Special Episode: Cybersecurity

Corey Martin, a customer solutions architect at Heroku, is in conversation with Jason Meller, the founder and CEO of Kolide, to talk about the future of enterprise security software. Kolide is a device monitoring software with an emphasis on its users. By and large, devices which are part of the Kolide fleet are free to operate unrestricted, whether that's downloading files or disabling firewalls. However, Kolide lets users know when they're engaging in potentially insecure behaviors, through Slack messages and OS notifications. It places the responsibility and trust for safety onto the user, rather than locking everything down.

Jason came up with the idea for Kolide after working at GE. As an enormous enterprise company, GE had to ensure that its employees' devices were always secure, to prevent outside threats from infiltrating their network. While realizing the importance of keeping users safe, he disliked the invasiveness of existing tools, not to mention that their approaches hindered necessary applications and services employees used to be successful at their jobs.

User focused security, which is what Kolide practices, starts with empathy. This comes about by visualizing the needs of people that are using the devices every day and trying to understand where risks might exist there, from the entire chain of users.

Links from this episode

Kolide is an infrastructure analytics company

Osquery allows you to query your OS using an SQL syntax