 Hey Aloha everybody and welcome back to the Think Check Away studio. We've got an amazing episode of Security Matters for you today, David Symes chiming in from our friends up north in Canada. David I really appreciate you taking some time to join me today. We've all been through a lot of change and I hope we can kind of get a perspective on the sort of the changes you guys have been going seen up there north of the border. Thanks Aloha Andrews. Thanks for having me. Right on man, no worries. So give a quick disclaimer. I've known David a while back from his Kintaba days. But we haven't seen each other in quite a while so I'm so glad to get you on here and have a chat man. It was fun catching up before the episode started. I'd like to that our audience get to know you a little bit those folks who don't know you. You know when we're all we're in the PSA gang I mean you are popular in there. So I don't know. We haven't seen you around that group in a while I don't know if you guys will be back in there or not but maybe take us for audience who don't know you know sort of your history in the industry and how you've evolved up into your current role at Paladin. Sure, I don't know if that I'm many more popular than I was back then. But yeah, I know I'm a computer engineer by profession. I kind of started in the wireless carrier space so started with like paging and then moved on to the voice and data arena and did system engineering there and project management end up in in research and inevitably, and then just kind of life changes happen and I needed to find something different so I ended up, you know, just looking around and somebody tell my shoulder and got me into physical security so it's 1314 years ago now. And what a ride man it's it's awesome. I just love like I've always been the technology guy and you know invested heavily in learning about business along the way but you know the wireless carrier space is super sexy like you know trying to get the capacity of these mobile connected to base station so you got like awesome data speed and resilience on on your mobile phone out there and there's all kind of technology attached to that but it was a very narrow technology evolution. So, so there's just certain segments of the technology would evolve, whereas physical security has just been, you know, you got all the field sensors that are evolving independently you got cameras you got these weird sensors you got network technology evolving independently you got server compute storage capacity increasing you got, you know, analytics. You get the software feature settle all independently, you know incremental consistent improvements that just kind of as a wave of evolution that you get to experience in this industry so it's been awesome awesome right. Yeah, and today it's sitting up up there as the EVP now you guys scale across all of Canada. So this technology delivery is it is it a regional as far as the systems that are out there do you see more, you know video in the in urban or is it I know you guys oil stuff up north you got sort of different industry segments healthcare is the technology growing in each of those sectors sort of equally or or do you see you know favorites are certain things in certain sectors that are sort of different. Yeah, it's it's hard to pick a winner I would say in and and where we've had success and where we continue to grow is anywhere there's complex needs so you know you've got a large environment complex environment. A lot of subsystems need to talk to each other. You know high high level of security large number of assets large number of people. That's where we're going in and seeing success and and it's just a broad broad spectrum industries but you know critical infrastructure is his, you know continues to be a big one for us and just understanding that it those those industries really but you know healthcare enterprise business banking, you know they all kind of have some commonalities and and so, you know, our, our structure is is around kind of a regional focus so that you know we have local leadership for, you know, talking to customers and delivering. There's an accountability there and then, and then, but collaboration is really important for us as the business scales gets larger, it's always about tapping and finding the right person to tap on the shoulder to bring them their competencies to bear on a problem or to bring a solution to the table. And, and so really flexibility and collaboration in the structure is always been, you know, key to to that success. And so the, I know you guys are over 1000 people now so you've got a whole lot of support when you have problems that you need to address. Did you see a much of a shift or what kind of shift did you see sort of pre pandemic to during pandemic to maybe talk about you know externally, you know the changes that maybe we should start to anticipate going forward. Well, I think from a fundamentals perspective, like just that collaboration piece and then, you know, not putting up artificial barriers needed barriers for people to talk or, you know, apply themselves to a problem or, you know, come to a team. So that was even more important as things get shut down, like as the wave the tidal wave of COVID came across and, and things were shutting down. It was like, well, just, you know, how do we, how do we solve the problems of the day, and usually that's, you know, by finding the right people. You know, as so as things progressed and we've kind of exited that it's it's now we're just leveraging kind of all these these tactics and, and, and kind of learned behaviors of collaborating so you know teams zoo meetings like just picking up the phone a lot more often has been a lot brought a lot of improvements or capacity overall. I think the communications piece caught everyone off guard a little bit but now it seems to me that everyone, there's like a higher expectation of communication and it's not that handshake it's not that hug you know it's not that that the personal piece but information should be transferred, you know with these, you know, everybody just learned that it's available and it works and so I don't know was, was that you did a lot of work that was done maybe in person moved to sort of remote for your customers did you find you guys had to, you know, internally set up to support that type of interaction or how did that go for you. That was a small shift but I would say the majority we were already doing what we could remotely from a secure perspective like, you know, and we were always a proponent of, you know, quality control requires some, you know, bench building in the shop even like what we can do in the shop we want to get done tested and vetted in in a controlled environment before we we get it to the customer side so so we always kind of loaded that stuff. It's centralized right so, and then, and then, and then we've we also specialize the role so, you know, the guys doing the server compute storage networking or, or, you know, fundamentally just focused on that and the software layer. And, and they've always kind of just, it's been way more easy to have those guys working remotely generally, you know, there's obviously situations where you have to be beyond Prem and, and they will be on Prem for that but. Yeah, no I think so and then you know tools wise, we're pretty ready to rock you know we just just just happened to be, you know, growing enough we're at 20 some offices now. And, and so like tons of tons of remote communication already and, and, and it just, you know the platform was kind of there and then and our collaboration components like document management stuff like that that was, it was already there and I'll just like flourished in in in coven times. Yeah, it's amazing them so because there's some distance challenges to your offices right with 20 offices you're spread over 1000s of miles up there. So having that capacity or the understanding of how to do it remotely I've heard a few people tell those stories that had no that remote off they were kind of already ready to go so there wasn't that huge shift for them or their customers. I mean, what about on the pressure of coven on the like that, the sort of that deliverable aspect of your operations right where, you know, guys, some people have to come in and build the kits and get the gear ready to go to be deployed do the bench testing and all that. Did did was there a slowdown and that type of work for you guys was there, was it difficult to bring people in, for example, I don't know what how it wasn't there. Well, I mean, depending on the jurisdiction the lockdowns were fairly rigorous, you know, we're delivering done critical infrastructure so central services so we kind of had a pass on that but you know just there wasn't an acceptance to mobilize in a lot of spaces. You know, there's remote like the camps, just work that we do like they were, they're very concerned about having outbreaks so so they really restricted our access to go there. So I think it would have been similar to the, to the states kind of experience of, of like, you know, jurisdictions locking down and, you know, at some point you had to fill up employees and, and because you just, you couldn't deliver anymore but then it kind of had ramped up pretty to put in all the safety protocols we, you know, very very rigorous around the health and safety of our people so we got them back up and running and, and, and, you know, we've had a pretty good ride since then right and we're coming out of it now and it's it's super excited. I, you know, can you from the, from the deliverable side of that house from technology deliverables. I don't know did you guys get hit with like, we had like banks that wanted to open back up and they wanted the thermal stuff in there to help their customers feel good not not really not knowing that it's not really preventing any exposure per se but to make the customers that were coming to their places feel better. You guys get requests for technology weren't familiar with yet and had to had to vet out some new stuff for deliverables for people that just had that sort of demand. I say, you know, almost everybody was in that kind of scenario at some form or fashion, and we got it. We were really, really cautious. We were, we said we looked at, you know, the technology, the proof side to outcome the results, the data. And, and it was just like, this is the wild west and we went from like five suppliers of this to 100 and some suppliers of these things, and like cost just range from, you know, all over the map. And, and, you know, so there were some areas where we implemented and it was effective and it was, it made sense but there's a lot of we're like, like, top the brakes top the brakes and then, you know, well, now that's history and and who knows right like the next, what's, what's the next pandemic or the next critical, you know, thing to hit our place where we adapt. The good thing is, like we've always focused on open scalable flexible platform so we want to be able to plug some other technology into that, your existing technology want to be a little bit of it if one of your manufacturers takes it on the chin falls down whatever want to be able to segment that chunk of the technology out and evolve it and keep you moving so. So that was helpful I mean we did we did have some, you know, fundamental flexibility in in the technology we're delivering to adapt to that. Yeah, it seemed that the in users let's just call them in users were not as aware of visitor management right as all of a sudden they're like, oh, because I'd like what are you going to do with this technology long term was kind of my thing like it's got to be able to your point evolved. And now we've seen that this stuff still sits there and they're, you know they're asking you know have you been the question there was these five questions you had to ask right you have a temperature but now it's like, have you been vaccinated and if it's no then the things smart enough to see if you have your mask on or not so it's kind of funny how it's, it's changed. A little bit but they're they're still there they're just doing a different function with that I thought was kind of interesting. I think we'll see a long term impact in the sort of the visitor management technology piece of our business going forward so that people don't have to ramp into it next time there's things already there that will make an effective to manage them, you know, requirements for visitors. We've kind of chiseled away that some of the fundamentals I mean beyond deploying some some kiosks and has happened that infrastructure out in the wild and some, you know, use case, you know, like just just funneling people through the right places and you know remote reception and stuff like that like, so we're kind of like trial that out and built some fun fundamentals. You know, I think, you know, mobile check in for visitor management is is going to be continue to be kind of a growth, you know, because it's super flexible and you can kind of deploy it, deploy it as you want. So then it's, you know, getting the back end systems to work and kind of amalgamating those those records together. You know, I think at some point hopefully we get some some analytics value out of that data as well so you got like now you're just it's not just a card read coming into that that system or whatever or you know visitor record, you know, we got other data. You know, can we be preventative in some form or fashion to the health of the business or, you know, restrict some accesses the access or or even just see some trends to some of these things going on when people access our environment. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. It's funny that some of the privacy concerns just went out the door all of a sudden because we had a different priority right so I was kind of I thought that was an interesting. But they were there but they took a lower tier than they had prior to that right so I thought that was kind of interesting. Looming sort of Damocles hanging over your head like the PII stuff and all the stuff that's been tracked you know where's that sitting today and is it protected and the regulations and laws are getting in the fines are getting worse. So, or, you know, more strict so it's concerning. Yeah, there's this balancing act that got kind of thrust upon us all. So we're about midway through we're going to pay some bills pay we're going to take a break for about one minute will be right back with David time stick around. I'm Mitch Ewan host of Hawaii the state of clean energy on think tech Hawaii. Hawaii the state of clean energy is about following the many clean energy initiatives in Hawaii. Hawaii the state of clean energy appears weekly on think tech Hawaii at 4pm on Wednesdays. Thank you so much for watching our show. We'll see you then. Aloha. Hey, welcome back to security matters we're talking with David Simon Palin technologies coming to us from Edmonton I believe today. David I really appreciate the insights on the, the pandemic and the changes to our industry that you guys you know went through up there it sounds to your point kind of similar to what we went through internally, you know, we are a small, you know, I'm in Hawaii right we're like a kind of our little show here. We do know what some of our other integrators went through but internally in Canada you guys were already a large company spread out you know across 20 offices. How, how were things functioning sort of, you know, 2019 national I think the industry was kind of growing, and then when the pandemic hit, and then you know coming out of it. Well what sort of changes internally, you know, struck you the most or do you think you guys learn most from. It was, it was really doubling down on the collaboration piece. So, and, you know, not to knock small business. You know I was in one, we're able to, you know, punch above our weight. And it's, you can deliver absolutely. But as, as you grow, and you, you know geographically you grow, we kind of entered some adjacent technology markets as well as as we've grown. And, and through that the breadth of your team, and, and the depth increases so you get this this growth overall. And, and then, so now you have different resources to pick and choose on to help solve problems and not just kind of compounds over over time. So, you know, 2019, you know that was where, you know, hard to look into the rear view mirror and see what you're actually thinking but, you know, it was steady steady forward. Like, we've just got a booster shot with the post COVID proving out some of the collaboration efficiencies related to collaboration but also just applying ourselves better to to these environments. Did your team, did you guys pick up so some teams were having like happy hours on zoom and different, you know, activity games I was jeopardy there was I heard of so many interesting things to sort of keep teams engaged and, and units engaged. Did what what happened for your folks and who sort of led some of those ideas. So, yeah, this a lot of it happened naturally. We're just missed each other right you know, you're, you're traveling across the country seeing all these people and hey we got to we got to catch up but you know like everybody I think zoom meetings and teams parties were got old pretty quick. You know, the vendors would kind of push those along and maintain them right so you still kind of got connected that way but, you know, the HR department did an excellent job of kind of doing doing some things so so they put on a competition for, you know, publish your your personal exercise every day and you submit all these ballots and you got to take a picture of it and they publish it on the on our internal website and you know the winner would win this Peloton bike. It was really cool it was it was awesome really in great gauge everybody to see what they're doing and their personal lives and also encouraging people to go, you know, get out and try and be healthy. Yeah, Christine Christine said the pandemic created hunk chunks or drunks. And I know that you're, I know that you're a workout guy so can you share with us what workout you submitted. Oh yeah I said did some runs. I was able to squeeze out a half marathon for my first time. Wow, did one of those yeah and just you know out on the lake paddling with my boys and stuff like that. It's been weird though exercising, you know, like changing your home gym over to full time gym was was weird. Yeah, all those, you know, body weight, you're a weight guy like all the body weight exercise you're like really but you know I found mold but I'm kind of not very good at a lot of that so it helped out. Who won the Peloton bike you know. Yeah, one of our US guys down in California. All right, yeah, yeah. Christine brought one of those in so I've been been hitting that pretty hard we also get get out and right as well. So what other sort of initiatives do you think, you know, internally sort of internal pressures. I mean you think there's anything coming to you, you know, from like a technology demand side like did you get I don't know if you guys had to get my cameras or the nice usb microphones or I don't know what all you went through from a internal change side but can share some of that with us or maybe what you see might be happening going forward. Yeah, so so the bits and pieces of technology infrastructure wise, you know that kind of happened. It was like supply chain problems everywhere just to get a webcam, you know I'm doing all that stuff so we got through it I think and we're probably set up like you know everybody's got to effectively a laptop now nobody works on a desktop anymore like let's keep that flexible and and from a cost perspective it's it's good so so I think the bits and pieces that technology have kind of figured it's figured their way out of reach some sort of plateau. The other side is like the infrastructure and cyber security and like the, you know, if you were able to be tight team some sort of like perimeter on your network before you can't anymore and you couldn't during COVID right so all of that got fuzzy so we're pushing, you know, data out into people's homes on to you know unsecured networks, even more and more and more right so that the colleges. And so, so I think the, like the big changes we're making right now are on infrastructure and just keeping us as flexible like we want to deliver to our customers like a nice flexible scalable platform, we're doing that for ourselves our internal system so going through a bunch of change and pains along with it. You know, we can have easy to use flexible security and and and deliver the line of business applications to our people reliably. You know that's that's that's just so important and then, you know, and just keeping that flexible so you know who knows what the next thing is but you know flexibility is key and cyber security is absolutely key. So that I think I think that's the one piece that that was broken for everyone initially right and there were a few hiccups along the way with some of the bigger technology providers even right that we saw that had some some, you know, vulnerabilities exposed. And did your team by and large adopted you have to ramp up training for for you know I like ransomware and you know inside a threat awareness and that kind of stuff that's a kind of one piece of that took on to try to keep our team aware of the stuff that might be coming at him because the criminals didn't rest either right they they kind of they took a little break and then they came out like fiercely right trying to attack us and so I don't know if you guys saw that up there it was pretty ugly here. Totally I mean, training and awareness is, you know, ever, you know, could ever be improved and with growth, you know, you got to kind of manage that. So we implemented some tools to help us as well some additional, you know fishing resilience in from an infrastructure standpoint, you know, we've got further plans you know it's ever evolving trying to try to move that that forward. It scares me like the fact that you know, Joe Biden and Putin we're talking recently about like the first steps in some sort of Geneva Convention when it comes to cybersecurity attacks from a state level like why are we there right now why like, oh my God, we have so many exposures, you know they're just recognizing now that hey you shouldn't probably go attack the other guys power grid because that could cause human suffering. I think that that looks to me like okay now you're going to enable all the other businesses to be, you know that that means it's it's table stakes to go and go after all of the the non classified industries right. I think that perspective. A lot of people sort of miss that right because governments like look, like, let's let's talk about protecting each other or not attacking each other but that does leave the rest of the world perhaps expose right the rest of the world. Let's talk about Fortune five maybe right or maybe take the top few of those out but they're they're so big with so many in points I mean I can't imagine managing that mess anyway, but I mean, it's a great point that if the, you know this this supply chain risk management all this stuff flowing into government that we're seeing down here. If, if the rest of industry particularly security industry right we're supposed to be the secure guys if we don't start to adopt these mindsets in our manufacturing and all the way through our own processes and integrated deliverables. You know, we could be part of that vulnerability problem that is the attack surface expanding instead of getting narrower. Yeah, you bet. Are you are the major manufacturers that you folks use have they been coming to you are they are they waking up and getting you know into that. Hey look we've got some cyber assurance issues we want to work on you know we know we need a software bill of materials hardware buildings are you starting to see that kind of chatter from them are they still kind of quiet. Oh, I think there's an improvement there's definitely segments like manufacturers have definitely stepped up where you know those, you know, publishing their threats and communicating, you know that that's that's I think improved because the risk in the the perception piece there. And then the other side is, you know, they're feature wise to enable, you know, whether it's 802 1x or whatever like those those are slowly coming to be commonplace in a lot of the endpoints and stuff and then, you know just, you know, it's but it's slow incremental compounding investments in this stuff in in all directions well they have to do that in the cyber security direction to, and so you see these slow improvements but the bad guys are also doing slow improvements or like jumps, jumps forward. And then so the other thing like yeah we have to be way more cognizant of our supply chain with the, you know solar winds and, you know, everything, all the other vectors that are that are coming that are being exposed right now it's like well you got to you got to put some rigor into your supply chain, you can't just rely on, you know, you know, then then promising you that they've they've done the bedding you got to you got to see some results. Yeah that third party assurance is going to become a I think of a slap in the face for a whole lot of people that you know not only integrators but manufacturers the entire ecosystem is going to have to step up in a way that they they've not been challenged to do you think we've made a lot of money for a long time doing what we do but we haven't done it securely as we can and that security piece is going to cost us a little bit. Great stuff, great insights there Dave. Well I've got a got a few seconds left. What advice would you have for our industry folks out there going forward to accelerate themselves out of this change. I mean, go back to it collaboration, you know, stay stay on the bleeding leading edge of what you can safely, and, and, you know, open flexible platforms is where you got to invest in. So because the future is is so uncertain as has been proved out recently. That's awesome Dave thanks so much. Appreciate taking the time to share with us today on some great insights be flexible out there people who knows when the next change will be forced upon you. Dave take care. Aloha everybody have a great day.