 Tommy here from Orange Systems and welcome to a special sponsored interview and technical demo Sponsors video is Zoros. They offer web filtering software That makes it easy for you protect and monitor your endpoints anywhere your users work via their endpoint agent of note They're not only a sponsor They're a product we've been using for quite a while now if you're interested in signing up for a demo or to try out Their product there's a link right in the top of the description where you can get started now There are two parts of this video this one is about the web filtering product they offer and down in the description is a Another interview we did about their engagement product, which helps with employee engagement It's actually a really interesting discussion not only about the tool, but about managing productivity and efficiency So check out that video on my other channel linked right down below one last note I want to add before we dive into our technical demo is this is targeted at IT providers or managers writers like myself as a tool For us to use to manage filtering at our clients. It's not really designed for individual end users to sign up for filtering on their Computers, so let's get started with the demo All right I'm joined by Brett and he's going to show us where the product lives kind of how it works functionally. How you doing Brett? I'm doing fantastic. How are you Tom? Great? So we want to block or Use our site here total wine calm Talk about how your product can stop people from going to total wine calm or any other website You don't want them to go to really Yeah, so with Zoras being in point-based We have a very unique way of being able to intercept all Communication coming off a device without it actually leaving the device So this picture here I love pictures because I feel like pictures speak a thousand words, you know This is a basic no filtering kind of set up You know how the internet works so to speak in its most simplest form, you know So you want to go to total wine calm reaches out to your DNS server? Whatever it might be and then it says, you know, that's the phone book what IP address Am I supposed to go to returns that and then it sends you off on your merry way with Zoras? what's really cool is This is an allow example of this person was allowed to go to total wine calm before it even leaves the machine we Analyze where they're trying to go whether this is TCP traffic for DNS What are this is UDP traffic for DNS? It doesn't matter whether it's the browser or an application that's trying to reach out again doesn't matter We intercept all those DNS requests and analyze them before against our Zoras security policy This goes through a scrutiny of you know threat Detection Intel as well as content filtering and in the sense of just hey They're not allowed to go to alcoholic websites in this case they can so it allows it and once it's allowed It lets it off on its merry way Not messing with any routes if we were going to block that though It would say hey, they're not allowed to go here. This is deemed You know Something a place that they can't go so we're going to give them a block page and just completely Ignore the rest of the network and it just never ever leaves the machine to begin with And I like that you use a laptop for the example because that's a very important point people don't always work in the office And I don't always have control over where they may be working or their firewall So having it on that laptop. Hey cool. It's inside your corporate network. It's working It's outside your corporate network here at Starbucks, and you still can't go to total wine calm So it's it's at the endpoint level and not monkeying with anything and also You know for extra clarification if you do have local DNS like your Microsoft is running active directory those DNS servers. It doesn't monkey with that either those requests aren't going to get filtered Correct, and I think that's the beauty of it a lot of people will travel around in hotels or airplanes and different scenarios where DNS really can't be tampered with but we still need to filter them and keep the device safe In those cases we we work very well to prevent any kind of weirdness in activity It's just as simple as yes, they're allowed to go here. No, they're not allowed to go here Leave the rest of the network alone So that regular operations can exist And also you're not changing what their DNS servers are I will still specify in that laptop whatever those DNS servers need to be You know example being Windows domain controllers and you're not messing with that part of it You're taking those other DNS requests because you're analyzing them on the endpoint level and only taking external requests and doing the analysis to them It doesn't it's not like you're just specifying your Outside DNS servers that is where sometimes people can say oh can I use this like some external DNS server that does filtering I've talked about like quad 9, but it's really not the same level at all That just does some of the most basics and also will break everything if you tried to do that in a corporate environment This is why we use Zora's for this particular purpose Yeah, exactly and when you're when you're replacing that DNS server Internal resources and in different routes Will start kind of breaking down you have to set up Configurations of secondary DNS's and different things like that to get that replacement to work or DNS loopback issues Whatever it might be you run into kind of a myriad of issues When you're changing that DNS and as we all know in the IT field DNS causes a lot of problems when you just leave it alone and that's kind of our philosophy And it's like I said you're not changing the servers on this they can still get through DCP They can still grab whatever they want and your endpoint Tool is working in concert with whatever your DNS is to add these extra features to it So that's that's an important distinction I want to make sure because there's a reason you know, we've tested all these things I'm familiar with what breaks I've gone through the gamut of these things and maybe probably a lot of people are watching It's going yeah, I dealt with all those other things Tom just mentioned that broke Don't break those things. That's a very Something that sets Zora's apart I would say yeah, yeah I mean if the networks are complicated, you know, we'll leave that to the network guys to go manage that And we'll just make sure that whatever traffic comes off the device is is appropriate Okay, so where we kind of start in Zoras is really around the policy When you're setting up a customer each customer is kind of unique in the sense of like what can they do? Where can they go? You know schools have a very strict policy You know different businesses might have very open policies Point-of-sale solutions have a very strict or kiosk, you know, you want to block basically everything You know, we make it really easy to do that. So this is effectively what? the view of the policy configuration can look like we categorize the entire internet using crowd source kind of methodologies and Be able to break down different Websites categories and what you want to allow so in my standard ability here I block adult content drugs and alcohol and then obviously security. So security is kind of tucked away here This isn't really content filtering. This is the security filtering. This is the thing that should never be allowed, right? Yeah, but we have a lot of items in here that go through so all of that traffic every single request like I said It's not just their browser. It's any application. They try to download and execute on or whatever might try to run off of that machine We scan through our threat intel which is inclusive of obviously blotnets hacking sites infected sites key logging Now where I think a really big one that I always like to call out is you know, kind of like newly registered domains It's very common for fishing Attempts to just build up a new domain put up a website and then try to fish you on that We will automatically block anything that is has been created within the last 30 days Which I think is very cool and that's one that can't be overlooked because the latest Mailware campaigns, especially against content creators. That's one of the key things you can look up and see Oh, they registered domain like less than a week ago and sent out a massive campaign And you rarely run into a business problem doing this though The newly registered domain is not something that causes much trauma because most business sites didn't register yesterday and start today and Examine them on a case-by-case basis if one of those problems comes up and that's and that's what makes it really easy I'll go through the whole unblock request kind of In a minute, which has made that whole. Hey, I got blocked and makes it a lot easier To finish up on the policy here though As far as just you know being able to save list items block list items Say there's particular items within a category that you want to allow or maybe there's things that are Allowed, but you want to block a specific thing under an allowed category. You have the flexibility of doing that As well as IP based Blocking for geo IP so We'll look up the IP address We'll see what the origin country of that IP is from and you can block based on that country So this comes into handy if you want to you know, let's say block all traffic from you know And let's say I'll Algeria or whatever it might be But you could also just say hey I only want to allow traffic from the United States and that's it and it'll just block everything else Which becomes very handy again for? you know like Devices that are really needing to be locked down and what they're allowed to speak to and then Last but not least, you know enforcing safe search. So schools. This is very common You know that way if they're searching Google or whatever it might be we turn that safe search on Automatically as well as you know a safe list only so whatever is in your safe list is the only websites This particular device can go to or group of devices and then block traffic on on agent failure This is this feature is strictly for like the super super strict if it hasn't been filtered block it So if our infrastructure were to whatever blip or go down for whatever reason block everything because you know It's not safe environment Is kind of the concept there and that's that's the policy configuration there? So it's pretty straightforward and simple again. You'd set this up, you know kind of customer by customer And you can apply that there and I can go through that in a moment Okay, let's let's look at like kind of what a block looks like real quick. Sure. So I'm going to open a new tab. I'm gonna go to our total wine example because you know, sometimes you just need some wine This is effectively so I am obviously running Zoris You'll see this little tray icon here in the bottom right Which is our agent that is Brandable and you know the logo the text everything that you wanted to say you can make it, you know your Designation, but I think what's really cool is if a user a very common issue is hey I'm supposed to get the total wine I like it's Friday afternoon and I'm trying to order some wine for the team and You know, how do I get through to this? Well traditionally speaking you would have to open up a support tick Ticket with your your service tech They would you'd have to wait on that and then you know, they'll get back to you They'll ask you why you're trying to get there You know this whole myriad of of issues going with that now you can simply just say hey like let me in here Hey, it's Friday Let's have some wine. I realize that's real small But this is what your end user would be able to do and then they submit that and now your technicians Have just been notified that a particular device and a particular customer is requesting to go to total wine calm So let's see what that looks like back in the portal here Yeah, and by the way, it does support you can tie this to email and ticketing on your back end So as from an MSP tooling standpoint, it can be integrated into your workflow on your side. Yep So from there, this is what that just came in as You'll see it's my device who's logged in You know the policy that they're on where they were trying to go why it was blocked So whether it was blocked for geo IP reasons malicious reasons or just content reasons Category that it was their request. Hey, it's Friday. You know, let's have some wine now from here I can allow or deny it as the technician. This is all based on permissions, right? Not just anybody can come in here and start making modifications But I as an authorized user am allowed to do it for this particular device So I can sit here and say, okay Let's let's allow this traffic and let them have their fun So in a moment here, you'll see this this pop-up here that just came up This notified the user. Hey your technician just approved this you can now go to this website And it was that you saw how fast that was. Oh, yeah And it's nice because you don't they're not following up on a ticket going back and forth and getting aggravated The request comes from the back and we can look at it and decide internally. Was this an in was as valid Was it something they should do and we can just say, yeah, that probably shouldn't have been blocked Or yes, this is a valid reason and go ahead and approve and without them seeing anything other than they hit the request We hit the approve they get the little pop-up. Oh cool. I can go to total wine.com now that workflow is actually really smooth Very smooth and and it creates such a delight for your end user to be able to just go. Oh, wow Like that that was really nice. Now if they get a deny, you know, maybe you just run their fun for the day You know policies or policies and you know, sometimes you do have to deny the request as well Yeah, those it my overall experience though has been it's relatively smooth But you do have to have some internal decision making going on Not because of Zoris, but because people will ask for things that you're you'll scratch your head Yeah, and and it's all audited right so you can see I do um all sorts of um requests going through as demos So that who approved it why etc all goes through Yes, auditing. There is yeah, there is accountability. You can see the history of who did it What the reasons were and it's actually a good conversation And you can take that to your client later and say hey, these are the requests that came through if if ever was a discussion of To why like maybe you justified it? Maybe they had a question later some management But there's a whole workflow and audit trail that goes with it, which is really nice Yeah, when it comes to just security products in general having that audit trail is very very key To make sure that it changes to policies have happened. You can track that So to touch on the the kind of being able to brand that block page This is you can brand not only just the icon of the tray If you decide to show that the tray is there To know that you know this indicates to the user. Hey, your device is being filtered. It's safe and so on The actual logo you can change the text here You can see a preview of what you know your block page will look like and so on as far as being able to brand it You're pretty straightforward here. And then from there. It's it's really just Customer management. So let's kind of jump in we'll go into my particular customer And be able to see kind of the different settings that we have so I think the big concept here Is is groups within a customer think of this as though each group would have its own policy There's a lot of times where the ceo wants to be treated a little different than let's say the rest of the company So they get a special profile where they can go to facebook, but nobody else can go to facebook That's a very common scenario that we see We allow you to be able to create groups within a customer of different machines and Based on which group you're in is which filtering policy you get That's a really important aspect because a lot of times social media blocking is a pretty common request Because there's not much of a business use for it But if you have a marketing team that needs to update the twitter's and the facebook's They're going to need to have a policy on there and being able to start with a global policy And then granularly work your way down to group policies inside there that are all controlled Really handy for being able to manage all of that Yeah And and there's different settings that we can do as well within those groups to allow Different behaviors of our agent one of them is a policy schedule Policy scheduling is as simple as hey during certain hours of the day. I want a different policy applied So another example with social media. Let's say we don't really mind around lunchtime and after hours They should be able to go to facebook or go to instagram or whatever on their work device You can actually set it up so that during 11 to 1 In their time zone It will switch their policy to be less strict to allow them to do those things and then back once it hits 1 o'clock They it starts to block again Is the concept there You can also do different things like passive mode Passive mode is show me what you would block, but don't actually block it. This allows you as you know, kind of a An it professional to see What's if I were to set up this particular policy with this particular, you know group of machines What would get blocked from a content perspective? What would get blocked from malicious perspective? Obviously you want to block those things on the malicious side But it will it'll come back in what we call traffic logs and show you that so you can kind of make your judgment on What you do and do not want to do Hiding the tray icon hiding the unblock request in case you don't want people to be able to do that Are different ease of things and then there's an engagement product that we'll get into at the end of this That you can also add on here From this particular standpoint. So now once we have those groups It's very easy to deploy end points The concept that we have here is we use your source of truth to deploy out Many msp use our internal it shops. You already have a tool that you're probably doing software Deployment to so we make it super easy to just say hey, you know what I want to import from that source of truth So I'm going to run through kind of An example here since I'm a kekwise automate X veteran I'll use that as our example, but it's as simple as you connect to that data source You can now see the customers within that data source and how many end points are at each one of those customers I can then simply start checking off. Well, let's select policy first Brett We obviously need to select our base policy. This is typically you have somewhere where you start This policy has made in the essence of all my customers have this kind of framework And then we deviate based on their needs from there So I'll select that policy then I can select which customers I want to import And move along and this will just import those customers We then configure your tool to be able to deploy our product for a script And off it goes, you know, you go use in this particular case You'd go to kekwise automate you run the install zorus script And it will automatically go to the particular customer within zorus and everything is set up and configured for you based on best practices It it can't get much easier than that. Yeah, and we're using it with uh ninja one No problem. We can deploy it all our customers. It supports a lot of different tools out there in terms of your msp tooling on the back end So your deployment you understand how to do the integrations They they're relatively easy to get deployed and match up with your customers. So now that they're deployed They're going to be filtering And to be able to see that traffic It's as simple as coming over here to traffic logs. This is again. This is my machine. We can see everything That's being kind of navigated to off of this machine again. It's not just browser traffic. It's anything if you know Office, you know word or anything is reaching out to stuff We'll be able to see it and potentially block it We can then quickly see the different blocks that I had While we're you know demoing just now we can see the total whiner quests and previous times that I've been you know, kind of Walking through the demo for other people to block the same total wine pour total wine being blocked all the time that You know sometimes it has to happen and yeah, I mean from from that standpoint That's that's filtering kind of in a nutshell. It's a very Straightforward use case making sure, you know, we're keeping those endpoints safe No matter where they are airport hotels At the office regardless of what firewall you're behind Yeah, no, it's it's a solid tool. It's one of the reasons, you know, we like it It just makes it a lot easier for us to manage the Diversity of clients we have and where they are at at any given moment as the you know Some people work for home three days We split offices are pretty common now where you come in two days and are out two days and that Device moving back and forth. It just makes doing it at the firewall level impractical here. It's such an old way to do it as well Um firewalls as encryption becomes better. They come blinder and blinder things That's why you got to jump it all the way to the endpoint to understand it. That's uh, that's just been where the market's moving Yeah, yeah, I'm just understanding who's going where as well, you know a lot of times at the firewall level You'll you'll get some indicators of what device. Oh, I got to look that device up. Who is logged into that device? You know, there's a lot of Insight there that you got to start correlating together that we just put together for you Yep as far as being able to track by user Let's talk a little bit about The other product within the zorus portal, which is engagement Due to the fact that we're on the endpoint We can see kind of the traffic coming off of that endpoint As far as what websites people are going to etc We can now do what's uh, referred to as engagement Insights and being able to help you Understand where time is being spent not only in your own business But as a service that you can provide to your customers So right now what that kind of looks like and we'll look at me This is my particular device last week. So we default to last week week over week I can kind of see last week. I had the flu really bad and I was pretty much knocked out on the on the couch or the bed all Sunday Monday Tuesday So you can see it literally did nothing on Monday and Tuesday But once I got back and I didn't have a voice but Wednesday Thursday Friday You can see I had about five and a half hours of activity and kind of like what I In generally doing throughout the week. I can now see this and have insights on this You know slack time zoom I'm on gmail because we use g-suite here at zorus, you know me doing demos for the portal and and so on You can see not only their web traffic, but also what the thick line applications And so on as well as how much time I'm spending on zoom So you can see I spent four hours for five minutes on zoom and I'm listening to Spotify for two hours This this is pretty granular in that sense of individual But kind of our vision here is being able to help Not only at the individual level but at the global level understand Where time is being spent in your entire company? How many you know What sass apps are you using? How many people are actively using them? How long are they using them for? You might be able to optimize on that standpoint Educational opportunities here seeing that individuals are spending an excessive amount of time and let's say excel And is you know, hey, let's let's do some education around excel within our business So that way we can optimize the time there and make sure that we're not spending too much time there And so on there's there's quite a few use cases that you can use with this data insights At a macro level Yeah, and this is something and we have the other video link down below that we do We also dove into talking about it from a broader perspective of it's not about You know watching and making sure people are being efficient But let's say you have a sales team and one team member is spending way more time Looking at a quotes or spending more time in excel It kind of gives you baselines of your company so you can understand or as an msp talk to your clients and say This department, you know, is this your top performer? They spend the most time writing quotes or is this the person supposed to be writing quotes Or do they just spend too much time because they don't understand a product or is a training opportunity So it just opens up the conversation so you can start engaging to understand Why their profile may look different than others and you can then you know present that to the client because it gets you To have better conversations. You're like, wait, why does this person spend so much time in excel when all the people Although other people on our team don't so those are it just opens up those conversations It's I don't want people to perceive it as like this is a spy This really not it's about trying to come up with better efficiencies of how things work Yeah, if people do go very negative very fast with this And it's so easy to do that Here's here's the fact you can't fix bad management and bad management will use this for bad things, right? That's just the way it is What I see though is huge upside an opportunity when it comes to your ability to operationally mature your team and your business By looking at data at a at a holistic level. You don't need to look at it You know kind of specific to this one end Point here, but being able to look at it holistically you can now Get to understand the flows of your business And you can focus on your on your star players as well Because it hurts your business more losing your best talent than it does losing your worst So I think that's kind of overlooked in a lot of ways that you know What are you doing to engage with Your over achievers and do you know who they are? Especially like weekend warriors when they shouldn't be working on the weekends being able to come in monday morning This is how I use this for my team I come in monday morning I spend 10 minutes and I just peer at this and I'll be able to go person by person real quick And say oh wow, I see you know kate spend a lot of time saturday and sunday working in jira that That's awesome, but at the same time so I want to reward her I want to say hey, you know, thank you for doing that But why do you feel you need to do that now? We can have a deeper conversation like you know, do I need to take something off your plate? Are you doing too much like you know? What's going on so I can help you and that feeling that you just gave your particular colleague Is invaluable to being able to retain and keep them mentally Healthy as well while working with you. So those things go over like the Those things are not visible today as a hybrid environment Yeah, and this offers some visibility into that and like you said it comes down to You can use this tool for good or bad that comes down to the workplace that comes down to the management You know, you have a good team. They're going to use it to say all right How do we optimize the team? How do we do things more efficiently and you know? This does open up that opportunity to do so Yep And then we can we can also drill in a little deeper on the it side msp side You definitely want to know hey if I had a security event on this particular device at a particular time What was the user doing at that time? We can actually help you with that as well. So If I go to this devices activity logs, I can now see Kind of what was going on At a particular time and say hey this was related to The user so we can see you know, whether I was using slack at a particular time or what application As well as each individual log. So if I need to do any forensic Analysis, we can see we're doing a demo right now. So it's just a lot of Portal logs here, but you know if we need to do any kind of forensic analysis on this particular device at a particular time We can rule out that the user had any involvement by looking at this Data the exact same data we're using to summarize Kind of at that holistic level as well and we can export this and and so on to be able to make sure that your customers Or your Situents have the data insights they need to you know make a judgment call Yeah, and just be clear it's logging like you said I heard you use word thick apps But the locally running apps on there as well. So it's not just web This is actually very tied into everything the user is doing then that gives you a great timeline for You know how the products or how things are being used It's very interesting. Yeah. So for instance, this slack here. This is I installed the thick client slack application So it's detecting i'm using that slack versus if this were inside chrome Let's say and I was using the chrome based one. It would show me in chrome using slack instead. Yeah, that's that's the summary For engagement there very cool. Uh links to the other videos. I mentioned are down below and uh, thanks for joining Brett This was great. This is a deep insight and there's a link down there to sign up for source and learn more and I have Brett give you a personalized demo I would love to I'd love to see y'all Thanks