 Hi, this is your host of the Bhartiya. Welcome to the 2023 prediction series and today we have with us once again Mike Malone, founder and CEO of SmallStep. Mike, it's great to have you on the show. Swap. Great to be back. Thanks for having me Before I ask you to grab your crystal ball and share your predictions quickly remind our viewers What is SmallStep all about? SmallStep is an open core Venture backed company and we build a platform that helps enterprises DevOps engineers Encrypt their network communication and secure their software systems. Nice time for you to pick your crystal ball and share with us What predictions you have for us? My first prediction for 2023 is I think this is going to be the year that enterprises really start executing on zero trust strategies and I think mutual TLS people are recognizing is really synonymous with zero trust so there's going to be a real uptick in deployment of mutual TLS and Certificate based authentication in internal networks my second prediction and this is tied somewhat to my first prediction around internal mutual TLS is that the new device attestation standard for Enrolling in a public infrastructure using a cryptographic Co-processor, which is a much more secure device enrollment strategy is going to proliferate. I think in the enterprise for Enrolling devices Particularly, I think this is important for remote employees so you can do zero-touch device enrollment but also in the cloud and for Virtual machines and physical infrastructure where enrollment for the purpose of zero trust is is also important My third prediction is that I think this is this is going to be the year that people really recognize the advantage of Asymmetric cryptography as an alternative to Password based or shared secret based authentication I think that's already happening with pass keys for the consumer and I think we can draw parallels there So a pass key, you know web off-end security token based authentication is using a hardware bound asymmetric private key and That pattern of using a hardware bound private key Has tremendous advantages over shared secrets which are you know deceptively Simple people deploy them because they appear to be simple but managing and securing those Those passwords or shared secrets is tremendously difficult and I think this is it's already happening in the consumer space, but again, I see this spreading into enterprise IT and production environments and I think it'll mitigate The sorts of attacks that we're seeing like with Travis and circle CI where these shared secrets are being exfiltrated and used maliciously So I think that people are beginning to recognize the benefit of asymmetric cryptography To protect against that sort of threat. Thanks for sharing these predictions with us now If I ask you what is going to be the focus of small step in 2023? We are a PKI company we help manage certificates and and Cryptographic keys, so we're very interested in supporting enterprises on this journey to To zero trust and to replacing secrets with asymmetric crypto and all these enrollment Technologies so we are We're servicing I think what what I was sort of predicting it just previously We support the device at test-01 standard for device enrollment and we're building out more end-to-end solutions for managing encryption and authentication in enterprise IT and production Software systems what are the challenges that you see will be there in 2023 and how small a step is going to help Users and customers kind of navigate through some of these challenges. I think like 2022 We're starting out in 2023 with a big focus on folks trying to do more with less so Ourselves included I think we're in a really good position as a growing business venture backed. We have a lot of cash But uh, you know, there's a big focus amongst our customers. I think a lot of them are are Trying to figure out how to reduce costs and drive efficiencies So we're we're catering to that, right? So there's a lot of This is a new need that that we're addressing with zero trust and people are trying to understand how to do that efficiently and a lot of that means automation and You know, that's I think a big driving need here Mike, thank you so much for taking time out today And of course share these predictions focus of the company challenges ahead and as usual You know, I'd like to have you back on the show at the end of this year to see how many of your predictions Turn out to be true and get next set of predictions for the next year, but I really appreciate your time. We thank you Thanks again. It was great being here