 from downtown San Francisco. It's theCUBE, covering RSA North America 2018. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the RSA Conference North America 2018, downtown San Francisco, 40,000 plus people swarm and all over Moscone to the north, to the south and to the west. We're excited to have our next guest on. He's Chase Cunningham, principal analyst at Forster. Chase, great to meet you. You're welcome. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. So you just had an interesting blog post. It was Zero Trust on a Beer Budget. What is that all about? Well, so Zero Trust is a pretty simple concept about accepting failure if you will and focusing on the internal and moving outward. And basically the premise was, I had a friend of mine asked me if he could do Zero Trust for his small company. And I said, sure, let's go get a beer and we'll figure this out. And literally in about half an hour, we had a Zero Trust strategy in place for less than 40 grand and his infrastructure is way more secure and it's really simple. So that's pretty interesting because it's easy for big companies that have a lot of resources or the big public cloud companies have a lot of resources to put a lot of implementation into place, but as we look around this conference, tons and tons of companies, it's a lot harder for small and medium business either to have the expertise or the budgets to really bring in what they need to secure things. So what were some of the insights from your beer exercise? Sure, so it's really simple. Like if you really think about where the majority of the threat comes from, the network is there and everybody uses it, but who accesses the network? The users, the individuals, the devices, everything else. So the first thing we did was we're going to lock down identity and access management because I know if I can control that, I've made a fundamental shift in the power position for myself and the next thing we did was we said, look, you guys don't really own intellectual property but you send emails, we're going to put stuff in place to encrypt every email you send whether you like it or not. So between those two simple things, identity access management and sort of data email encryption, we put a really strong security platform in place and it didn't break the bank and it wasn't really hard to do and it's something that you can get better as it goes on. Right, and I'm curious, had he had an event or he was just trying to get ahead of the curve? He had had some weird stuff showing up and he was in, he's in esports, right? So he didn't have like actual intellectual property but he's worried because if they get tossed or they get hacked or they get ransomware, for every minute they're down, they're losing viewers and that's business and money for them. Right, so it's kind of ties back to this kind of next-gen access where it's really important with the identity but the other one is the context. Who is it? Where are they trying to get in? Do they usually come in that way? Do they usually have access? So that's another really way to kind of isolate the problems that might come in the front door. Yeah, and you know the years ago, the next-gen firewall was really the thing to integrate lots of functions across the network and that's all there. It still exists and it's still necessary but really when you break it down and look at historically where the threats have come from and where the compromises have come from, it's access and if you can't control that, you don't have the capability to actually stopping bad things from happening. Right, right. So as you look around and you've been coming to this probably for a couple of years as this space evolves, you know kind of what are your general impressions? I mean on one hand, so many vendors, so many activities, on the other hand it's like we've been at this for a while or are we just stuck in this race and we just got to keep running? Well I think we're going to continue running the race but interestingly enough, there's buses driving by now with zero trust all over the side of it and I'm glad to see that that strategy is starting to take hold because the problem I have is you can Frankenstein technology together all day long but if you don't have a strategic guidepost that everybody understands from the board down to the network engineer, you're going to get it wrong. You're going to miss. And so I'm a fan of simplicity and force multipliers and to me the zero trust strategy sort of drives that forward. All right, well Chris, thanks for taking a few minutes. Everyone can log on to your site, take a look at the blog. Thanks for stopping by. Thanks for having me. All right, he's Chris Kiningen for Forrester. I'm Jeff Frick from theCUBE. Thanks for watching from RSAC 2018.