#321 - Sponsor Spotlight - MightyID

Identity can be an asset, you know, it can be a security mechanism, it can, you know it, it can be so many different things. And so when you have all this information from, you know, backing it up and holding it, it becomes something that is, is pretty useful. So we're looking at ways that we can take that information and and give it, present it to our customers, their information and present to our customers in ways that is is even more useful for

them. This is identity at the center if it has anything to do with IAM. This is the go to podcast now your hosts Jim McDonald and Jeff Steadman. Welcome to the Identity at the Center podcast. I'm Jim McDonald and we are having a special sponsor spotlight episode today.

I've got Chris Steinke here on from Mighty ID and he's going to tell us all about their exciting solution. But before we get into the contents of this episode, I want to let everyone know these are special sponsor episodes that are created in collaboration with our sponsor, in this case, my DID to dive more deeply into their viewpoints and specific

solutions in the IM marketplace. To make this crystal clear, the sponsored episode it's a little bit different than our normal episodes, but they flow very much in the same way. Now what the sponsor spotlight episodes allow us to do is provide you with, you know, in depth insights and expert perspectives straight from the sources, straight from the vendors themselves. And we get to hear about their

solutions. A lot of our listeners have told us that they kind of treat these like first sales calls, right? They can, you know, hear about a solution and figure out whether or not it makes sense for them to to look at said solutions. So like I said, I've got Chris Donkey on from my DID Chris, welcome to the show. Hey Jim, thanks for having me. I've been looking forward to coming on and chatting with you guys. Been big fans of the of the show for a while. That's awesome.

I've been really looking forward to it as well. Really interested in your solution. The more that we've talked in preparation for the show, the more excited I've gotten. And we're going to talk a lot about I am resilience today. But before we kind of get into

the meat of things, it would not be us if we didn't start the show by asking how you got into identity access management in the 1st place. So kind of tell us about your journey. How did you get into IM? Did it pick you or did you pick it? Probably a little bit of both. Started a long time ago in the Galaxy far, far away when I was in the Marine Corps. And I started working inside the technology field and the

emerging security field. Back when I started, there wasn't a specific job around information or IT security, but you had to, you know, secure IDs and you had to have, you know, access and, and security and methods like that. And then it, it, it moved into, after I got out of the military, moved into working inside companies like Lucent Technologies, moving into American Express, other brands like Zell and, and now I'm here with my DID.

And those journeys have taken me through multiple roles around security, around infrastructure, around cloud, around application development. And every, every one of those roles, either I had responsibility for the identity and access management environment, or I somehow touched the identity environment or had something to do with it. And, and like your podcast says, identity was always at, is always at the center of, of what I've done.

So that's that's really the, the brief story of of how I've got here. Yeah, I feel like we hit the bull's eye with the the name of the podcast. Yeah, I think so too. A1 take wonder if you will. So, yeah, yeah. So I think if there's anything in the world that's going to teach you about being resilient, it's being a Marine. But you, you've mentioned a kind of an interesting path and now you're at my DID, you're the chief operating officer there. Tell us what my DID.

Does what? What did you guys bring to the table? Right. So my DID is really focused on solving the problem of resiliency for your identity platform and your your identity and access management. Think of it as, you know, not just backup and recovery, but the ability to have flexibility, the ability to have migration capabilities, the ability to have failover across your identity platform or platforms. You know, really today having the ability to bounce back.

You've got so many threats out there related to identity spaces. You hear it on, on your podcast quite often. The, the statistic that is quoted around like 80% or so of security tax have a vector through identity. And and so one of those attacks is your identity system and your identity is not being available. And so when you think about that, how do you make that recoverable? How do you make that be able to absorb an attack, bounce back from an attack?

And we provide a solution that allows you to not only back up your environment, but quickly recover in, in an emergency, in, in the face of a ransomware attack or in the face of a, some type of operational issue. Our solution also focuses on removing things like vendor lock in. If you're, you know, if you feel like I've lived this in the past where you know, you're worried about, Hey, I, I don't want to move from a very complex platform that I've spent

thousands of hours configuring. And what we make that a lot easier. We take that from something that, that, that takes, you know, hundreds, if not thousands of hours to do and we settle that into, you know, a fraction of the time by being able to migrate from one identity

platform to the next. And then you know, with that we've we've seen and work with our customers where they can do a failover with that and failover between one identity platform to another identity platform and and essentially doing like a rapid migration in the event of a of a true disaster regarding their identity platform. So those are those are really the the three spaces that we work in and solve around resiliency for our customers.

I think resiliency is on the tip of everyone's tongue now. I actually interviewed David Monty from Transfer Security on the episode that dropped just right prior to this one. And, you know, that's one of the topics you want to talk about. It's like this is on the mind of Cisos and CIOs around the world, right? Is, you know, we need resiliency in all of our IT systems. And at the core of all that, what makes it all work is identity systems. Without the identity infrastructure, you can't get

into IT systems. So and he hit on. There's so much unpacked with what you talked about there. But before we start unpacking it, I've got to ask you one of the the question. I'm sure it's on everybody minds, which is how did you come up with the name mighty Idi? Love it by the way. Well, it, it really, it really summarizes the fact that we're small but mighty. But, but really, when you think about it, the ID is like we talked about earlier at the center.

And it is, it is, it is how business gets done. It is how work gets done. And it is something that is very, very important. And, and because of that, it's, it's mighty and, and you want to make it strong, you want to make it, you know, impermeable, you want to make it secure. And so there's kind of a dual meaning to that.

We we think of ourselves as a small but mighty team, but that the ID is also a very mighty component of your environment and so we we combine it together to come up with mighty. ID that, that's pretty cool. I like that original story. So tell me, Chris, if you know, if folks want to find out more about Mighty ID, what do they do? What do you recommend that they do? Oh yeah, Just come visit us over at mightyid.com. Especially for those listening to the show, they can go to

myid.com/IDAC. You can, we've got a special white paper that's there too that they can download called, you know, 6 questions to ask your identity provider, your, your IDP and, and those are really centered on the, you know, what if something bad happens when things go wrong, you should be thinking ahead about what are those things that could go wrong and what to ask your identity provider.

Because whether it's a security attack, whether it's an operational issue, whether it's a misconfiguration, how are you going to handle those situations around your identities? And so we'd like to make sure that people are informed are thinking about those questions. So download the white paper. Bonus points if you want to go sign up for a demo and we'll send you some cool swag. That's cool. Yeah, we're always up in this industry. Everybody's up for a little bit of free swag.

So, but I'm really excited about that white paper that you mentioned, like the six questions. I I want to know what those questions are. I'm going to go out there and, and get that white paper because I think if you, if you have these six questions on there, you know, they're really in depth and solid. If you're going out to RFP and looking at an IDP solution, like include those questions, if you have an IDP, ask your existing IDP those questions and you know, make sure they can be

answered. So that's what I would recommend. Go out there, look at what the questions are, see if they make sense for you, see if they resonate with you. So, Chris, I wanted to know a

little bit more about what makes Mighty ID unique. So what makes us unique is really the, a little bit of, of the background of us is, you know, we started, we were spun out of a security company called Tevora. It's a security consulting company. So we really started with the security in mind and, and, and how, you know, how we approach things. Next is really our architecture. Architecture is built to scale. We scale up to millions and millions of ID's and and objects

and applications and attributes. And so that makes us unique. Also on top of that, you know the, the options that we have for what, whether it's a dedicated or a kind of shared environment, we have those types of options for our product too, which make us unique. Then when you get to just how, how our product functions, we have another set of unique

capabilities. Sure, you can do backup and recovery and there are other products out there that do that, but we also do migration where, where you can move from one identity platform to another identity platform. That's something that saves our customers thousands of hours and let alone the headaches and risks of migrations. I, I remember back in the day when, you know, just doing e-mail migrations or other types of migrations and you would use the, you know, the software for that.

And that was always a little bit of stressful. So Can you imagine identities and all your applications that are tied to that and all your access as tied to that? So, so we make the migrations easier and then we also do failover which allows you to use two different ID PS in a a disaster type scenario. So those are the things that

make us unique. Yeah, yeah, I, I'll, I'll admit, I thought I had a gotcha question for you, which was going to be around, you know, this term resilience means a lot of things as you're laying out here. But I, I kind of thought of it in terms of the ability to recover from a quote UN quote, a disaster. And my gotcha question was going to be we're in the, you know, most talking about cloud ID. PS Here you know ping Okta antra. Why do we need to back them up?

Well, you know, first of all, everyone makes that that initial assumption that it's in the cloud and it's always available. But you know, as you know, it's that the service could be available, but it doesn't mean that everything you've built and configured is going to be 100% available and in there and how you expected it, right. So those providers give you essentially a bucket to put your stuff in.

And, and so if something goes wrong, whether operationally, you know, I've, I've lived this first hand and maybe some people in your audience have too. Maybe you have where, you know, good intentions, you go in there to run a script to, to remove users or clean some things up. And that script actually, no matter how, how well you had it peer reviewed and everything like that, it's, it ends up taking out, you know, a whole bunch of users or a whole bunch of access or something.

And what do you do and how do you find that? And how do you recover from that, right? That, that has nothing to do with with, with whether it's in

the cloud or not, right? And, but that's still a resiliency factor of being able to quickly recover from that, you know, whether it's it's something like ransomware where, you know, being able to recover from or step out of the way of a ransomware event, or if, heaven forbid, there's a, that the identity provider has a bad, has a bad operational event happened to them, right. And, and you have to move out of the way of, of, of that. So there are, there are those

types of scenarios. And, and really what it comes down to is, is that shared accountability model that a lot of people just don't always think about when it went. They, they know it's there or they, they know it's in the contract, but they just believe that while it's up there with, it's an always, always available service. They're, they're, you know, they're running on a cloud environment, they're in AWS or something like that. And it's, it's always going to be there.

It's never going to have a problem, right? And and our customers have recognized the fact that there is a huge risk there and that risk is they have to be able to, you know, take accountability to recover and and you know, bounce back from those types of issues. Yeah. I mean, you know, it's this whole shared responsibility model right in the cloud. I think you brought up a couple interesting scenarios, which is that people make mistakes.

And by the way, I'll tell you that I've never run a script that screwed up production, never. But people make mistakes. And then the other thing that you brought up was the ransomware attack, which I think is, you know, I think ransomware was like, you know, at least, you know, I think my, my immature self used to think ransomware was like some hocus pocus thing that happens.

And a lot of times is someone gets a credential by phishing or social engineering, or if they buy it from the dark web and now they're onto your network And, you know, maybe they spread some kind of virus that gets on to an administrator's computer, locks them out. And then they connect to the IDP credentialize, authenticate in an appropriate normal fashion, and then just start changing configurations in your, you know, IDP tenant. And whose fault was that?

Is that the IDP's fault? Because you, you know, you authenticated in a way that that appeared normal. You had the username, you had the password. Maybe you're able to complete the MFA because if you're using Ubikeys or something and or, or whatever the reason is you're able to, to authenticate and now you start changing settings. Now if you don't have a backup of those settings, you can't

restore them. I mean, do you really want to be having to call Microsoft to say, restore all my settings through my my Antra instance and I've got 25,000 users who can't log in anymore? Like you want to have some insurance policies to that, right? And that's what a lot of this is about.

Right. And, and in many ways, they're not going to be able to restore all that configuration to, to the level that that you had said it or in your scenario, you know, and as you were saying, sure, if, if that, if that attack vector was in through the IDP, it's their fault, right? If if someone broke in through, the IDP hacked in through that through. Through their through their back

channel. Then then, yeah, that's, that's on their end of it. But if it, if it's they called your help desk and social engineered their way in because that never happened. And, and what do you do then? And and so that's, that's really where you're taking control and you're getting control of that environment and you're having it's just, it's it's like what you and I talked about before. It's just the, the good old days of having those backups, right?

But in this type of scenario, you can rapidly recover, you can recover in minutes. You can, you know, our, our abilities allow you to recover down to the individual attribute to individual user, the individual, you know, if you just need to recover something like that, if you run a script that you know, deleted everyone's, you know, something, an attribute on the user that is all their phone numbers, you can recover all the phone numbers, right?

That's not necessarily a big critical thing, but it, it, it still can be a big headache. I mean, I, I've, I've, like I said earlier, I, I live that nightmare where we had the, the entire C level and senior executive leadership accounts removed by accident through inherent script. And I would have loved to have, this is many years ago before Mighty ID existed. And it was part of the reason the, the, the passion project that is Mighty ID and why I'm

here. But you know, I wish I would have had something like that, that I could have recovered from in minutes instead of spending hours trying to reassess what happened and, and how do we build those accounts back and so on and so forth. Well, yeah, if you're an administrator and of an IDP, this is like a little bit of an insurance policy from the ransomware perspective. To me, that's the, that's the new disaster, that's the new

earthquake or the new tornado. Like, you know, you mentioned the scenario like, OK, the IDP, like the data center goes down. The IDP is in that's kind of the ID, that is kind of the ID PS situation to restore from. And, and when you look at like Amazon with their, you know, their different availability zones sometimes like you don't, if you configure things properly, you don't have to worry about that.

This doesn't save you from, you know, poor practices in your identity management where somehow you cough up an ID or. You know, you get compromised in a ransomware attack. You could very well be running into the situation where you'd be really happy if you have a backup. So that's that's the backup side of things.

But you mentioned a few others. So the migration vendor lock in, I would imagine that the organizations that get most excited about this are mid size to large organizations where they've got pretty big instances, even though like from an enter ID perspective, I think like it's got to be 90% of companies from enter ID of all sizes now.

But when you get into that very large organization and this seems like a tool where they could be doing mergers and acquisitions and, you know, buying a larger company or smaller company and having to migrate them from whatever their IDP is to whatever your corporate standard is, a divestiture where you need to carve them out and get them running on to their own instance. Is that kind of what you're talking about here? Yeah, Yeah, that's exactly what we're talking about.

There's obviously a few different scenarios that you can use that this, you know, migration feature for because we look at migration as, as two things. You can migrate between the same identity platform, just two different instances or you migrate between two different vendor platforms, right. So how we, how we've built the product and how our, our users or our, our customers have given us feedback and are using it is exactly that.

They're using it for mergers and acquisitions, divestitures. They're, they're using it to make test environments. They're using it to test their, their BCDR plans, right. I mean, you go from a tabletop exercise, which is great in theory, but to actually be able to restore a tenant and test it and, and you know, really know that it works in, in, you know, in, in real time is, is, is pretty powerful.

And and then you've got those big strategic projects where you're talking about a company that wants to move from one platform to another or a company that says, hey, we, we want to move our Siam onto a different platform for diversity of capabilities. So we don't have all of our debt identities on one platform from a risk perspective.

So we might put our customer identities on one platform and use our enterprise internal identities on another platform, but we need to split those out, right? So let's migrate those off. So, so there's a lot of different use cases for how our migration capabilities get used by customers. And we, we learn new things everyday from them. We learn, we get new feedback from them and, and, and how we develop. And we've got some pretty cool ideas in our in our future road

map for that too. Kind of feels to me like there's one kind of like the main feature, which is, yeah, I always go back to Veritas backup exact. That was like the the backup to tape platform that I used for so many years. I remember like going out of style, backing up the tape and shipping tapes to off site locations. And you picture some, like mine under the earth that you're storing your tapes and like it's cooled and everything but that. That's a really old analogy,

right? But it has to show my age really early. But I'm kind of like picturing this as like the main features, like the ability to back up and to restore. But I'm also seeing this as like a tool because you've got the ability with this thing to do

the migrations. I also could see a scenario where you're using this mighty ID to say, all right, we're going to migrate configurations from, you know, pre production environments to production rather than kind of the stare and compare, which I know a lot of right words. And So what I mean by that is that they don't have an automated way to take configurations from earlier environments to, you know, closer to production. And so to me, that's like a huge benefit.

Well, it is, it is. And you can, you know, it, it gives you that ability to, you know, build and and destroy environments and, you know, use those identities in an environment for those purposes. And like I said, there's once you have that, once you have that data, the configuration data and you want to build a, another tenant or, you know, another IDP like that, it's, it's pretty easy, right? And you can just put it out there.

And it, it's, it's always interesting to see the different use cases and different scenarios which our customers like to like to use it. And and like I said before, they they give us great ideas all the time. You dropped the a a term on me when you you and I were chatting

earlier. You called it change 360. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I just wrote that down and I didn't tell you. I was going to ask you about it but it was Change 360. Yes, Change 360, I'm, I'm glad you brought that up. So change 360 is one of our key capabilities around being able to identify changes inside your configuration of your tenant and being able to trace that back to a patient zero. So now that we're backing up your tenant and you're, you're generally doing backups in a

regular manner. Some of our some of our customers like to do it daily or weekly. We have the ability to do it continuously and we recommend just just let it run continuously and do it in an incremental continuous backup. Anytime there's a change that's done, it automatically backs it up. But anytime that change is done, is back backs up, you can, you can be alerted to that change and you can go investigate it and investigating it and see was that, was that something that

should have happened? Was that something you can reconcile that if you want against the change record. Hey, was that, was that an authorized change? You can go back and, and see how far back did that change go to? Does it tie back to a specific user? Right. And so as you're keeping those incremental backups and keeping, keeping it over time, you can eventually through our Change 360 capability, create a, a timeline map of changes on a user and buy a user.

So it, it, it turns into a really powerful investigative tool. You know, our customers think it's pretty cool. They like, they like to play around with it and use it a lot. We, we've got some, some new features coming up around it, new enhancements coming up around it in the future. So look for some announcements coming out around what we're going to do differently and add on to change 360. But it's it's, it's really powerful, really insightful and great tool.

Yeah, it sounds like a really powerful feature and I just want to remind folks that if you're interested in learning more about the my DID platform, my DI, d.com/IDC, there's a white paper out there. You can get a demo, sign up for a demo and they're also send you some some cool swag. One of the things I wanted to ask you, Chris, is you know, you guys work with a lot of customers.

How did they measure their success with your platform? Yeah. So measuring success obviously is is around a lot of those different user stories of the product right around backup and recovery. So there's different measures of success around that compared to migration. The failover measure of success is kind of similar to that of the backup and recovery, but the first measure. RTO.

Yeah, is around RTO. So the first ones around RTO and being able to recover quickly in the in the event of a of a some type of failure or issue. The the second measure, the second measure of success is, you know, project based measure of success. How, how quickly and how, how, how you can de scope risk in your projects around things like, you know, migrating around projects like, you know, divestitures or acquisitions and things like that.

Because those all you know, all those things are going to have risks associated with them. They're going to have project timelines are going to have costs. So those measures of success reduce those costs, reduce those timelines, reduce the, the risks and even the risks around operational issues that can happen because of that project.

So you're, you're working now with this, with the Mighty ID and a tool that automates these things and, and you know, significantly reduces the risks around human error and just the manual work involved with it. And, and the, the, the failover piece of our component is, is measured in, in a sense of very

similar to RTO. When you get into some of our other features like our Change 360 and our new features that'll be coming out here in the next few months around our health check and dashboarding health check capabilities. There's going to be, you know, success measures. Obviously the Change 360 success measure is around, you know, security investigations even, and even change management like being able to understand what changes are happening.

Our, our, our health health check capabilities will obviously enable success measures around, you know, the health of your tenant and, and the configuration of your tenant in the way of do you have, you know, you know, best practices applied? Do you have things like, you know, MFA enabled for all your applications or, you know, do you have, you know, too many users with administrative

privileges and things like that? So those are other additional, you know, capabilities that will help give, you know, administrative and and and other pieces of information for for users to to measure. So obviously your Mighty ID solution is built around allowing customers or helping customers be more resilient. How is Mighty ID resilient?

Like are you guys in a globally diverse and a failover configuration? How? How are you managing that? Yeah, I'm glad, I'm glad you asked that. You know, we, we touched on that earlier, I believe a little bit. But you know, we do operate in a, you know, in AWS in both regions in the US and we operate in, in Europe and Canada. And so we, you know, we have diversity in our, in our, in our architecture there.

And then, you know, besides having all, all the built in, you know, diversity in the architecture and resiliency built in there, we also run our, our backups and, and back it backing up ourselves in a different cloud in Azure. So we're, we're about making sure we're resilient around our architecture and how our application operates so that, you know, we're not going to fall prey even to the issue of a, of a, of a huge cloud failure or something like that.

That's that sounds good. What is the future for my DID? Where? Where are you taking the product? You know that that's an interesting question. You know, our, our product is, is focused around resiliency and I think we can go multiple places. We can continue to grow the product in the way of how do we cover more identity platforms.

And that's, that's a natural kind of growth trajectory for us. It can be a little tricky sometimes because the more you start to grow all those identity platforms, it's just it, you know, it becomes a lot of work to keep parity and to keep, you know, everything running that way. So we have to be, we have to be smart about it and we really, we really try to listen to, you know, perspective customers and our customers needs on where that, you know, where we should drive that piece of it.

You know, the other piece of it is, is really how do we, how do we help enable the security story and the change management story and, and, and the what, what we would call the, the health and metrics story of, of, you know, identities overall. And so that's, that's where we're taking this because we really look at, you know, the identity can be an asset. You know, it can be a security mechanism. It can, you know, it, it can be so many different things.

And so when you have all this information from, you know, backing it up and holding it, it becomes something that is, is pretty useful. So we're looking at ways that we can take that information and and give it, present it to our customers, their information and present it to our customers in ways that is is even more useful for them. Sounds pretty exciting. Yeah, I expect you just rattle off products, but I think you made a good point there.

It's just like that's really not easy to maintain and that's probably not the right way to to go about it, right? Is it better to be broad and shallow, or is it better to be, you know, more narrow but deep? That, that, that. That's your. Customers who are on your platform in those areas, they want you to go deeper and deeper. They do, they do.

And and that is, you know, and we certainly want want to be there with them and sometimes you can and sometimes you can, you know, it it all depends on what you're able to access inside that vendors platform. So what and how you can access inside of Okta, inside of Ventra or paying or, or IBM or, you know, to start going down the list.

And, and you know, we're, when you're doing that, you can go deep and deep and deep and deep and, and we, we will always try to meet our customers needs in that space. But it is a dilemma and there's a balance that we have to strike because there's always going to be customers out there that are on some other platform and they want that backup and recovery capability too. So, you know, it's, it's, it's a constant, you know, push and pull, tug of war, so to speak,

within our, within our strategy. So let's be clear, what are the the platforms that you currently support the? So, so today, yeah, we support ACTA, Microsoft, Entra and Ping ping one and and you know, we've got, we've got other ones in the in the road map in the future. You know, we're even looking at the big boys like, you know, AWS and Google. And should we be looking at doing things like that?

Because we, we've heard from our customers that even our customers that have Microsoft or have Ping or have Octa, they're looking at these other platforms, maybe not just as a replacement, but they're looking at these as augmentation.

Because I, I don't, you know, although some companies and some of our customer strategy is to have a single identity provider, like I said earlier, some are thinking about, some are thinking about splitting them up, some are, some are accepting that a hybrid identity platform is, is better for them, even though there's a little bit more overhead in the management and

so forth. So that's where we can really provide value too, because we can help back up and recover both of their platforms or all of their platforms and they can have one, one tool to do that. Well, it's not just ID PS. I mean, you know, you could kind of extend into the IGA market. You can look at privileged access management. There's a bunch of other ITIIM spaces that are maturing.

I mean, you know, it's certainly when it comes to ID PS it's like if it goes down even for 5 minutes and people can't log in, that's a major issue. Usually from provisioning standpoint, it's not. But there are a lot of large organizations that have whole teams managing those IGA platforms. And I bet you there are a lot of times where people would like to go back and see what was the configuration before we've rolled all these changes in or what were all these changes like.

Let's run a a differential. You know, I could definitely see that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So Chris, before we wrap things up, I wanted to talk to you about the Gardner I Am Summit. When this episode drops, the the Summit is only a few days away. For those who haven't registered, by the way, we do have a discount code. It's IDAC 375, save you 375 on your registration fees. Chris, are you guys going to have a Mighty ID booth on the Expo floor? We sure are and we look forward to having everyone stop by and see us.

We'll be there. I'll be there Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. So stop by and say hi. We'd love to talk to you, tell you more about what we do and, and hear hear from you too. Like these are great opportunities for us to not only interact with with with everyone in the community, but a lot of times too. We hear some of the pain points, we hear we get great ideas and and we collaborate with everyone there to come up with new ideas

and come up with new solutions. Some of some of the features in our products today have come directly from collaborations like that. So love to hear from you. Stop on by and hopefully I'll see you there too, Jim. I love that. That's like a very good perspective and it's a unique opportunity for folks. Like how often do you have an opportunity where you can go to somebody, whether or not you use their product, give them your ideas and potentially end up seeing them come to fruition.

So I definitely encourage everyone to to take the time to swing by the booth. Chris wanted to take us out on the letter notice kind of tradition here at the Identity of Center podcast. And you and I, we're sports dads. I was a baseball coach and dad for many years. Now you are on the on the lacrosse side with your son and he's doing some big tournaments. One of the things you mentioned to me was that lacrosse, and by the way, when you said this, you said lacrosse builds resilience.

And I just pictured what you meant was the guys hitting each other with the sticks. And I'm not even sure if that's what you call them sticks or what. I've seen some of those those tournaments on TV and it's not a gentle sport and the guys aren't padded up as much as they are in football. So I mean, you got to be, you got to be pretty resilient to do that part. You got to be willing to take, Yeah, you got to be willing to

take a few hits. You know, you know, I, I, I grew up playing hockey and, and soccer and baseball. I didn't play lacrosse, but I started, I, I gained an interest in it when my son started gaining an interest in it at about nine years old. He's, he's 14 now. So he's been playing for about 5 years. And quickly into the sport he, he realized he didn't like running a lot. He likes playing and playing around, but he just didn't like having to run a lot. And it's a, it's a run a lot sport.

I mean, you are running all the time. And, and so he, he decided to switch to goalie as a lot of goalies, if you talk to a lot of goalies in lacrosse, the reason they moved into goalies is because either one, they were the younger brother and their older brother put them in goal at home and would just shoot on them or they didn't, they didn't like running. And so, you know, he falls into that other category, not running.

And so he started playing goalie and quickly learned that it's a it's a very, very difficult position. It's even. More difficult than than the other the you know, the other positions on the field and, and goalie in general. When you think about something like, you know, soccer goalies or, you know, hockey goalies and things like that, that it's, it's, it's different than any

other position on the team. And, and it's a very, it can be very high stress position because all eyes are on you at that moment when someone's taking a shot. And, and in a, in a sport like lacrosse, that the lacrosse goalie, a good goalie is generally 5560%, you know, save average. And that can be pretty tough when you're thinking that, you know, just about every other shot on you is going to go in the goal no matter what you do, no matter how hard you try it, It can be like that.

Now, that's not always the case for all of them, but you know, that's, that's generally how it goes. So building up that mental resiliency is a, is a big thing. And, and he and I have worked on that a lot. And I've, I've learned a lot about myself, learned a lot about him and learned a lot about just the idea of resiliency overall. And it's how it's become such a, a big concept in technology and security.

I mean, I've seen, you know, all the old BCDR and, and, and whatever concepts and terms and, and teams are now becoming resiliency teams. the IT operation teams are becoming resilient IT resiliency teams. I've even seen security resiliency teams. So resiliency is becoming a very, you know, kind of strong concept and in the technology

world and the security world. And, and so, you know, and then in my personal world, I live this, you know, almost every day with my son on how he becomes more resilient as as a goalie and learning how to, you know, bounce back and, and you know, be stronger again. And, and you know, whether whether someone's, you know, cranking on him at, you know, from 30 feet away and it with a 7080 mile mile an hour shot.

And, you know, he's either got to be able to just stand there and take it, not be afraid of it. And, you know, or it could, you know, that person could put it right on the right spot and shoot it by and he's got to be OK, like, all right, then get going to get it next time. So, you know, the whole idea of resiliency is just something that has become a a strong kind of center in my life. And it just, I think it really just is a focus on how how we

just become better every day. Yeah, I mean, I think youth sports is full of, you know, the popular term nowadays is teachable moments. Teachable moments. I remember coaching, you know, 8-9 year olds and I'm crying after they struck out. And I would not in the moment, you know, after the game or at the practice the next day, just say, unless you're crying when your teammates strike out, I don't want you crying when you strike out. It's a team game, man. It's not about you.

And so I think if you, you know, if you want to try to drive a certain kind of thinking that's, you know, there's there's a lot of opportunities and being a coach to young people is like such a privilege. It really is to really mold them. You know, I, I agree and, and you know, especially the, the concept, I know it seems like we're overusing it, but the concept of resiliency is, is so

important. Even, you know, even more so today, because when you think about the environment our kids are growing up in, you know, I, I just think about it like, you know, he's got a, he's got a smartphone, he's got social media, he's got all this other pressure around them, things that I didn't even think about when I was growing up, right?

And how do you be resilient and in, in the face of all those pressures and in the face of all that stress and, and expectations and, and, you know, just be able to, you know, put, you know, move forward every day and, and make yourself just a little bit better every day and, and push out all the noise, You know, like you said, and, and life is a team sport And, and it's not always just about you and, and resiliency isn't just about how you cope, cope with it yourself.

It's how you cope as a team and with the people around you and the people you have and the type of people you have around you, right. So that, that's also very, very important. And that's what, you know, he loves about it too. It's his team. It's his, you know, he loves being around his team. You know, even when it, if they don't win, they do it as a team. So it's it's, it's great to see. Great, great points, Great discussion. Chris, I really appreciate you

coming on the show today. Really enjoyed this discussion. Again, I think you mentioned you're good with people find you on LinkedIn searching you up and just connecting to you. I'm open to the same thing. So if you're a listener of this podcast, especially committed to this point in the show, please look me up on LinkedIn, send a connection and know Jeff is of the same mindset. Mighty ID can be found on the

web of mightyid.com/adac. If you're interested in getting that white paper as well as signing up for a demo and and enjoying some swag. Also look for Mighty ID. Look for their booth at the actual Hall Gardner IM Summit if you're there next week. And the Identity Center podcast is available on all of your podcast listening platforms. Well as on YouTube, go to idacpodcast.tv.

Our website isidacpodcast.com. If you get an opportunity to give us a like a five star review, any of the good stuff, we certainly would appreciate it. It helps us get the word out and more people to find the show for now. Thanks for listening and we'll see you all on the next one. You've been listening to Identity at the Center. We hope you've enjoyed the show. Make sure to like, rate and review, and we'll be back soon. But in the meantime, hit the website at

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