that hire a whole lot of people to work on the tournament. So they have to spin up the environments for people who can the tournament, the tournament last, you know, couple of months, and then have to shut it all down again. And in the old days, they would buy laptops, and then it's at the laptops in the cupboard, and then they would have to read, you know, as the period came close, they have to read all the laptops, and then you obviously have, you know, capacity problems here, because only so many laptops can rebuild at a time and all that sort of stuff. So this kind of stuff makes a lot of sense there. And I was curious about with, you know, obviously, Citrix has been a player in this space for a long time. And the move to clouds, you know, Amazon has AWS has the offerings for desktop as a service. Microsoft has various offerings as your desktop, Microsoft desktop, and we should note is, are you seeing any sort of preference to either of those offerings a lot, our customers still building their own things internally and exposing it out to it using some sort of an on premise hybrid, and cloud, I guess, would be my three categories. Well, what do you see?

Karen Gondoly 02:09:51
A little of everything, really, and because different solutions are going to be better for different user groups. And so there are use cases where Windows 365, particularly if an organisation is a Microsoft shop, Windows 365 will be great for a fleet of task workers. There are cases where Amazon WorkSpaces or workspaces core is going to be great, particularly now that you can bring your office 365 licence in there. So that's maybe for your knowledge users, you want to use something like that. If you have, if you've purchased a lot of hardware that you want to continue using, that's all on prem, but you want people to be able to access that when they're not on prem as well. So the key is that, look for the solution that's best for your end user. And then look for a tool that simplifies the access to that. Because you will, as a larger enterprise, you know, if you're a 25 user enterprise, maybe not so much. It's not really an enterprise. But if you're a large enterprise, you want to use the correct tool for the different types of users. And then have one single pane of glass portal where people can go to get everything, and it can go to manage it. Because that way, you're providing the best experience for the user by simplifying access, and also giving them the right resource in a way that is going to hopefully optimise costs for the organisation use smaller instance sizes for users who are just maybe doing some word processing, while use your on prem GPU enabled workstations for the users who are doing the complex, large data set applications.

Ryan Purvis 02:11:26
Well, I guess that's a good question. Are you seeing because I remember we used to have that sort of concept of a not really a knowledge worker but a very thin layer worker, someone that you know, really was spending most of their time in very basic, well, Outlook for sure. Maybe a bit of worried a little bit of PowerPoint. And then Excel was kind of that one that was in the middle because sometimes Excel would just be a very basic spreadsheet, you know, 20 30 rows, couple of worksheets. any other sort of person dealing with 100,000 rows? or more? Do you see it that granularly in the sense of a very thin layer that you're offering? And then the power user that you mentioned becoming more and more delivered this way? Are they still putting them in physical desktops that you're connecting to?

Karen Gondoly 02:12:05
I think the power users are moving away from the physical desktops. And some of that is well, at least recently, some of that is you know, whether it was hard to get a GPU, so. So it was easier to rent, quote, unquote, GPUs in the cloud. If you wanted to do anything related to AI or something, you were just going up and moving into the cloud instead of buying physical hardware. And to your point earlier, it's expensive to buy hardware, it's going to age out. And if you can rent that in a cloud, then that's a much easier solution and more cost effective from the organisation.

Ryan Purvis 02:12:37
Yeah, I mean, I remember we were doing migrations at a time and the business case that was there was signed off was based on hardware reclamation being the same, but to your point around data retention, that was always going to be the higher value return by moving people to I say, get rid of physicals, but but reducing the amount of data on the physicals and having it all held in a data centre that was secured. And especially, you know, most cloud environments are very secure. And I'm just wondering, do you guys, when you sell your product, you get into a value conversation? Do you do you say, Well, this is how this is why you need to do this, here's your benefits of having a remote desktop access control system.

Karen Gondoly 02:13:13
You know, it's funny, we tend to be brought in a little later, I think, in the sales cycle, just as the way things work out, because we're just a small slice of the stack. So somebody who's already started thinking about moving to the cloud. And so they already have kind of wrapped their head around some of the benefits of why they would want to do that. And now what they're trying to figure out is, how do they manage that in a way that optimises the environment and simplifies it? So we are trying to move ourselves up in the conversation. But right now, that tends to be where our focus is, when we talk with people?

Ryan Purvis 02:13:41
Yeah, the reason why I asked that question is I spent a lot of time personally, with customers that have bought a solution. They've spent, you know, six, seven figures on it. And they're saying, Well, I bought this thing, but I don't see the value. Like why have I got this thing? And you got to almost, there was a business case that was done, you know, six months, 12 months, 18 months ago? And you gotta go back to the original business case and say, Well, this is why you justified it. Okay, now we're fast forwarding, and you got away with it, then. But now you got to justify it again and find those levers. Is it a risk mitigation? Is the cost save? Is it a productivity gain? That's pretty much the main three, usually, and then tie that to those use cases. So if you had a mobile workforce, you're you're saying, well, your mobile workforce is much more productive, because they're on the on the road and able to access using this technology, and do the work without having to, you know, find a hotel or restaurant with WiFi, or whatever, you know, whatever the thing is, that's why I was the question because it becomes very common to keep back justifying, but reinforcing why this is a valuable part of the solution.

Karen Gondoly 02:14:41
Right, right. And it's funny, because you said something that made me remember, a particular customer that I've worked with who came to Leo stream after they had done the business justification and invested in a system and built it all up, and then realised, oh, this system's not working for me. And then they came to Leo stream and said, Please, please deliver me the hail Mary and make this work. And we did. And so it's, it's those things. That's why I'm saying if we can get higher up in the conversation, the same these business use cases and these business initiatives that you're trying to solve, you can do them with a digital workplace and a remote access Lucent solution, you just have to be cognizant of all the different pieces that are coming into play and choose the best of breed to make sure that you can get to where you want to go. Yeah.

Ryan Purvis 02:15:26
I'm curious, Where did the name come from?

Karen Gondoly 02:15:28
So I mentioned earlier, one of our founders is from South Africa, the other is from the UK. And in the UK, there was a tea shop that had the first computing device, the name of which was Leo, and this was essentially a computer quote, unquote, that may change for the for the tea shop. So that is where the Leo, part of the name came from. The stream part is kind of lost in urban legend to me, I've heard many stories from the tea shop was on a stream, too. It just sounded nice together. But the Leo part is definitely the computer.

Ryan Purvis 02:16:05
Well, yeah, I mean, I think stream makes sense from a your streaming data backwards and forwards. So...

Karen Gondoly 02:16:10
Right. Well, the curious thing is our company was around since 2002. So well, before the day of remote access or VDI, or anything it was we started in the land of virtual servers and doing physical, virtual machine conversions. So that's why I started to think that maybe it was just stream sounded nice. Yeah.

Ryan Purvis 02:16:25
I mean, I think it's a great No, I was I was hoping the South African connection would come in with some sort of lion story or something, you know, epiphany in the bush would have been a great, great story. So I mean, we're gonna say end of the year. I mean, what are your feelings around market for 2024? And any big plans for the company or your customers?

Karen Gondoly 02:16:44
Yeah, we have a whole bunch of interesting stuff going on. We're kind of looking at you know, I was I was speaking with someone who said, Well, the big Question is, well, how are you always wrapping AI into your platform? And we always say, well, it's you really don't want AI controlling your access control rules, you want to lock those down yourself. But it is true that AI can come into play in the scheme of a remote access environment, because you want to, again, you don't want people running these AI tools on their own laptops, maybe you want to lock them away so that they can't cut and paste to their own corporate device and things like that. So we're starting to look at how do we enable those kinds of workflows more what additional tools will we need to disable cut and paste through our html5 Viewer, for example, and, and things like that, we're also doing a lot of work to make it easier to schedule access, you know, if you think of some use cases of labs of computers that are locked away, obviously, in the corporate building, but you want to give remote access to them. So you want to do that based on, you know, what students are accessing that lab and a particular type of day, or what project is going on. So we're looking at some calendar integration, so you can schedule access based on time. So that'll be kind of cool. So yeah, there's some, there's some good things going down, I think, you know, the, what we have been calling remote access and work from home is now just kind of the modern way of working, it's going to remain hybrid for as long as I can see. And so we just want to make sure that we can support that organisations in the way that works best for them.

Ryan Purvis 02:18:13
I mean, I could think of a few AI implementations for you guys. I mean, you know, while you were talking about time based access, I was thinking about, you know, some of the security things like, you know, if you've got users logging in outside of their normal working hours, you'd want to be flagging that, engage them and asking them, why are you logging on now, you know, there was when I was not, I wasn't involved in it. But prior to joining UBS, we caught the whale, who was doing illegal trades. And they figured that out, because he was logging in outside of his normal working hours. So you know, there's because you've got basically the channel from the person's location into the business, you can profile the users quite well, you know, not necessarily by person, but a nominal, you know aggregations of things and see some stuff.

And then from a health and wellness point of view, people that are spending too much time working, right, that's good, especially if you go into Europe, where I mean, you can't send an email to a French company, I think, in a German company outside of working hours, are expected to be responded to same as you could be locking down people's access. So they're not working outside of working hours. So you know, a learning mechanism, not necessarily a charity to be thing, but just a basic machine learning thing as a basic, but you don't I mean, learning learning behaviours, and making recommendations. And also, going back to those seasonal things, people always have an opinion of where the seasonal things are. But because you're managing the connection, you've got the data that tells you well actually drain seven to nine, it's actually not a busy time, it's nine to 10 is the worst time because that's everyone dropped the kids off at school, they're logging in to get on that first meeting, that's when you need to have capacity. So you can pre warm up capacity and like kind of stuff. So those are just things I was thinking about TG just normal applications of machine learning or even

Karen Gondoly 02:19:52
like that. Those are some good ones. I'm glad we're recording this. Yeah.

Ryan Purvis 02:19:58
Well, I mean, you know, my background has been in user experience. So you know, constantly thinking about how do you make the end user have the least amount of friction possible to do their jobs. So a person that using Excel, and they're doing more than 65,000 lines worth of Excel grows? They need to be on the 64 bit version versus 32 bit versions? But then also, what kind of machine are they on? Are they backed off to a physical device or two? Yeah, I think it comes down to what they're doing as a jump function. That's where that question was coming from. And then, you know, these other things that get people on calls all day long, do they really need to be on a remote session into a call? Or could they be on an app on a phone? That sort of thing? Do you find that you're going down? Or you're considering a headless route to remote access, so not having to go through a session but actually go through sort of a backdoor back channel, but but a sort of hidden behind something else as your connection into your VPN? Stream?

Karen Gondoly 02:20:49
Yeah, we haven't even we haven't really considered that. And so that's another interesting idea, out of this call.

Ryan Purvis 02:20:56
I was just thinking about in the sense of, you know, very much an API economy, I think is coming up. More and more. Now we're, you know, there's only so many ways you can build a front end. And I must say, we've perfected it. But you see the same thing. Starting to repeat, once someone gets a good idea, and people started liking it, then you see like a whole bunch of them follow the same. Yeah. So in order to get your product to market faster, instead of worrying about the UI, you build the API layer or the services or the protocols that people can use. And you're just basically providing the mechanism to deliver on the service and someone else worries about the UI.

Karen Gondoly 02:21:28
Yeah, we'll get there. We've we started building a RESTful API for the entire product. So you can configure a do everything from something. Yes. i But we're at the very early stages of that.

Ryan Purvis 02:21:37
Yeah, it's a bit it's a big mind set shift to do that stuff. Because, you know, obviously, when you building the app yourself, you take on the shortcuts, but you take certain decisions that get you there to get the product out. But when you think about API's and thinking about all the people All the people are going to use them and how they're going to use them. You got to really think about, you know, obviously everything but a lot of stuff you hadn't thought about before. So it can be can be tricky.

Karen Gondoly 02:22:00
Yeah. I was gonna say just we found that developing features at the same time trying to build the API to support it. And the features that were already in there as tricky as well

Ryan Purvis 02:22:13
building the plane while you're flying. Yes. Yeah, good. Good. I don't have any other 3d thoughts right now. Anything else you want to share? Or do you want to people you get in contact with you?

Karen Gondoly 02:22:24
Yeah, sure. You know, if you want to learn more about Leo stream, we've got a website https://leostream.com/. Pretty straightforward. And, ya know, we look forward to helping really any industry, any workflow, any cloud, we got, you

Ryan Purvis 02:22:35
just want a thought? I mean, do you guys do a trial with anybody? I mean, could they come and see how your product works? Somehow? Is there a demo environment?

Karen Gondoly 02:22:43
Yeah, yeah, if you go through our website, you can schedule a demo, you can request a free trial, I suggest the demo first because it our product is, you know, it's enterprise software. It's pretty robust, don't use word complex. It's pretty robust. There's a lot of features and functionality. So really, if you can see it in action with somebody, one of our sales engineers who are really, really smart, you can watch them step you through it, and then you'll, you can hear people on the phone go, Oh, I get it. But if you hand it to them, they might be a little less likely to be like, Oh, I get it. So I suggest ask for a demo. We're happy to do one.

Ryan Purvis 02:23:16
Yeah, I mean, you know, there's a there's a product that I work with a lot. It's exactly, it's a technical product. So you have to, you have to know a little bit more about what you're looking at, just just to understand the benefits sometimes of what you're getting. But I've enjoyed talking to you. And I think the product looks really good. From what I've seen on the website and what we've talked about, I think it's in a good space. And I look forward to seeing how you guys do and perform in the market. So please do keep in touch

Karen Gondoly 02:23:39
Fantastic. It's been a pleasure Ryan.

Great stuff. Thanks, Karen.

Take care.

Ryan Purvis 02:23:44
Oh, do you wanna give your LinkedIn profile as well? Or they can find it LinkedIn?

Karen Gondoly 02:23:47
I guess everything's under Leo stream. Yeah, there's not a lot of live streams around there. So

Ryan Purvis 02:23:52
great stuff. Cool.

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