¶ Introduction
Live from the somethingcool.com studios this is the K-12 Tech Talk podcast this is going to be a little bit of a special episode because we have a couple interviews that we've recorded that we're you're going to hear tonight uh but first Chris is with me here uh I guess it's really no secret we're in New Hampshire right now um we're at the New Hampshire CTO clinic and we've had to pre-record some interviews to get an episode out this week to everyone um but first let's talk about our
sponsors that are with us every week we have ntp uh they awesome EDR Solutions get a hold of David Wren over at ntp I think let me let me see if I remember this email d-w-r-e-n at ntp Dash incincinc.com they do a bunch of stuff but uh they're one of their big things they've got right now is uh EDR solution from Sentinel one with a 24 7 monitored sock go ahead we want to thank extreme networks as we always do you can email Dominic mayor D Mayer at extreme.com if
you're looking for switches for wireless for whatever check out extreme networks and then Fortinet a proud responsible Tech Talk podcast reach out to them as well and we have a special so so let's unpack the special interviews we got to sit down with absolute yep several the guys from absolute because we've been unpacking them over the last several episodes but we've been doing an okay job yeah so we had the experts come on to impact them about what they really do yes so the
best way to explain it is LoJack for laptops right so they um if you've got a they'll they'll monitor several devices but if you've got a Windows laptop they've got a client that gets installed and goes straight into the BIOS you can't remove it um kind of like an MDM type solution uh so they'll they'll explain that in their interview and kind of their company history they used to be a different name computrace I just remembered that uh and I used to use computers shoot man 15
years ago at a different company I I work for so it was kind of cool uh putting the connecting those dots together and seeing their their history as a company uh the other interview that we're going to have during this episode is a really cool interviews with yeah Andrew wasn't the tech director there but he was like I guess he was one of the instructors for this program so tell us what that's about yes so we got to meet Andrew and George uh in particular Andrew I I Eric the intern
hung out uh when we were at the coast and Conference to learn about this is a high school that has a great cyber security program so Josh and I we talk about our our our student text that fix Chromebook screens fix Chromebook Parts this school took that way next level uh and they're into cyber security yeah they have like a a I got the vibe almost an entire high school he said they had 250 kids in the program which is astonishing to me um but what they do is they focus in
these different tracks and cyber security and if the kids want to they end up coming out with certificates in different programs like Network plus a plus George was going for he just passed Security Plus this week yes shout out to George you're gonna you're gonna hear from him but yeah George you're going to listen to this congratulations on that that's a big deal and I think you're going to be blown away with some of the stuff that George says he's doing he's
he's more or less working as a cyber guy for a company near their school and doing some red team stuff doing some training it's funny because he was talking about how his dad is in I.T and they were on a road trip as a fan like a family vacation or something and his dad's on a conference call George is on a conference call and they're they're George is a senior in high school and he's on a conference call with a international company about a cyber I.T problem so like this kid's in high
school and he's he's doing that because of the Cyber program that the Lakota schools in Ohio has so it was a pretty impressive interview and I think uh Georgia is going places like these kids coming out of this High School they've they've got a foundation and they are super super marketable yeah listen to that because that's a I think that challenge us with our absolutely kick butt and we do have kick butt kids uh in in our uh student tech programs but there's some other stuff that we could
do with our high school kids for sure yeah absolutely we're looking at adding a plus to our program so uh give it a listen and uh we'll be back regularly scheduled I guess in two weeks because next week you're gonna hear some interviews that we've done here at New
¶ Lakota Schools Cyber Academy
Hampshire and uh that'll be next week's episode so we appreciate you listening uh stay tuned thanks all right so we've drug in Eric the intern again what's up Eric wow and you brought some friends along with you that you also drug in from somewhere I don't know how you convince these guys to hang out with us for a few minutes but you pulled it off yeah this is uh coasting keeps on giving I just kept drink dragging people in and we keep dragging them in now so who we got today all right we've got
Andrew and George uh and they're gonna talk to us a little bit about the cyber security program they have going for students and their school and I'll let you guys introduce yourselves where are you from what are your names what do you like to do yeah so uh my name is George from Cincinnati Ohio um I mean you know it's easy to say my passion is in cyber security but um I'm a passion outside I like baseball a lot um played Sports all my life but uh definitely had a huge interest in computers
um from her early age to be honest so yeah just computers and baseball really what grade uh senior in high school when I'm gonna be going to University of Cincinnati for uh cyber security next year and what high school awesome other Cody East High School there we go yeah uh my name is Andrew I'm the director of secondary curriculum here at Lakota schools and so I oversee all of our programming grades 7 through 12.
um and I've similar I've got an interest in technology my whole life but actually was a social studies teacher for a number of years before I get into the curriculum world and have just had the pleasure of working with Lakota schools to help build a cyber program we're about our fourth year the Cyber program about 240 students and um you know George is a really great example of the the students that we have in our school districts so just excited to talk to you guys about that
you have 240 kids and you're in your cyber program yeah wow that's two high school we have we're a two High School District um and our cyber program essentially
spans grades 10 through 12. and cyber one cyber two cyber three and we have 240 students in the program so it's amazing Define that program Define what that is sure I'll give it kind of a high level and then I'll let George kind of fill in with what that's like from a student experience um we we started out with uh industry Partners who are like hey you guys should really build a cyber program and we're like okay let's do it and from the very beginning we we had a cyber
Advisory Board uh because we knew we needed the industry support guidance to to spin this up and to do it the right way uh you know in education and we kind of have a specific approach and business can sometimes have a different approach and we thought it was best to put our minds together to do it so one of the advice that they gave at the very beginning is they said try to keep these courses um with kind of vague names because the industry changes a lot so instead of
having you know like 15 different discrete courses you know just do the three courses align them with industry certifications and what standards and stuff are out there and then we'll provide you know the industry partner so they provide a lot of support and That's essential we did so cyber one is sophomores generally speaking cyber 2 is um you know Juniors then cyber 3 is a Capstone course mostly for C seniors for the most part the curriculum is generally
um aligned to Security Plus with a bunch of offshoots and areas for students to explore some of their own injuries and things like that um George anything from your kind of perspective yeah so like cyber one really I mean cyber security is kind of a really hard thing to grasp so it's almost summer one's like a Basics right of you know you know running a Cali Lakes machine and doing all sorts of stuff like that of learning the basics and then cyber two you're really jumping into
um you know Security Plus and studying for that um and like you said the Capstone project so for My Capstone project right I'm I got uh serve out ethical hacker Pro certification and then I am taking Security Plus I've already taken it once I got close to it I'm taking it this weekend so it's really just do your own learning and and however much you put in you get out so it's it's been a program that's really fit around me too so so from a curriculum standpoint you know
you've got cyber one two and three they're also taking their core classes right like English math so are are you guys from a curricular standpoint are you adjusting what math class classes they take or cert any any other adjustments like that not really um you know our students paying quite um you know a wide range and one of the things that we try to have done in the program and I don't think I have to tell you or the listeners this but I'll say it anyway is that you know cyber is
almost as broad as Tech and you can maybe even argue it's broader because you could get into uh policy and you know geopolitics in the world of cyber um so we don't have any sort of other courses that are mapped to it or expectations and you know we we want to be able to provide students who are really not Tech focused but maybe are into social studies and or maybe want to go into some sort of government work or public administration or political science work to also learn enough about
cyber security that that would be uh you know a value add to them also and I mean for me too it's like I had a lot of interest in social studies um but I took a lot of computer classes and I didn't like coding but I mean I like the fundamentals of building a computer but I don't like coding as much as you know some of the stuff that cyber security gives me so that was one thing that really attracted me my sophomore year was saying like you know I can sign up for this class this computer class I
don't do any coding but I'll learn the basics in ins and out of computer which was huge I actually think we have a lot of students who are into Tech but don't like coding or learn they didn't like coding that's kind of been an interesting one for us so these are all credited classes right like like you're getting a grade not a pass fail yeah and I mean the one thing I'd say too is is it's called we get college credit for some of the classes like for our soft the Cyber 2 class is a CCP
class at a local community college awesome so I'll have that course off taken off of my college and then the class we took a class I took cyber three for several ethical hacker Pro um I get that also off my college so you get college credit too and then those are taught by our teacher our teacher got dual credit adjunct status and then teaches the course in-house to our kids kids get dual credit now that's a that's something that blew me away Andrew when you were talking
about that at coast and um because I think that's one of the struggles that a lot of our schools have and it was one of the first questions I had when I walked into your session where the heck am I going to find people to teach this so who did you find to teach your classes now yes um well our opinion was that I'll take one step back uh cyber security doesn't have the most typical educational pathway for the people who are practitioners in it right um only recently did colleges even have
programs like only the past four or five years there really aren't many um you know high school programs so there are definitely some around the country so a lot of people are in the cyber security took alternative paths so we also knew that you know we weren't going to be able to pay cyber security wages so what we did is that we looked for teachers who were great teachers and kid magnets um and were ultimately the number one criteria was like are you willing to
learn and do you feel like you need to be the expert in the classroom and so we looked for teachers that were doing that so our two teachers one was a math teacher by trade and the other was the English teacher by trade then we train them up and part of that is the support that we get from our cyber industry partners and um you know send them to various trainings so we get support from our College Partners industry partners that we got them up to speed from the
cyber security side but from a student standpoint like let me talk about your your teachers and oh yeah what they bring I mean it's like the two teachers that we have here are really special and I think that I think like Andrew said like with the kid maggot they can really they can really talk to us right they can explain it and I think cyber security is something that almost everyone around the world is almost learning right now right so it's a growing industry and stuff like that so
um from a teacher aspect it's great I think that you know they're learning with us and they're not you know they're not afraid to say that right they're not to be out you know they're not afraid to say you guys might know more than me because some kids in our class do because some kids love just you know go home and you know Tinker with a calorie machine right and they might know more commands than Mr daughtery does but that doesn't mean that you know he's not the
teacher right so it's really special from that aspect of it so do you would you say you view the teachers is kind of like a guide really leading them through the curriculum yeah I think God would be perfect um I mean like that's exactly what they are to us yeah would you unpack so you talked about working with Partners in Industry Partners uh unpack if I'm thinking about doing this at my school so I know I need to find some good teachers that can work with kids well uh how did you go about that
initial stuff or what advice would you give to a school that's thinking about getting started who do they reach out to so some things that we learned along the way is as soon as we put the word out that we were doing this just people from the community just came out of the woodwork you know the number of businesses that reached out to us parents who worked in cyber security and were like oh cool you guys are starting a program I work in the space how can I help um there is a sense that the cyber
security Community have been like ignored for a long time and like they finally got an opportunity to like shine and they're like yeah let's go and help out so we've had tons of folks who uh do that so we have people who Mentor we have guest speakers at this point like every other Friday every Friday and high quality individuals too high qualified individuals um we have Mentor or not mentors but industry Partners who um we've asked for internships and and do that and so for I would say the
advice for the school is like just publicize it as much as possible and and you're gonna find the people in your community who are more than happy to do anything from just share advice to get into a classroom you know to mentoring students you know on all those different levels that was not a challenge I could see that maybe be more of a challenge depending on what part of the country you live um you know we're in a the Cincinnati Metro metropolitan area I could imagine
maybe if you're you know more rural it might be a little bit harder to find quite the the community to be able to support but I still think that you'd be able to find folks who are close enough to cyber security or in the tech space that can help out kids and virtual breaks down most of those uh geographical barriers now that you can bring people in on a zoo I mean yeah and honestly most of our guest speakers are virtual at this point it just does not make sense that people come in
yeah so um are you able to name any of those industry partners are you do you have students doing internships at any any companies right now yeah so uh I'm actually intern right now at this company called Spinx Electronics we're a goal manufacturer I've worked there since last June so last summer um I've been working there for about a year and I work around 10 hours during the school year and I work try to put in 20 hours and you know breaks in summer and they I had they had me doing tons of
stuff like uh encryption on their computers and patching on their computers and uh I've done some side projects like rfids using them in the office um even red teaming uh so I'm wrapping up project right now on hacking and stuff like that of of in and even physical um uh you know physical and social engineering stuff like that so um yeah it was huge I think the internship too especially I'm so grateful for it because I think that being able to learn yeah in the
classroom is great but being able to learn soft skills and being able to talk to a boss right or my co-workers who are in a different you know engineering people sit next to me and being able to talk to them right that was huge for me is is being able to learn soft skills and Technical experience in that internship outside the classroom and you're even doing stuff like globally on different time zones too yeah like um meetings I've had to get out of school
for meetings because some people were in Japan and Portugal and I had a you know the time didn't work out so stuff like that right where it sounds cooler you know I mean it sounds cool but then you're stuck in a meeting for 30 minutes but it's so much you know it's a lot of fun and I love being able just to talk about it because it's like a lot of people were like wow that's that's really great and I think that's that's one thing too that I just love talking
about too is it's great George you also have family working in an industry as well don't you yeah I have so my dad works uh for Salesforce um I.T right and uh I have some extended family that are in I.T as well and so they you know I do definitely get that sort of aspect of you know my uncles and sometimes they know what I'm talking about but some people you know my grandparents stuff like that right they there's not a clue but this program has allowed me to kind
of spread cyber security too I mean like you know my I don't think my grandparents really knew much about cyber security but being able to uh talk to him about hey like you know this email that you're getting is this is a phishing this is what that means right that was that was cool for me too yeah teach the older ones of my life here grandma this is how your Facebook's gonna get hacked grandma yeah Josh I would say I've always been which I am prideful on my TSI of tech support
interns and if it's Chromebook screens and blah blah blah um but cyber security and throwing in that realness of it into a school system is amazing it it uh it hit help it hits home for us right now because we are looking we've we've modeled a student-led help desk after what Chris did um and ours has been really successful and and we're really wanting to give those kids a little bit extra something in the near future and we're looking at offering um oh a plus certification through test out
for those for whoever wants to do it like we we currently have like 25 kids in that program um we don't think all 25 will do it but if we get three or five kids that do it and we're able to give that class um as a credit then instead of a pass failed class and it qualifies for some higher um State reporting scores because of the College and Career Readiness it's an IRC industry recognized certification um that that's something that we're looking into so this this is this is
fantastic that you're doing this um I'll I'll say George that uh one of the things that will get you hired more often than not you know it's one thing to have certifications behind your name and you know you can prove that you know what you're doing with technology having those soft skills enabled and being able to have a conversation with someone and take the content that you're trying to get across to that person and and be able to uh refine your delivery so that anybody in the room can
understand it at multiple levels that that skill in itself will get you hired more times than it will um that is very very rare in the I.T field I think the guys and you know Chris and Eric um they all have that those two guys I I consider myself to have that skill as well um it's it's one of the reasons we're in the positions that we're in um so if you refine that skill and you keep using that it will take you far just that skill alone but by all means keep going for those certifications
I and I wanted to kind of highlight some of the certifications George you said you got the ceh yeah ceh no not the CH the uh test out yeah okay yeah yep and then and then like I said Security Plus um a couple kids in my class have gotten that and then I'm taking that once I'm taking again this week and then we've had kids get a plus um I know okay last year and we got Azure Azure and then there's kind of my class taking AWS before summer begins so just you know there's a lot of different
certifications out there too and we don't require our kids to get them we definitely highly encourage them um and then we support them if that's a decision that they want to make and so that's cyber 3 course really allows for that because it's a Capstone so if a student says you know what I'm just not interested in Security Plus but I really want to do Azure or whatever then we help provide the resources for them to get that on top of explore other topics that are part of the curriculum and
whatever else has the district been pretty willing to to pay for some of those certifications because I know we I mean no not because the district's not willing it's the district by our choice refuses because that's what our industry partners are for oh so um from a industry partner perspective that's a pretty easy ask uh to say Hey you know there's going to be an 18 year old that's about to go out into the world and have a Security Plus and or Azure or ethical hacker Pro or whatever else
um you know 200 bucks here and 300 bucks there is I think um something they're more than happy to sign off on it's very tangible for them and from a give back perspective it's you know if that's been an easy one for us perfect and the fact that they are then taking these our students as either interns or co-ops or employees that's that's cheap right well I think what's great about it you've set up a model that fits the cyber security realm but it also fits in the it realm too
especially for smaller school districts everybody's got I.T even if they don't have a cyber security Focus but just the fact that you're reaching out to the community at large and finding those sponsorships and the support is really amazing because that's what we're all about is is integrating with our communities and being um good stewards of the of of the resources we have so I think that's awesome yeah and I'll just go back to the I didn't finish completely finish your your question about our
other partners so started with standards because I know that's who George um interns with but also U.S Bank Fifth Third Kroger GE Aviation um ATC Technologies to a local company it's been incredibly supportive trying to think if there's anybody I'm missing but those are the big ones um in belcan yeah uh all those companies provide internships uh mentors or some sort of financial support or a combination of all three and why I think during your session you guys were just kind of telling some
stories of your internships and I was really captivated by those just the things that you're getting to do um and it's often a challenge in our Tech departments to bring in student interns because we have confidential data or whatever it seems like it kind of throws up a barrier to you being able to give admin access yeah but I was impressed that you guys were even digging into like email uh compromise and those types of things within an institution like that yeah it's I mean I
I'll paraphrase and help me out here but I know Colin was talking about um for the internship that he works at you know had they had some sort of big incident and they pulled them into the War Room you know and he's a part of part of trying to figure it out and we've had students who I remember one of our students was doing where like when employees left he was doing all of the making sure that they weren't taking sensitive information with him which was like wow
that's pretty cool for 18 year olds yeah given that level of responsibility but hey that's your choice um yeah so and I know George you tell I always like your story about like being in the car trying to do yeah yeah so um I was going on vacation last summer and uh like I said my dad works for Salesforce so he's on a lot of calls and we were in a car to uh South Carolina Hilton Head um and I had to get a meeting because we the company was starting to do MDM with
mobile device management and enrolling that and I had to be on that call and we're in the car and I had my computer on my headphones and talking and then my dad was had a meeting too while he was driving and his detention in the car was just too much because you know you got one company the other company and then you know MBM and Cloud it's just my mom was looking back at me and was like oh gosh it's just not good it's stories like that right it's just fun to tell
because it's like you know as an 18 year old not many people have heard that and it's it's I'm really grateful for that right of being able to do that just tell you stories and you know all that it's real yeah that's awesome um so this was a presentation right that Eric hung out with you guys at cousin is that could you send us that that we can put that in the podcast description Maybe yeah the presentation doesn't the actual like slide deck doesn't have a ton of
information because the goal was really to have George and Colin talk as much as possible but there might be a recording of it so let me see if I can find a recording of it and see if that'd be great and I guess we can wrap this up by saying if you're listening to this and then if if you're wanting more information I'm sure you can email us and we'll try to get you a hold of these guys to to talk about that more yeah we're happy to help oh yeah for sure awesome well thanks for hanging out with
us guys yeah thank you yeah thank you thanks for your time all right so we've been talking about absolute on the podcast for several weeks now um I think we know that you do it management cyber security compliance you help out with the school's one-to-one program uh but Bobby Warren Oliver uh do you guys want to explain absolute to us I I've been doing my best to talk about absolute but I'm sure I'm not doing a good job so if if I'm a school district tech department uh would you just tell
me a little bit about absolute what you guys what what do you guys do sure Chris thanks and uh um appreciate you having us on on here today you know I think before we jump into kind of what we do you know one of the things that we've seen in you know a lot of change in in how it management school districts works because of what's happened in a kind of post-covet world and well I think we all saw and need to conduct congratulate all the districts out there that actually got technology in the
hands of students we all saw you know laptops being handed into cars as they drove by to give to students so they can go home and learn and um really was an amazing job you looked at kind of what Corporate America had to go through to do a similar thing but most people had technology in their hands already so getting technology in the hands of students was really a Monumental lift and I think that needs to be recognized because uh somehow a lot of these districts weren't even
ready to go one-to-one at all and suddenly they were thrown into this here you go you have to get the technology in the hands of all the students and I think a lot of the what happened and the problems that we're seeing now stem from that because you know a lot of folks didn't even write you know that they had the technology in a spreadsheet was really all they were even even that so a lot of what we're trying to do today is to try and solve some of the problems that came
from that a lot of it is really where is the the technology that I handed out to these students um isn't it in a point in time where where it's it's manageable uh is there an inventory that we can control from that and the biggest problem that we've seen now and is is just the loss of those devices not necessarily kind of your classic theft around someone broke into a car or someone you know broke into a school and took a cart of uh of Chromebooks or what have you but just
loss of inventory you know these devices are out in the wild they didn't look at them for for or or collect them for for a couple of year period of time and now here we are and we want to get our technology back into the enhance the district for summer so we can refresh these machines and lo and behold you know we can't find numbers as high as we've heard as 20 so those of us that have known absolute over the years even back to our days of of of computrace which was our nomenclature for a long
long time that's all we really did was tracking our recover losses to own devices and we've found that that use case is has really been uh what we've we've been used for in the K-12 Community more than anything else whereas my work really it's the where's my stuff right and we do a really good job of helping you understand you know where your equipment is uh what's on the equipment uh how it's being used and ultimately at the end of the school year or even during the school year let's
make sure it gets back in the district so we can we can make sure that kids can keep learning Bobby think you want to add there yeah I think what's what's maybe a little unique about how that works for absolute is we're actually in embedded in the bio so we're in the we're at the firmware level of every you know major device that's out there and so we kind of have that unique you know unbreakable tether to that device so in the situation where maybe a device is stolen or a device becomes
compromised or someone tries to maybe switch out a hard drive to use the device for other reasons you know that agent you know reactivates itself comes back online and we can still see maintain manage track trace and take action on that on that device it's funny you guys mentioned computrace I didn't realize that was who you were years ago we at a hospital that I used to work for um we used computrace on on laptops that we had it it's funny how some of this stuff it it's actually a pretty small
world when it comes down to it uh we we uh called it LoJack for laptops right yeah understand what it what it does um so you kind of talked about the uh auditing part of that from a from a tech deployment OR tech department deployment perspective how does how does that work and take us from from footprint to footprint you know laptop versus Chromebook versus whatever else Hardware wise um what the Management console looked like give us an idea of what that's like
sure and and Bobby did mention the BIOS integration that we have on the PC side things work a little differently on Chrome of course and we we support anything outside of iOS um so your your Apple devices uh your Mac devices your your Chrome and PC devices um implementation of the software is actually very easy and I'll start with the PC side of things it can even be implemented at the factory of your PC OEM so whatever device you're packed will be buying because we're already in
the Bios of that device in a dormant state it just takes a software load to activate that agent and install the agent onto the hard drive of the machine and once that's installed then that bios agent always looks after that that software agent so you can't remove the agent once it's been um once it's been activated um so if it's not a factory load that you've done at that point if you have an existing Fleet of machines it's just a simple MSI you have to push out to your
devices and activate that boss agent off you go for Chrome it's just an extension of the of the Google Management console um and does a lot of as we mentioned a lot a lot more deeper uh you know a lot deeper uh data is pulled from the Google Management console along with you know as we mentioned some of the you know geolocation and device freeze and some of the things that are on from there and any of the Apple devices are very similar so the implementation is extremely simple
um this is a cloud-based solution so all you need to do once it's been and loaded is is just access our customer center console and once you're into the console you can see all of your devices where they're calling in from and that calling feature is really an important component to that because once the agent is is loaded on the device all it does is multiple times a day just connect back to the server and give data about the device and once we have that connection
from the machine then we have a a lot of different features and and and really solutions that we can provide from that from hey let's recover the device if it's lost or stone it's freezing machine Let's spot up the device let's track and recover let's geolocate let's push out scripts to really do anything at that point so once we have connection from that machine from that unbreakable tether certainly from the bio side of things um you're good to go all you need at
that point is just access to the console and the ability to provide action to that device you're muted Josh what a what a noob I've never done this before yeah let's make sure that makes the final edit there yes [Laughter] so give give us some examples of schools that kind of like a use case or uh you know a quick uh white paper type on a on a district that has used absolute to either recover equipment or get a better picture of where those assets are living
yeah I'll tell you as Warren's mentioned I mean that's in in the K-12 space I mean the the the primary use case is that device recovery right there's a lot of other things we do which we'll we'll mention here shortly but um I mean countless school districts have reported device loss in the 20 25 30 of these devices they're just not getting back not necessarily that they were stolen right but just they're just not getting them back um and I mean numbers of school districts
who've deployed this have gotten that device recovery or that device lost down into the low single digits right so you know when you're going back to the school board and you're trying to beg for budget for you know next year's you know Hardware refresh um you know being able to uh you know stand firm and say hey we were able to get the large majority of our deployed devices back we do need you know a little extra budget to uh to refresh a certain certain subset of our Hardware
versus going to the board and saying man we had a we had a challenge recovering a large number of our devices and we're going to ask need to ask for you know more budget or go tap into more federal funds uh in order to support our student needs I think secondarily you know a big part of of what we're seeing use and maybe they if someone's purchased us because they've got a large kind of lost problem but because we touch these devices every day or the devices really call home and
touch us every day um and for us to be able to go and find a device we need to know where it is all the time and there's there's a lot of use to that to be able to say hey I just need an inventory of all my machines um and we find that you know smaller districts probably have a little bit of an easier time trying to accomplish that task but when you get into these large urban districts with tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands devices that task gets harder and harder so just
to be able to say here's where I have my technology here's what just schools that are in here's how many are going home here's how many are are not going home uh and here's really the health of these devices um is really a secondary uh probably the biggest secondary and probably what you use us more for ultimately uh because as Bobby said our goal is always to drive that kind of loss rate down to you know single digits you know then what do you use this for and really it's just
maintaining the day-to-day of those of those devices and we can even start to take our technology and and either have other inventory Solutions like a haze tip web for example uh ported into our solution or ours into theirs um so there's a lot of things that we can do around just the inventory of those devices um and then really just maintaining control of them um and the data that's on them and maybe student devices don't have the data that's important but maybe it's your
admin or teacher machines that have uh you know for regulated data what have you and you want to be able to freeze that machine or delete that data or move that data should something happen with the machine so really those are I think would be the three main components is the loss of the device the inventory of the device and making sure that the the data that's that's housed on there uh is is um is not compromised and you know uh Josh that you you mentioned you know use cases there's
um we've had we've had a number of districts here recently that um are leveraging our technology for those those very things that Warren just just detailed um but we've actually had some some districts have some um success with identifying and finding lost students um certainly not something that the technology was designed for nor are we necessarily touting that but you know if you think about a student gets reported as being lost or missing um you know the IT team is notified they
you know activate and accurately search out where that student's device may be most of the time students are carrying their phone and their device with them right their their Chromebook maybe um and you know I've had three school districts here over this past year that have reported back to us that hey they they were notified of a missing student and thankfully all three situations the student was found uh in one situation they went to their grandparents home
after school as opposed to their parents home and no one knew that that's where they were supposed to be one student got on the wrong bus one student was a troubled student and and was missing for some time but they were able to track that student down and get that student taken care of so kind of a unique application leveraging identifying that technology to ultimately maybe find that that missing student or troubled student if I could add you know one more thing
and I think one of the the things that most districts are worried about right now is it is some sort of a ransomware situation and having and having a device that gets back into the district with with something on it um and you know at the top Bobby mentioned our our bios persistence and and we've always persisted ourselves to make sure that that if something happens to our agent we reinstall our agent we're now using that agent to reinstall and to to harden other agents that are
out there so that could be something as simple as your VPN or your SCCM or your uh you know name that particular product but a lot of it comes down to if you're starting to use an EDR solution or you're having other solutions that are out there to help you with your cyber security we can be that last line of defense to make sure that whatever you're deploying to those devices and this is more on the PC side than the Chrome side but whatever you're deploying on those devices we can make
sure are always on um and we find that there's when there's human interaction with an agent often that agent can be can be corrupted or removed we hear a lot about SCCM having corrupted agents for example and we can rebuild or reinstall or really do whatever is necessary to make sure that particular agent or any other agent really is on there we you've got a we've got a library of I think it's 60 some odd agents that we we persist today and and make resilient
um and uh that really helps to make sure um that things like a potential breach or or ransomware can be um uh your tools that are there to make sure that those things don't occur are always on and running um and we know all that's that's one of the worst case scenarios that you run into the situation where students can't learn because you're in this kind of ransomware situation and we want to try and help protect from that as well great so if somebody listening wanted to
get a hold of one of you guys to find out more get pricing get a demo who who would they contact well the easiest way is to reach out to sales at absolute.com um and uh obviously you can reach out to myself Warren and Oliver and Chris I don't know if there's a way for us to share our contact information but we can certainly yes so for sure I've been putting Oliver's in the podcast description and Josh continues to disrespect Oliver because of his username oh Schmidt and Oliver on behalf
of the K-12 Tech Talk podcast I'm sorry about Josh it's all good you should try pronouncing my middle name if you think my my uh my name right now is interesting so now did you do that alone did you have parents like did you have parents that went out of their way to come up with an O name so they could say oh Schmidt yeah that's a great question or was that was that just coincidence I think it was coincidence but my initials are OBS my middle name starts with a B so we're
sorry about that so they really just doubled down on that one so Oliver you got to quit while you're ahead bud I know digging a hole buddy yeah we'll just get a double down so we'll put an email into the podcast description for sure sure and to make things really easy the other place that you can go if you're ever interested in absolute we don't sell anything directly but talk to whoever you buy your your Chromebooks or your PCS from but they all know but absolute um they will be
the place where you probably buy them from and one of the beautiful parts of of what we can do is we can just incorporate right into your laptop or Chromebook Chromebook buy so we just become a light item right so you know you add you add the in and out there and there's pricing differs between a PC because we do a lot more than in a Chromebook and obviously Chromebooks these days can be you know as low as a hundred and hundred fifty dollars and we want to make sure it's priced
appropriately there but um you know that's another Avenue that you can always look at and they'll get in touch with us from there but Oliver is your best uh uh point of entry but really anywhere you buy a device from we can we can certainly um uh start there as well great is there anything else for the big the calls that were missing uh you guys have listened to the episodes that we already talked to you or talked about you is there anything else that you want to make sure that listeners
know about absolute well I think the other thing with it reaching out if there's some interest I mean we are we are on standby we're more than happy to provide you know demos and show you the the you know the console and how the technology uh works I think most customers that that first response they get when they see our you know our console and our demo and they they understand all the you know technologies that are available one of their most common responses is I had no idea that
some of this stuff was even possible right so okay um we'd love to take you through a demo and and and get your feedback as well plenty of sales and engineer folks uh uh on standby ready to ready to roll awesome well Oliver Bobby Warren thank you guys so much for hanging out with us Chris Josh thank you really appreciate your time today yeah thanks Chris Josh we appreciate it all the best thank you for having us thanks guys thank you