752 Get Hard with Senteon's Zach Kromkowski

[Uncle Marv]
Hello friends, Uncle Marv here with another episode of the IT Business Podcast, the show for IT professionals. We talk about a lot of stuff, talk about product stories and tips, and we try to help you run your business better, smarter, and faster. This is the Wednesday live show, so if you are watching either live or later on video, we do this just about every Wednesday of the year.

We're coming down to the last few shows. I've got tonight, I've got next week where I have another guest on, and then the week after that is the year-end holiday show. And that will be it.

I'm taking off because the week after that is Christmas. I'm not going to do a show with you folks on Christmas Day, so that's what's going to happen. And then I'll see you guys next year.

It'll be fantastic. I do want to say thank you to everybody because this has been a great year. I looked back as I was starting to compile the number of shows that I did in trying to calculate this year's podcast winners.

A lot of shows, folks. So I mentioned that just to get this out of the way up front. The voting is up.

So if you're familiar with the show, voting is up for the 2024 Podcast Awards. If you're not familiar with the show or you're a new listener or new watcher, every year at the end of the year, I ask listeners to vote on what they consider to be the best episode, the best guest, and the best vendor swag. So I know that I talk about vendor swag when I get back from conferences, but some of you guys like to chime in and say, no, this was better.

So you will get the chance to do that. I've already gotten some responses. And I do want to say this.

I need some listeners to come on the show and vote for somebody because so far I think I've gotten eight votes and all of them are guests who come on and vote for themselves. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I'd like to get some other people on and voting. So the voting is going to be up until December 17th, and then I'll have all the stuff accumulated and counted just like the college football playoff.

There will be rankings and we will get everything listed and announced on the holiday podcast show on the 18th there. So if you've paid attention to the graphics for the show, my guest coming up, Zach Kromkowski from Senteon will be on and we're going to chat about Pitch It. We're going to chat about Senteon and a couple of other things that I'm going to ask him about that he does not know about.

But let's start off the show with a couple of stories and tips. And I promised you guys that I would start sharing more about what's happening in my business because yes, I do have a day job that is running my boutique MSP down here in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. And Monday started off, thought it was going to be kind of a slow day, stayed in the office, took care of everything remotely, things were going well, cleaned up the email.

But around 4.55 p.m., I get a call from TJ. TJ, our good friend, called up that late on a Monday. I almost did not answer because I'm like, I'm not going to start this at five o'clock on a Monday, but I did.

And the first thing TJ said to me was, can you help me? I can't find a printer. So I said, what do you mean you cannot find a printer?

You cannot physically find it? And he said, no, no, no. I'm trying to install a printer, but when I search for the printer, I can't find it.

So needless to say, and to make this short, I get on with him and he is trying to install a printer at a branch office where the user was remote into a server. And they were trying to install a local printer. And all he was doing was opening up the ad printer wizard and clicking search and not seeing it.

And I said, well, that's really not what we want you to do in this case. We want to install by IP, blah, blah, blah, whatever. So I explained to him how to do that.

And when I found out what printer it was, it was a Kyocera copier that had been moved from another office. So I knew that this was a copier that needed to have the print driver downloaded. And I said, well, the first thing you want to do is go to the, you know, go to the web, download the driver and have that ready.

And he proceeded to say, okay, do I do that with Google? And I said, excuse me? He said, how do I download the driver?

I'm like, do you mean to tell me that you've never downloaded a driver? And he's like, no. And at that point, I wasn't sure what to say.

And I just said, I'll do it. So that was Monday. So TJ does not know how to download a driver.

So Tuesday comes along and I'm actually going to shout out a vendor. I know I try not to do this, but I've always said I will highlight vendors when they do good. And I'm a call out vendors when they do bad.

So this is one of those times where, well, let's just say this, it started off bad, ended up good. So let's at least put the little, what's the sandwich thing they call the good job sandwich. Good, good, bad, good.

So this was a vendor that I had seen at conferences before, no big deal. And because I went to a lot more conferences this year than I did last year, I'm getting a ton of calls and I've got a fantastic gatekeeper who knows who I want to talk to and who I don't want to talk to. And I'll be honest, all vendors.

I mean, I love you guys being on the show. I love talking to you. Some of you put up with me or not buying product because listen, we can only have so many things in our stack.

I can't have a hundred vendors in my stack. So some of you are understanding of that, but this vendor calls our office and says his name from Ionis. Oops.

Yeah, I said it. Ionis. And she buzzes me and I said, well, I'm busy.

I can't do it right now. Just have him email me. So not even a minute later, he calls her personal cell phone, which is not associated with the business in any way.

I've never listed it anywhere in terms of a contact number for me. I may have listed it as an emergency contact number way back in the day, but most of you that know me realize that I don't put my personal cell number anywhere. I'm certainly not going to put her personal cell number on it.

He called her personal cell thinking it was a contact number for me. So my response is what the hell? And I get it.

I know that vendors, they got to find any way possible to get in touch with somebody. So I sent an email to this person and they had been emailing me for a while. It's not like I didn't know them.

So I emailed and said, hey, thanks for reaching out, but I find it unprofessional that you're going to call my wife's cell phone. To their credit or his credit, he emailed me back and apologized and said that they use a program that, you know, goes out and grabs numbers. I don't know how.

And he said, “I apologize. I will make sure that that does not happen again. And we'll see what happens there.

But I, I did kind of, I worded it nicely, but I did say that makes me want to rethink if I will ever do business with you. And I probably shouldn't have said that, but that's what I was feeling. So good, bad, good.

Yes. They reached out. Yes.

He was polite. I emailed him and all of that. So listen, I know vendors.

I know you guys have a tough job and I know the people that call after a conference have a tough job because most of the time they're not the ones at the conference. So if I talk to somebody at the booth, they have to make it seem like, yeah, you were interested. You talk 95% of the time.

I didn't talk to nobody. I grabbed a piece of swag and moved on and somebody scanned me without my permission. That's what happens.

So that was Tuesday. Today, good story. My oldest client in terms of being with me, my business has been going for 27 years.

This client has been with me 26. I expect him to retire at the end of this year. He called me what started out to be yesterday because he couldn't get his tablet connected to the Wi-Fi.

I remoted in. I could see that there were seven devices on. I'm like, well, can you do this?

Can you do this? Blah, blah, blah. And he's at a point where he couldn't do it.

I tried to get him on his phone to see if that would connect. No joy, as Mike Smith would say. So I'm like, all right, I got to come there because I can't do anything else.

And nobody else was in the office to get them to try to go there. So I go there. First thing I do is NetAlly.

I pull out my NetAlly device as I'm walking in, configure their Wi-Fi stuff, hit scan, connect, connect to net, all green IP address out to the internet. Boom. So I walk into his office and I show him, hey, your Wi-Fi is good.

Let's reset your phone. Do that. He was on in and out in just a few minutes.

And he was walking me to the door and raving to everybody in the office. Man, Marvin came and fixed it in two seconds. Blah, blah, blah.

So I didn't fix anything really folks. But I walked in with a NetAlly tool that made me look fancy and NetAlly is the sponsor of the show. So you might want to give them a look.

So those are my stories and tips for the day. My monologue. So why don't we do this?

Oh, let me first say thank you. The chat is busy. All things MSP.

Woohoo. Eric, thank you. And Zach is there.

Somebody from LinkedIn. Hey, Marv. Hey, Zach.

Rolling on the floor, laughing my ass off. TJ can't download a driver. That is awesome.

And oh, Mr. Tim Golden. Let's go. Glad to be here.

All right. So let us do this. Let me, where are we?

Here we go. So my guest today, Zachary Kromkowski, co-founder and CEO of Senteon, a cybersecurity company specializing in automated system hardening and compliance solutions. Senteon focuses on providing...

[Zach Kromkowski]
Look at that photo. You snagged Buck the bear.

[Uncle Marv]
Yes, I did.

[Zach Kromkowski]
Senteon focuses on... He made your slideshow.

[Uncle Marv]
Yes, he did.

[Zach Kromkowski]
You know, the funny thing about that photo is that not a lot of people realize. If you notice, the bear does have his arm in the air. There's no strings attached.

There may be a Zach hiding behind the seven foot teddy bear, holding up the arm for the photo.

[Uncle Marv]
Oh, it's not one of those blow up things like, what is it? Buckwheat did with the Gumby doll.

[Zach Kromkowski]
No. This boy actually has some weight to him, man. You know, a little bit of stuffing's light.

This guy, this guy's got a few pounds on him.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So let me ask this question first of all, and we'll just get it out the way. People have seen you in your shots, in that position, in that RV.

How was van life, man?

[Zach Kromkowski]
Dude, honestly, I... So van life started very hard, to be perfectly honest. Like, this is something me and my wife Miranda wanted to do.

We've talked about it. We've wanted to get in, but boy, we didn't realize what really went into it till we got here. And honestly, the timing couldn't be worse.

So obviously we're here because, you know, I got to fortunately present and be the winner at Pitch It. But what you don't know is three days before, no, two days before I got on my flight was my first night sleeping in the RV. So the week or two weeks leading up to sleeping here, I was primarily moving into my RV, getting rid of 70% of my belongings, buying a new 20% of things, because there's things you need in an RV that you don't need in an apartment.

So the amount of chaos that went into moving, trying to make a presentation, trying to nail the pitch, that was the most stressful time of getting here. All that said, Pitch It went great, and we do love living in the RV.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah. So let me ask this. So I had a client that decided that he wanted to sell his house, rent an RV, and travel around the country for a year, and he was going to run his business remote.

And now this is, I can say this much, he is a partner at a very successful law firm, and he bought himself one of those nice RVs.

[Zach Kromkowski]
This is not what you're looking at here.

[Uncle Marv]
So he probably spent more on that RV than I did on my house, and he only made it six months, where he's like, no, they couldn't do it.

[Zach Kromkowski]
He struggled with the transition.

[Uncle Marv]
I think he and the wife both did. They're back in town now. I haven't asked him, but I think they bought a small apartment or something, and they still have the RV, and they still travel around it.

So let me ask this, what is your end goal with van life? Is this going to be permanent? Is this for a stretch of time?

What are we doing?

[Zach Kromkowski]
So it's definitely a stretch of time. So our real reasoning behind this, and this is going to relate back to business, because everything relates back to business, right? I do come from enterprise sales.

So my background is visiting customer sites, making in-person conversations, buying lunches, buying dinners. And one thing the MSP market really doesn't have is those in-person meetings, because it's a nature of the market. The vendors do have to have reasonable, but relatively low price points to where the MSP can market up and make their profits while learning a new platform, because that's not easy.

There's a lot of time involved with that. So it does inhibit a lot of vendors from doing those one-on-one meetings. So what we talked about, me and my wife, as Senteon Grows, we want to incorporate that back to my life.

That was one of my favorite things to do. And one of the ways to do that we explored was moving into an RV. So the short-term goal here is to visit partner site to partner site, drive trade show to trade show, and in a perfect world, pull out the smoker in the parking lot of a trade show and host a little after trade show event.

So that very much is the short-term goal here. But the real end goal, of course, is probably to downsize the RV and move into a proper stationary home. But we'll find out how much we love it.

Being in a van down by the river, as David says in the comments, is quite great. And Brian, you're absolutely right. Figuring out the PO box to get mail, that was also one of the challenges to figure this out.

You can't have Amazon if you don't have an address.

[Uncle Marv]
Well, you just have to change your pickup location every time.

[Zach Kromkowski]
That's true.

[Uncle Marv]
That's true. But you can do that. So let me ask this.

This is kind of off topic, but let me ask, you made the comment about wanting to integrate those visits to partners on a regular basis. I know that the conversation over the past couple of years has been the fact that we've added conference after conference after conference. There's so many freaking conferences.

And what...

[Zach Kromkowski]
Don't say it like you're sick of them, Uncle Mark. You love them.

[Uncle Marv]
Oh, I'm going to do more next year. But I do like the fact... Now, here's what I have said publicly.

The longer the conference, the more I don't want to be there the whole time. I'm good with being there one or two days. Once it gets to a third day, I'm like, okay, that's enough.

I mean, unless it's something that's super focused, which a lot of the conferences, yeah, they may have some tracks, but they're not super focused. And that's what I want. Now, I'm probably not the typical MSPs, but I do like those one-day partner meetings.

I like those types of roadshows. Is that kind of where you think it should go? Or how do you view it from a vendor perspective?

[Zach Kromkowski]
So I have two views on trade shows, and I will echo everyone's getting their own shows nowadays, and they're getting more and more extravagant, which creates a larger and larger barrier for the innovative companies who can't afford to be at all of them. And I can shout out LionGuard. They do a great job, very close with Joe and his team.

They're a great company. They're also... They put on their own show.

There's so many companies doing this and they rented out, what was it, the Dallas Cowboys Stadium, right?

[Uncle Marv]
AT&T Stadium, yeah.

[Zach Kromkowski]
Yeah. In order to be an innovative startup and compete with the companies of this magnitude, it creates a barrier to innovation. So the big feedback I would give and shout out to IT Nation for doing so well at this, and MSP Geek.com as well, is having that lower entry point on the cashflow side so that innovation can still come and can still sponsor. So my echo is, and Tim Golden, shine at RoarCon, I heard it was a blast. I will absolutely be going this way. Joe has been a great advocate of Senteon and a good friend.

But MSP Geek.com has also done a great thing, wanting to lower that barrier. And towards the talk tracks, that was... It's true, right?

The way these... A lot of the shows I've been a part of are designed. It is apply to speak, or you pay for a speaking spot, and then you talk about the thing you're passionate about.

That's absolutely great. But if I want to go to a show and actually walk away with a tangible skill or something to take action on when I get home, it may take more than a 30-minute or a 60-minute speaking slot. I may want to go to a show that's focused on one thing, obviously biased towards Senteon, a hardening company, a show towards how to configure assets, or a show just towards GRC, having more dedicated and specified tracks so that all of the submitted talks have to be aligned on the same type of topic, I think would have a lot more tangible takeaway value personally.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah. And I know it's tough. I mean, just to get the sheer numbers for an ROI from a vendor perspective, you almost have to do that to some degree.

And from an attendee point of view, some of those conferences get expensive. Ticket price, travel, hotel, and a lot of people get free tickets. I understand that, but you still got to pay to get there and you still got to pay to house yourself, and then you got to eat, right?

[Zach Kromkowski]
I'm going to find out just the limits on parking in hotel parking lots. I'll tell you that right now. We'll see how much housing I pay for in 2025.

[Uncle Marv]
As long as there's a Walmart nearby, you should be able to park, right?

[Zach Kromkowski]
Hey, trade show conference, we're all going to the Walmart parking lot on me.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So now let's kind of swing back here. And folks, if you're just joining and listening, Zach Kromkowski from Senteon here, the 2024 IT Nation Pitch It winner.

So you were actually just on Eric's show, All Things MSP, and he got you right after you won with a video. And he kind of stole my thunder because take a listen to this. Zach, you've just won the grand prize for IT Nation's Pitch It.

What do you do now? Um, where am I going? I'm going to harden some Windows machines.

Get hard.

[Zach Kromkowski]
Oh, my gosh. That humor, man. I was just in awe and I didn't know how to respond.

And I was still in presentation mode. I was talking about hardening Windows. There wasn't anything else on my mind.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah, yeah. And so that was something that I thought was good. Whose idea was it to do all the hard hat construction attire, all that stuff?

[Zach Kromkowski]
Oh, my gosh, dude. So that was me. I very much had to push the team to allow me to do that.

But I will give credit to, I will never say his last name right, but Dr. Zoidberg, Dean Trempalis. Shout out to him being a new Empath employee. So shout out to him on his new opportunity.

But he did tell me, you know, hey, try to get something in the audience to kind of rally them and invite peers and networks so that you can have that larger friend presence. So, you know, talking to him, he had some ideas. We went back and forth for a while.

But ultimately, I was like, you know, what can we relate Sentient to? And we always say it's the most, it's the fundamental piece of security. It's the foundation of a strong security posture.

And at some point, something kind of clicked. It was like, well, foundation, construction, maybe we can do something there. And then immediately I was like, oh, hard hats.

Oh, hard.

[Uncle Marv]
Get hard.

[Zach Kromkowski]
Perfect. We'll get hard hats for everybody.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. And then he also asked you a question about what set you guys apart to make you winners. I'm going to ask it this way.

There's been this trend that the previous winner coaches the next year's winner. So how did it feel knowing you were going to win being coached by last year's winner?

[Zach Kromkowski]
It took away all the pressure. For those who don't know, Bobby's coach, Bobby Jacobs from Threads was the previous winner of Pitch It. And his coach was also the previous winner of Pitch It.

And I believe that was the first year they did it, if I have that correctly. So each year, the winners are invited to come back as coaches. So each time the coach has come, the coaches pick the winner, the winner has been there and so on and so forth.

So now the pressure's on for me to continue the family tradition, coaching the next contestant next year and getting them to be winners. So, you know, it is funny to say, you know, how did it feel knowing going into it, but it very much, Bobby really was really building that confidence. And, you know, he reviewed the presentation and was willing to work together and just shared what made him stand out.

And one of the things he did was wear a type of outfit. I think he did a pirate outfit or something they do over at Threads. And that was another thing that led to, okay, hard hats.

Oh, why don't we just get a full-on construction vest and go all in on it, wear steel toes and so forth. Right. So it really was a combination of just having a coach who wanted to win again.

He was driven enough to kind of make sure I followed in the footsteps. Um, but ultimately, yeah, it was, it was just a grand old time getting that outfit put together.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. Now let's go back to the beginning and talk about what got you interested, not just in PitchIT, but, uh, looking at an opportunity to expand in the channel, because it's not like Senteon is like brand, brand new, right?

[Zach Kromkowski]
Right. Right. So we're really not new.

So we have been a company for almost the last five years. Um, so we've been doing security, but we haven't been doing hardening the last five years. So any entrepreneur will tell you your first idea, you probably should vet it before you build it.

And that's also the advice most entrepreneurs will ignore the first time. And we, we were unfortunately one of those where we built the thing that we thought everyone would love. And unfortunately for us, the thing was a very competitive landscape, namely an EDR platform.

When you're a bootstrap company going against those guys, even if you can get the same output, um, a different way, it's still the same output. So why buy a new company when you can have a CrowdStrike, have an S1, right? So we, um, did make a lot of pivots throughout the years, but what that allowed us to do was to flesh out some ideas with a lot of the people we were networking with doing market research with.

And what it really showed us was, Hey, screw what we thought it needs to do this. And this was, yeah. And Tim's laughing, right?

We were going to do like some type of on-prem platform, um, instead of the SaaS offering. And, and now we do have the SaaS hardening platform to where it was what the people were asking for. Um, we listened and we built the thing in the hopes people would use the thing.

And those hopes have definitely came to fruition at this point.

[Uncle Marv]
So going through those early things, those early years and having to make the pivot, what was it that got you to settle on this? I mean, you talk about the fact that you love, you know, CIS controls and all that stuff now, but did that exist back then? Or did you fall into it?

[Zach Kromkowski]
So for us as a company, we are, um, traditional, um, cybersecurity majors out of school. So we actually knew about CIS maybe before it had the popularity it does in the MSP market. Um, and one of the, um, my co-founder actually like a capstone project or one of the year-end projects was to harden an active directory environment manually.

Uh, that as you can imagine, anyone who's manually hardened an AD or even just a browser or an OS on a windows, there's a lot of work that goes into it. And the chance to disrupt a lot of business activity, if you don't know what you're doing and you do this manually, just changing things. So it was combined with the experience and the challenges that they had in their school project, knowing what CIS was seeing the writing on the wall for my market research conversations of saying, Hey, this is the important thing, which also led to this is important because of CIS.

We just started seeing a lot of the similarities over and over to where now we were like, this is the pivot. This is validated. We have people, you know, we, like many entrepreneurs, when you, before you have a product, you'll try to get people to sign a letter of intent.

We got a few of those signed. We have a lot of verbal commitments. Um, again, I mean, we can't shout out compliance scorecard enough.

Tim Golden was very much an early stage partner of ours, um, beta tester at the earliest stage. So very much found people who were interested and wanted us to build the thing because they wanted to see the thing built.

[Uncle Marv]
Nice, nice. So how much of this was, you know, kind of accelerated after the year of our COVID?

[Zach Kromkowski]
I think the, the best outcome of COVID for us was the fact everyone had to go virtual and me, who, you know, first time entrepreneur, we didn't know what pivot was going to be successful. I had to talk to people to figure it out. Right.

And it wasn't until COVID that I started getting my calendar filled. People were like, Oh, he wants a virtual meeting for 15 minutes to ask me some industry questions. Sure.

Why not? It was like a perfect storm of people being willing to answer cold LinkedIn messages to the new, um, early graduate entrepreneur researcher to where now fast forward five years later, it's pretty, I don't know if anyone has some best practices for lead gen via LinkedIn, but it is very hard to land meetings now. Um, if you don't have that warm introduction, but for us five years ago when COVID hit, I think people were craving the human interaction and were open to taking industry related calls, which was very helpful for us.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So I do want to go back and you mentioned, you know, hardening active directory manually. So I still have some customers where we've got those on-prem server.

So I want to ask you a little bit about that, but before we do, I want to take just a quick minute here and thank our sponsors. So ladies and gentlemen, uh, we'll be right back after this. 

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My guest today is Zack Kromkowski from Senteon winner of the 2024 pitching competition put on by the connect wise folks and it nation. I should probably have done a better job at the beginning if case somebody hasn't seen you in all 100 places or not. Senteon we've talked about it.

It's a product that hardens automates hardening and standardization of workstation servers and browsers on CIS standards. So I think what happens is a lot of times people, you know, we understand hardening servers and workstations, not browsers.

[Zach Kromkowski]
Understanding, you know, the concept of hardening, I think is, is widely understood. We should be doing this. But when you start to dive into the details of, you know, there's some, I mean, there's thousands of settings at 500 on a workstation, 450 on a server and another 120 on a browser.

Nobody really knows all, what is that, 1,500 of those different settings or at least one by one. So even today when our learning mode presents disruption factors in which settings might cause something else to break, we, I'll pause, I need to refresh myself on this setting. I haven't had this finding in a while.

And, you know, like you said, it is widely understood. OS server workstation, it's known, but just the depth of it, I don't think is fully grasped. Even today, I do think it's starting to.

There's been a lot of shows I go to and I'm like, Hey, have you heard of CIS benchmarks? Oh, the 18 controls. That's actually not the right answer there, right?

The CIS benchmarks are part of the controls, but there are thousands of different recommendations on how to actually configure the asset. So very much is an understood topic, but the depth I don't think is realized. A lot of times I'll find MSPs doing maybe 10 or 15 different settings that they know are important, but nothing more than that.

And then, yeah, getting into the browser, Uncle Marv, the hot topic in the market. This is a space people don't really understand. This is very much new to a lot of people.

And even today I'll tell our partners, no, you don't need to install a Senteon plugin to harden your Chrome or harden your Edge Firefox, right? And that's the case. We don't need a plugin because the only way to harden these browsers is actually through the registry.

That's one piece a lot of people don't understand. You can't harden the settings we're hardening via the browser directly. They're actually reg keys.

So that's why Senteon is able to implement this into our process, incorporate the learning mode and remediate browsers without additional time to install something.

[Uncle Marv]
So let's explain that a little bit more because hardening the browser right now, I know that when I've had discussions with other techs and clients, you know, they're always looking at the browsers, you know, Chrome and stuff where they allow things to happen without an administrator approval. And most of us don't even know what the best practices for browsers are. So where do you even begin with explaining that?

What is best practices for browsers in the simplest form you can give?

[Zach Kromkowski]
So one, I want to make sure it's very clear where to find this. If you do just toss a Google search CIS benchmarks for Chrome for Edge, there is a free download of their hundreds of recommendations. So that's the first thing I want to get across to everybody.

The second piece, you know, I actually encourage our partners not to sell hardening to their clients because clients a lot of time don't understand security, let alone the aspect of hardening. So I instead encourage them to sell standardization to say, hey, we're setting up this browser to be like the other browser. Oh, what does that mean?

Well, some examples is, and I'll share with them like the easiest examples an end client would understand. So this would be like, you know, we don't want you to save your password to an insecure browser, right? We don't want you to click on a link and an executable to run right away, right?

So there's settings that will change end user behavior so that there's not just an immediate click, an immediate executable, but you actually have to click it, tailor which path it goes to, and then approve it again. Because a lot of times, I mean, with phishing and everything else, you don't even know you're clicking an executable until it goes, right? So I very much encourage our partners to sell standardization and making things set up the same as opposed to selling the security aspect of what we're doing.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. And then the other side of that is, do you ever get pushback from MSPs who look at the settings that may be imposed? They're like, you know what?

I don't want to do that. Or I don't believe that that's the right best practice. I want to do it this way.

Do you get that at all?

[Zach Kromkowski]
I get the former. So I don't think anyone has told me like, oh, this recommendation isn't the right one. I don't get that type of response.

Everyone I've talked to says, oh, that makes sense. Yeah, that's probably more secure. But the former of what you said is, oh, I don't want to do that.

Why don't you want to do that? There's scenarios of, like a setting, don't display last username, right? So now you have to type in your username every single time you sign under your computer.

How many end clients know their username? 80, 20, maybe less?

[Uncle Marv]
I don't know. I was going to say 50, 50.

[Zach Kromkowski]
50, 50? Yeah, see, that's exactly right. So an MSP will review it.

And Sentient has set up our platform in a way where those disruptive or we call them behavioral settings, it's a behavior change to type your username. It's a behavior change to hit control, delete. We do break those up into a different category so that the MSP who is weary of causing their clients to change their behavior can just click here and say, I don't want any behavior change settings, ignore this category.

So that's one way that we assist our partners because we are the experts on these settings. And we've already filtered out the noisier behavioral aspect settings for the MSP.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So let's see. So Sentient's approach, you know, you automate a lot of that.

You do use an agent.

[Zach Kromkowski]
We do.

[Uncle Marv]
Which some people are like, really? Another agent?

[Zach Kromkowski]
This is one of my favorite topics, honestly, and it used to be my least favorite. Holy crap. When I was like learning just about, you know, I mean, truly becoming an SME on what we do and what we built, but just learning more about the security space, I feared the agent question.

I'm like, how long can I put this off before, you know, it has to be asked, right? So this is actually something I now embrace because I've realized that the challenge we had and the reason we chose to go with an agent is the same reason people are coming to us to do their hardening. And that challenge is Microsoft.

So we've seen constantly Intune will say a policy is applied and then we check locally on the device and it's not actually there. Or we've seen PowerShell scripts deployed and it never actually took or group policy objects deployed at the domain level never actually took at the local level. So, you know, we tried to make Microsoft work.

After failing, just like all of our audience has failed, hence why they reach out to us, we had to build an agent that didn't trust Microsoft. So when we make these changes, we're making them directly in the Regkey, SecPool and AuditPool via the Win32 API with no PowerShell in the middle. So that's actually an embraced question now that I welcome and I talk towards.

And I'll give another shout out since we're allowed to talk about vendors and friends. Matt Topper said this in the best way possible, you know, what's the risk of your agent, right? You are an agent that inherently is risk when you install something new like that.

And because of how Senteon is built, we don't have any PowerShell access. You can't run any arbitrary scripts. It's not how our agent works.

So all a bad actor could do is change the settings that we currently have supported. The good part here is if a bad actor compromises the agent, it has to report back to Senteon command center and Season will change that malicious behavior right back. So and Matt Topper's word next to zero risk because it would have to be a whole company compromise in order for anyone to do anything with our agent.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So that answers the agent question. Now, the environment question.

So there's a lot of people that are, you know, 100 percent, everything needs to go to the cloud, Azure AD. I still have clients where I've got on prem servers because of the line of business apps. I do a lot of stuff in group policy, a ton of it, actually.

[Zach Kromkowski]
As a matter of fact, I spent an hour working on I mean, it is the available medium inherent to Microsoft with the right license.

[Uncle Marv]
But saying that you don't trust Microsoft means that we're going to bypass Intune and group policy, right? Correct. And that's just a change of a change of thinking for a lot of techs.

How many people have to get used to that?

[Zach Kromkowski]
Yeah, it is a change of thinking, but kind of to my story before, I've never had to convince someone that the GPO they pushed may not have been successful. I've never had to. I believe me, Microsoft doesn't work.

I've never had to, like, force that story onto them. It's like, oh, yeah, I you said I can swear on my fucking hate working with GPO. It doesn't work, right?

Yeah, I hear that multiple times a week. And that's our strength, is the fact we don't trust Microsoft. And, you know, going back to our pre-show talk, we were talking about scanning tools.

And, you know, this could be a variety of vendors, right? There's plenty of tools that will scan for settings and tell you what's configured correctly versus not. You know, these are like the Kinect secures and various like Cyrisma, Covello, Threatmate.

There's plenty of these scanning tools out there, right? And they all do a great job at the overall vulnerability management side. But when you start to look at the configuration states, if you inherently and blindly trust Microsoft that it is applying the state of that setting into the local policy level and that backing value of the of the LPO, you may be displaying false information.

So the majority of my calls and honestly, post-customer calls even is, hey, this scanning tool X says this isn't configured correctly or it's showing this is configured correctly in my scanning tool, but it's showing not configured in Sentient. What's going on? And the reality is, because this is all we do, we are not a vulnerability management tool.

All we do is hardening. We just do one thing and we do it goddamn the best. Like it is very well done.

We constantly prove that other tools out there will display false information because they trust Microsoft, not because they're bad tools, but the way they get their results is trusting Microsoft and we don't. So we're displaying truth, which will prove other tools will display false information sometimes.

[Uncle Marv]
Has anybody reached out and said, stop doing that?

[Zach Kromkowski]
I've had partners say like, hey, this isn't okay. Like this company has my, I always do my client facing QBRs with this company's report. And it's saying some things are misconfigured.

And I'm like, they're not, they are configured correctly. They're just checking the wrong spot. And the reality is it's, it's, it's Sentient proving that the quality of some of these newer scanning tools maybe aren't doing as much truth seeking.

They're kind of maybe just trusting Microsoft without verifying, right? Trust, but verify a lot of these scanning tools I've seen come on the market. And a lot of my customer conversations is teaching them and educating them how a GPO is actually functionally available with the backing value and the reg key in place, as opposed to just the display value of a setting.

So I'll say this one other way. So with local policy, there's the display value that me and you read, something can be disabled, and then it's not available, right? Disabled.

The backing values to that may be a zero. That means functionally, it's not available. We have seen where the display value may be disabled, but the backing value is a one.

So functionally, that setting is enabled at the machine level and the machine is treating it like it's enabled, even though on all of your compliance audits, it's going to say it's compliant, right? But it's actually not. And we can prove that we do prove that every day.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. And one of the, one of the things that you love is your undo button, which basically is, you know, is the second part of the real-time monitoring analysis, alerting, and the ability to, to undo right away. What is the time delta in that real-time monitoring?

How long does it take for a station to check in?

[Zach Kromkowski]
Yep. So this is a great question. So the change tracking, which is very unique to us because we are able to push and pull information as opposed to Microsoft, which can only push.

Our change tracking is 24 seven. You'll get those results in real time, but the behavior that Senteon reacts to the change is customized on a time interval. So for example, if you want Senteon to automatically fix something, you can set that down, I believe to like five minute intervals, all the way up to 24 hours.

Or if you want Senteon to simply alert on it, but not make the revision, not to put it back, you can have alert only mode alert and then single click approval. So it really is just a customized choice on how you want to interact with your Senteon license, I guess.

[Uncle Marv]
All right.

[Zach Kromkowski]
Checking tracking is, is, is very critical to cyber insurance, CMMC and banking CMMC, especially they have a requirement. And if golden is still in the audience, right? Track changes to a baseline, right.

This is something that many companies can't do because it's an overwhelming process with thousands of settings. Tracking changes is an overwhelming task in an Excel workbook or wherever that is. So having the ability to have an automated platform that's tracking changes at the registry level is very unique and helps us build better attestation material for our partners at the CMMC audit level, but also for cyber insurance to show the change history of settings.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah. I've, I've, I just invested in a couple of tools that are supposed to do the change detection for me. And they're obviously not going to be as granular as, as this, cause they're not, they're not checking the registry and stuff.

So that'll be interesting. So there is a rapid deployment, so you guys can pretty much be up and running in 15 minutes, right?

[Zach Kromkowski]
Yeah. If you want to go through learning mode, I will say the total setup time takes, you know, learning mode, going through the findings to onboard a hundred devices. You know, once you're functional with the tool might take 20 to 30 minutes.

If you actually want to bypass learning mode, which is not best practice, you can skip learning mode and you can change thousands of settings in less than a minute.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. All right. Well, I don't want to dig too much more in the weeds.

We've done pretty good. Thank you very much. And Tim has chimed back in, then having clients approve the changes, API on the way.

Is he like, is he letting a cat out of the bag for you?

[Zach Kromkowski]
This is the dream request. And somewhere I believe we're taking our API integration with compliance scorecard because, you know, at Senteon, we never want to rebuild something that's more readily available through another platform. We'd rather integrate with another company's change management system.

So, you know, part of CMMC or in many compliance frameworks, you need to have a reviewer and an approver. Yes, Senteon will track changes, but we don't really, we never built in that reviewer approver process. So one of the things we're looking to do is to do integrations with those various change management platforms to meet the next level of compliance that people are asking for.

So yes, that API is on the way and we're very excited about that.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. Last question. How long are you going to travel with that check showing in your background?

[Zach Kromkowski]
So the check is actually dual purpose. So yes, it's a phenomenal background. Him and Buck Harden right there, right there.

Very entertaining in my background, but they actually do hide my sink that may or may not be filled with dirty dishes at times. My wife who might try to sneak into the background to go into the kitchen. So this check might be here to stay until people get really sick of it.

And like, why is that guy still walking around with a check when he won two years ago? But it is very much part of my RV background at this point, just because it hides the mess of moving.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. I guess one more question. I'm assuming the 70 grand is probably close to being spent already.

Cause I mean, it's, it's not like it's a million bucks, but it's not a million bucks at all.

[Zach Kromkowski]
I do intend to do a, a little bit of a silly series. So we did spend some of the money for just kind of various things around the place. And I'm going to have Buck Harden right over there in the bear, attempt to do some of these RV improvements personally by his bear paws.

So we'll see how those photos come out. They may be ridiculous and not work, but we're going to give it a shot.

[Uncle Marv]
So what I did not hear is investment in little mini Buck Hardens that, you know, can sit on the shelf back here.

[Zach Kromkowski]
That, that might be a good handout. I have myself a little bet. Uncle Marv, if we design that, you'll be the first one getting one mailed.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. That works out great. All right.

So folks, we're going to have all the links in the show notes. Go check out Senteon. And actually for those of you that are thinking, wow, this must be expensive.

It's not. I believe the pricing model; can we say it on the air Zach?

[Zach Kromkowski]
Yeah. Yeah.

[Uncle Marv]
Absolutely. I think you're around a dollar an end point with a 250 minimum, right?

[Zach Kromkowski]
That is the exact model we have. So we've decided to take a very MSP friendly model. And if you do break down the numbers, it's approximately 0.0016 cents per setting that we support. So if you really want to get granular there for the whole price of a dollar and less than one penny per setting, you can knock it out with a Senteon. So, but yeah, that that's absolutely right. And we're, we want to stay friendly to the MSP market.

This is where our base is. This is where our business model is. So we do, you know, raise that price point as the MSP grows, but also if the MSP does lose a client or something unfortunate happens, the price will also go down as, as you lose business, if that were to happen.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. Sounds great. All right, Zach, we've come up to a part of the show here that people know and love Florida man or random question.

So this is the part of the show where you, and it's, it's going to be weird for you because you're not, you're in an RV. It's, you know, you're moving.

[Zach Kromkowski]
Yes. I did ask the parameters of this question, if I could allow this to be any RV park in the country. And I was, you know, shot down, but the article that, you know, I found in real, real, real issues that are going on in California, people are allowed to basically live wherever they want.

And part of that is in very public streets where they park their RVs along the street and the neighborhoods, the County will try to evict them and it will just cause pretty major disputes, some aggression, some fights and so forth. Because again, it is like proper public streets and by schools. And then there's a bunch of rundown RVs sitting on the street that California has historically allowed to be there.

And now they're trying to take a step up and eliminate this. So this is just an example of one of the articles talking about this, this going on.

[Uncle Marv]
I was going to ask is, is this one of your RV parks? Is this what you see when you roll into?

[Zach Kromkowski]
We evaluated that one, Uncle Mark, but even if the rent was free, we decided it wasn't the one for us.

[Uncle Marv]
Oh man. So homeless RV parts. That's a very interesting.

[Zach Kromkowski]
Yeah. Are you really homeless?

[Uncle Marv]
If you have the RV, I mean, if it doesn't, if it, if it doesn't run or move, I don't know.

[Zach Kromkowski]
A very interesting value is you have a home, but the truth is not so much.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah. All right. And as I told you before the show, normally I have my Florida man story picked out, but it's, it's, it's been a week down here and I actually picked out four stories.

So I'm going to let you pick a number between one and four and that'll be the story that I read.

[Zach Kromkowski]
I'm going to take the first story.

[Uncle Marv]
Number one. Okay. Here we go.

In a shocking incident on Tuesday. So yesterday afternoon, a 70 year old Florida man was arrested after intentionally crashing his pickup truck into a US AA building in Tampa, Florida. Robert Beatty, a Tampa resident faces multiple felony charges following his destructive rampage.

So shortly before two 15, he arrived at the guard gate at the USA office and demanded to speak with a bank representative. He was denied entry. So he took matters into his own hands.

He donned a helmet and then proceeded to drive recklessly through the USA parking garage, causing extensive damage, driving through multiple fences, ramming his red Chevrolet Silverado into the building itself, attempting to run into a marked security SUV and struck a bunch of vehicles in order to create space for an escape. So Tampa police responded promptly, located him on the third floor of the parking garage where he was taken into custody. He now faces four felony charges, including two counts of aggravated battery with a deadly weapon, one count of burglary on an, of an unoccupied structure and one count of criminal mischief of a thousand dollars or more.

So I don't know what the burglary charge was for.

[Zach Kromkowski]
I don't know if there needs to be one. He has enough bills that he's not going to be causing trouble anymore anyway.

[Uncle Marv]
Yep. So yeah. So that happened yesterday in Tampa, Florida.

Oh my gosh. And I'm going to do this. I'm going to blame the cyber Fox girls for that.

[Zach Kromkowski]
He was causing disruption to get some attention. Holy crap. Yeah.

Those Florida stories are nonstop. And I, I even did my own search, you know, RV park, Florida to see what came up. And the first article, I didn't even have to scroll 72 year old RV park, man loses leg and alligator fight.

It's the type of stuff that is absolutely insane. What goes on out there?

[Uncle Marv]
It is, it is fantastic. So, all right. Well, Zach, uh, thank you very much.

This is your first full episode of the podcast. Uh, ladies and gentlemen, I will have a link to Zach's pitch it vendor profile so that if you had not listened to that, go back and listen to it. Uh, the quick 15 minute pitch that prepared him to win the entire contest.

[Zach Kromkowski]
And honestly, to emphasize this and what you do for the community by doing this, like it means a lot to us, innovative companies who don't get a chance to learn how to speak publicly. Right. So, you know, you sarcastically say, you know, helped me win, but it did, right.

I didn't do a lot of interviews. I didn't have a lot of these conversations before pitch it. And do you invest in your own personal time?

I mean, hopefully I'm not putting you on the spot pitch. It doesn't pay you to do these interviews. Is that correct to say, Oh, pitch.

[Uncle Marv]
It did not pay me.

[Zach Kromkowski]
Would you accept money if pitch it gave it to you though?

[Uncle Marv]
I would love for pitch it to pay pitch it.

[Zach Kromkowski]
You guys know what to do now. It's absolute community service, what you're doing. And, um, you know, from me and all the other contestants you had on, thanks for doing it.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. Well, you guys did a fantastic job. Thank you.

Uh, for, I mean, it's a lot of time commitment from you as well. I mean, 16 week bootcamp plus the competitions. And I mean, your wife must be a Saint.

[Zach Kromkowski]
She, uh, keeps me make sure I don't stay inside on the computer all day. I do, uh, at least one daily walk and I eat dinner now. So, um, she makes sure I never skip all the meals.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. Sounds like a good wife. Uh, all right, Zach, that's going to do it folks.

Thank you for watching or listening and keeping up with the show. Uh, be sure to head over to it, podcast.com and check out any of the other shows, uh, throw a slash survey on the end or click the link in the show notes and vote for your 2024 podcast awards. And remember on the 18th, not only will we have the holiday podcast show, I'll announce the winners and anybody that submits a vote will be entered into a drawing where we will be.

I don't know how many gift cards, but there may be a couple of gift cards that we'll hand out to anybody that's submitted. So thank you all very much. And, uh, yeah, somebody's actually throwing stuff in there.

Thank you very much for, uh, keeping up with the chat. Thank you for everyone that, uh, watched live and participated. Of course, Mr. Golden seems to have a vested interest in, uh, where you guys are going.

[Zach Kromkowski]
We're all competitors.

[Uncle Marv]
He's voting for that API for sure. That's what he's working on. All right.

That's going to do it folks. Uh, be watching out there on all the social media. We're on LinkedIn, YouTube, and the Facebook.

And of course the, uh, the website itbusinesspodcast.com. There will be more shows. Got a couple of audio shows coming up, two more live shows, and that'll be it for this year.

Um, thank you much. Uh, let's see. Let me get my thing up here.

That's going to do it. We'll see you next time. And until then, holla.