 Hi, everyone, and welcome to JSA-TV Live, the live streaming newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Barb Mitchell and joining me today is Colin Milstone, Chief Marketing Officer at Metari. Colin, so great to see you again. It's been a little while, it's always nice to catch up. Well, it's wonderful to be here and this live stuff is a lot of fun. Yeah. So you and I have had the benefit of chatting in the past, but for those of our viewers who may not have had the opportunity to meet you or to hear about Metari, can you just give us a little bit of an overview of the services you provide? Yeah. So Metari is a 30-year-old startup, so to speak, very entrepreneurial spirit. What we do for a living is basically we create and sell enterprise software. So our focus is in the collaboration space or telephony space. Predominantly, we're making software for enterprise class or very large organizations. Again, businesses, schools, et cetera, et cetera. Metari's mission, I think, is of note here. Our mission is to be the global leader and voice threat defense and that's a big statement there. What we're talking about here is the fact that our voice channels, our telephony systems, our ability to communicate via phone has come under attack. A lot of different threat tactics out there, cyber tactics relative to the voice channel, and what Metari is all about is building products that help protect and defend your ability to talk on the phone. Really, it is the bottom line. Metari's flagship product is called the Voice Traffic Filter. Again, that sets the stage to all of our conversation today. I feel like the importance of this is just increasing over time, especially and we're going to talk a little bit later about some of the trends that are leading to that. But before we get into that, let's just as a background. I know you've been really busy this year. You have done your second annual voice network threat survey. Talk about that just in terms of why this survey, why are you doing a second annual? What's the purpose of the survey? Again, good stuff here. The bottom line is I'm going to harken back to my previous answer that, again, Metari as an organization or wants, needs, and desires, and focuses all about being a leader in voice network security. Given that, we feel responsibility, if you will, to help create actionable intelligent metrics and data. The survey and doing surveys is part of that. This particular survey, again, the Voice Network Threat Survey. Again, we've got to work on shortening that title, but the idea here is that we wanted to dig in in an annual basis and understand what the professional world, the business community, the enterprise technology and security space, how does these markets, so to speak, view the voice channel as a threat vector. Our ability to answer a phone, every one of us has a cell phone these days. Over the last several years, we've trained ourselves, hey, if we don't recognize the caller that's coming in to our cell phone, we just don't answer the phone. That is the symptom, if you will. Well, if you think about the professional world, the business world, enterprise space, whether you're a hospital, whether you're a plumber, whether you're a big tech company or whatever, you can't just decide not to answer your phone. Again, the problem is real. We wanted to better understand how our organizations dealing with this issue of unwanted traffic in their voice network. Again, step one is to really dig in to say, tell us a little bit about your view of this threat vector, this voice threat vector as an issue or as a problem, and then tell us a little bit about what your organization is doing about the problem, etc. The survey, both last years and this years, is really all about how do we better understand what's going on out in the world. So there are this whole issue of voice network security. To look at the actual tactics that the bad guys are using, it's things like robo calls, things like spam calls, things like spoof calls, social engineering, spam storms, those are the actual tactics. Now, all of us as individuals, again, we have an easy fix, businesses don't. There are within the last 12 months or so, there's been some very high-profile organizations that have fallen victim to some type of a cyber breach. So where the actual bad guys were successful, those are names such as Uber, Cisco, Twitter, GoDaddy, Twilio. So all these really savvy forward-looking security conscious organizations have fallen victim to a cyber attack that has a voice-centric element. So again, we want to dig in through our surveys, understand more about what people are thinking, what they're doing, etc. And yeah, I mean, you can only begin to imagine the impact that that type of a breach would have on some of those large organizations, large or small financially and otherwise. So for this survey, I mean, there's so many people. As you said, there's even a difference between businesses and individuals in terms of how people are impacted. But who were you specifically talking to? What was your audience? Yeah, so what we decided to do was we said, well, who are the folks that should be the most savvy, that should know the most about cybersecurity protection, risk management, those types of things. So we believe that the folks that are most charged with that, those responsibilities are IT folks and cybersecurity professionals. So what we did when we earmarked this year's survey and kind of planned for our timing, we structured around three very significant tech slash security conferences. So the survey was conducted face to face through interviews where the subjects were basically given a tablet and they could just kind of pick and choose their answers, multiple choice, yes, no, that type of thing, all automatic, all coordinated. So again, we visited the RSA conference in San Francisco earlier this summer, which is probably the most significant security conference in the world. We visited Cisco Live and again, everyone knows Cisco, cybersecurity is a major part of their business. And then we also visited a show in Vegas called Customer Contact Week. And why that is so important is that's a contact center centric conference. And if anyone has to answer the phones, it's the contact center folks. You have to, that's a whole different realm of responsibility. So again, we wanted to target the folks who are based with dealing with this problem. So again, tech and security professionals, the overall this year we had from those three shows, 308 survey respondents. The survey itself was 12 questions long, so very short, sweet and condensed. And overall on average, it took folks about a little under two and a half minutes to actually complete the survey. So can you, so I mean, that's obviously you're talking to the right people, you're doing it in the right way, you're asking the focus questions that you're looking for some insights. So can you give us some highlights? What were the top insights? Yes, which again, digging into the data is like my favorite part, right? It's, you know, with all surveys, you just never know what kernels, what nuggets you're going to unearth. There was really five things that stood out to us, right? And FYI, we do have a full executive report. It's a PDF form and it's available online. But again, there was five things that definitely stood out to us, specifically to me, right? Because I'm kind of at the center of the stuff, which again, is a lot of fun. Number one, so the first thing that I found super interesting and again, I've done a lot of surveys in my career and usually when we look at our audience and we kind of slice and dice that audience up, we can see some differences in the different types of roles, you know, in those answers. So with this one though, we found that about 40% of our respondents were leadership roles. So in other words, these are people in tech or in security who have ownership of a business function and the ability to control budget and spend, right? So that type of leadership. So again, about 40% of our audience was for those folks. And across the board, usually we could say that leadership has a different, you know, significantly different or slightly different view than others. But in this survey, there was some massive group thing going on, right? There was no significant difference between what leadership roles felt and believe and what everybody else felt. So number one, to me as a data guy, like that to me was just kind of stood out. The next one that was the, I guess it shouldn't have been a big eye opener because Common Sense says kind of, oh, of course that's true, but we have a question we said, you know, tell us about how your organization is impacted by unwanted traffic. Again, unwanted traffic, robocalls, spam calls, vishing, spoof calls, et cetera. Tell us how you're impacted. 100% of the people who answered this survey who responded, 100% said, first of all, that they were impacted, that their business is impacted. So not one person of the 308 people said that this is not an issue. So first of all, that was like, you know, that's significant. It's very rare that you see 100% on anything, right? Now, when we dive a little further into that number and we ask about, you know, tell me kind of explain those impacts. The one that stood out to all of us is that 25, well, just about 25, I'm gonna round up for 25. It was 24 and some odd percent. But again, I'm gonna take the high road for the 25%. 25% of folks said they do not answer their business phone if they don't know who's calling. And again, our cell phones, that's okay. If I run a sales team and 25% of my folks are not answering the phone, that's a problem. If I run a customer support team and 25% of them are not answering the phone, that's a problem. So to me, that was a big deal, right? Yeah. Next, we have a number and the number is 85% and here's the deal. So 85% of our respondents said that they believe the voice channel, the voice threat vector is real and needs to be elevated to the folks that control and are responsible for security and risk management policy. So again, big deal. The reason this one's so important is that most of the organizations, most organizations across the globe do very little when it comes to protecting the inbound calls coming into the organization. If you juxtapose this with, let's talk about email for a second. I'm gonna take a quick tangent. So if you can imagine what your email inbox would be with all the filtering and protections in your inbox, right? Well, that's kind of where we are right now with the voice channel with your phone system is the amount of protections are exceedingly small. Part of it is that folks are just now realizing what a severe problem this is, but the other part is a lot of folks don't realize there are some pretty simple ways technically to proactively solve for this problem, right? So again, 85% believe that voice is a threat vector that should be elevated within the organization. The last number that I'm gonna kind of highlight here, the number is 90%. And again, this was another big surprise. And again, when we do surveys and we see numbers like over 30%, these types of significant numbers tell us that something is there, right? So this number is 90%. And 90% of the folks interviewed said that they believe that voice telemetry, and I'll explain telemetry in a second, but that voice telemetry should be part of every organization's or their organization's security program. So telemetry is simply a fancy word for data, right? Log data, right? So what we're saying here is every organization has some type of risk management program. Some folks call it SIM, some folks call it XDR. The bottom line is what large organizations do, they take a lot of data from a lot of different sources and kind of integrate that and condense that and bounce some data against the other. So that's data coming from your data center. That's data coming from your various endpoints. That's data coming from your email protection system. So all this data comes together and what the cybersecurity teams usually do is they try to correlate this data to spot any trends on a proactive basis. So again, big data, this is a true cybersecurity analytics big data job, right? So that's one part of the risk program. The other part of it though is once there is a breach, going back and saying how did this happen and how should we have caught that? What happened in our organization where there clues? Well, again, adding voice telemetry or voice data to both the proactive side of risk insecurity and cybersecurity management and the reactive side can add an entirely new realm of insight in correlation. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's, I love how you've taken these insights and you have, I mean, you said anything significant over 30%, your talking number is 85, 90, 100%. I mean, it's clearly significant and it makes a lot of sense what you're saying. There's so many protections online for folks but this is a different realm. And so aside from what you've been saying of telemetry and assessment and whatnot, what other ways can companies secure their networks? Do you? So yeah, so what's really important as you talk about this topic, it's super important to be clear with the words, right? So traditionally when you talk about network security you're talking about your data network, right? And so we wanna make sure we're being super clear. We're not talking about data network here. We're talking about the voice network which is very different, right? So telephony, voice over IP, lots of different words for it. The bottom line is your phone system, your corporate or business phone system. So relative to protecting your voice network. Number one, and again our survey last year and this year kind of shines a light on this stuff. Number one, the most important thing to do about this is to understand it, right? Get educated, understand the problem. So first of all, understand that, if I have some type of protection for my hardware, the hardware that my voice network runs on, we're not talking about hardware. What we're talking about is the traffic that traverses that network or the phone calls, right? Again, remember your phone system is open 24 by seven by 365, right? So it's always open and the bad guys know it. The bad guys know that there are very few barriers for them to gain entry into your organization and get direct access to a human. And that's really the holy grail is getting access to a person. So number one is understand the problem, right? Understand what we're talking about. Then understand the threats. Again, what the heck is a robo call, right? What the heck is a spoof call? And hey, aren't robo calls just an annoyance? Aren't they just a nuisance? Well, with this issue, we've got both nuisance traffic or nuisance calls and we've got what are called nefarious calls. So again, there's, yes, there's a component of it that is annoying and a pain in the rump, right? But hey, well, those robo calls, they just kind of tie up my lines, but they don't necessarily increase risk. Well, other tactics do, right? So depending on your situation, depending on what you do as an organization, different types of these voice threat tactics are bad for you. So let's say if you're a contact center and your contact center is overwhelmed with annoying calls, that is stopping your good customers from getting in touch and getting their problem. So again, just cause it's a so-called nuisance call doesn't mean it's not bad for business. So again, understand the different types of threats, understand the different threat segments and then understand how does that impact more organization? Again, if I have a call center, what does that do to me? If I have a sales team, what does that do to me? Accelerate center? I mean, it's obviously exactly what you said. I mean, you talk to people and there's, how do you quantify the damage that the nuisance callers can be incurring on you, but then also the ones that there's, I mean, there's fraudulent activities happening. And I feel like lately, it's hard to have a conversation without bringing up the topic of AI, right? There's everyone is so excited about it and kind of in awe of it and hopeful, but then also quite scared. And so how does that factor in here? Good ways and bad, maybe. Yeah, so- At least I'm good as well as some bad. Yeah, AI is definitely a topic that is training and it's something a lot of people have questions about. And it's really interesting. When we first put this survey together and started constructing it, was before chat, chat, GPT really hit the scene hard, right? If I had 2020 vision when we put this survey together, we probably would have put some very direct questions about AI, but the impact AI is having today is already being built and that is, again, we talked about robo calls in the nuisance related calls. So again, nuisance annoying lots of them in the room. Well, then there's the super bad guys that the terms here are fishing, so voice fishing and social engineering. So these are where the bad actors are, again, a human bad actor is making a phone call to try to get into your organization and get some information, whether that's access codes, whether that's passwords, whether that's, hey, I'm your boss, make sure you execute this wire transaction right now. Well, with AI, our ability or the ability to create deep fakes is super important, right? And super robust. So now, as the person answering the phone, I may be like on point, I may remember all the things I've been talking about, hey, if someone calls you and asks you these questions, be on alert. But if you know your bosses, your executive team's voice, and they call you and the voice sounds exactly like them, your propensity to do what you're being asked to do is quite great, right? So anyway, so the bottom line is AI is making this problem significantly worse and doing so extremely, extremely quickly. Yeah, yeah, it's a bit frightening, but I mean, I think that the first step for people is to talk to someone like you and your team at Metari, and I think that based on just everything, there's so much great information that you've been able to pull from this year's survey. I know you'll probably do another one next year and there'll be a whole other section of questions, but first of all, any final words you have on the survey and I'd love to be able to point people to it. I know you said there's a PDF version available for folks, so just sort of wrap up thoughts from you and then where you may direct people to find out. So I think the overall thought, especially when we look at our inaugural year in 2022 doing the survey and then this year. And again, we kept some of the questions the same, but we did evolve some of the questions. So I'd say about 60% of the questions have been consistent now two years in a row, and we've introduced some new ones to try to improve. But I think that the most important thing we saw, experienced, et cetera, was in the way, was in the experience of actually doing the interviews, right? Of actually talking to people about the problem at these shows, right? And the difference was astounding, right? In 2022, again, same situation we did, we did the survey at big shows, so same stuff, right? So we're talking to people who should know, right? This is something in their wheelhouse, but in 2022, our survey team had to explain many of the questions, had to explain much of the terminology. Again, folks who should know because they're responsible. Right? In 2023, everyone knew what we were talking about. We didn't have to explain anything, which again, like the term fishing is a perfect example. Fishing is, again, voice fishing, similar to email fishing, but again, voice fishing, fishing. That was a super confusing term in 2022. And in 2023, it was a non-issue, we didn't have to explain it any more. So people are getting a bit more savvy. They're knowing maybe a little bit more what to look for. And I think to just what we were talking about, about some of the trends out there, people are, it's more probably broadly talked about within, not just organizations, but just in general with folks. Yeah, I think what's interesting just within the last few weeks, there is something big in the United States happened and said that organizations that get breached have to report it. So that's a big deal, right? Up to this point, folks don't wanna talk about the fact that they've been breached. So again, I mentioned some pretty big brands earlier in our conversation that have been breached. So again, the number of folks that have been impacted this way are great. And I think we're gonna learn a lot more in the, as we move forward about all the folks that have been impacted that again, have not had to talk about it, right? So again, it just, it dawns to me, I got so excited answering some questions, I forgot others. You asked a question about where do folks go, right? How can they get some more information? Right, yeah. There's a QR code on the screen. That's right, there's a QR. Some people I think have, as we've been here, it's up in the top left, I think, as far as I can tell. People have been sort of scanning it as we go here, but for any of our listeners, definitely scan that. Yeah, so the Metaria website, again, that's metaria.com, M-U-T-A-R-E dot C-O-M. The Metaria website has a bunch of really great information. There's a navigation element or something on the top nav called resources. And again, I mentioned it earlier in the presentation, so to speak, that Metaria, we take our leadership in this, in our mission really, we take it very seriously. So we believe it's super important to educate folks and to put out a lot of educational content. So on the Metaria website, under the resources tab, so to speak, there are a number of eBooks that help explain the problem. And we also look at different industries. We look at what is this problem like if you're in a contact center? What is this problem like if you're in higher ed? What is this problem like if you're in financial services? Because every industry has nuance about it, right? And no one is experiencing the exact same thing. But again, we know that 100% of folks are impacted. They're just impacted in a different way. Yeah, and so great, yeah, I echo that. Your website has so many great resources. People can poke around in there, but also reach out to, I'm sure, for any business who would like the support, I'm sure, but you would have some possibilities and some solutions for their business. And Colin, this has been a great conversation. I mean, I know you said there's some questions, but I mean, we've talked about so much and there's so much more we could, I think it's such so topical everything that we're discussing here. And so great that you and your team at Matari have the right solutions to tackle this. So thank you so much for your time. Wonderful, thanks for having me and thanks for asking so many amazing questions. Yeah, thanks. We'll talk again soon, I'm sure. And thank you viewers for tuning in today to JSA TV Live. 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