Root Causes 361: The Premise of on Premise

Hosted by

Tim Callan

Chief Compliance Officer

Jason Soroko

Fellow

Original broadcast date

February 9, 2024

In this episode we examine commonly held belief that on-premise systems give system administrators greater levels of control and that that is better for security or other reasons. We explore the pros and cons of extra control, to what degree it is a benefit, and if it's worth it.

Podcast Transcript

Lightly edited for flow and brevity.

Tim CallanSo, the title of today's episode is The Premise of On-Premise. What does that mean?

Jason SorokoYou know, Tim, I think overall, generally in IT, there's a big shift towards the cloud. And it's a big mega trend that we've seen. But we definitely see holdouts where there's certain kinds of software that seems to want to stick to on‑premise for various reasons. And we're really going to get into that today. But this is not a general IT conversation. I really want to focus this on PKI software and perhaps CLM more specifically. But both. I really am going to talk about both PKI specific as well as CLM software and whether or not the premise of on-premise still hold because my goodness, yes, that is an enclave of an area where people - - there are people out there who will argue I got to have that server close to me.

Tim CallanAnd I'm not sure as we discuss those two groups, PKI software and CLM, I don't know that all the same factors apply to both of them. I'll be interested to get into that. But before we do anything more just for the listeners, what is the premise of on-premise?

Jason SorokoThe premise of on-premise is - I hate to say it. I'm going to try to oversimplify. I know that, you know, this is one of the things I always get - - This is where I always get mixed up here sometimes with people. I’m trying to make it real simple. This is really a question of control versus cost. And the idea is the premise of on-premise, a lot of people might think it's about security. Because that server is closer to me, it's more secure. And I think that's just pure mythology and we will get into that today.

So what really is the premise of on-premise? It is control. And a lot of people might say it's a question of control versus cost, but I want to expand that greatly. It's more than that. In other words, is control worth it? What are you getting for more control, Tim?

Tim CallanRight. So the idea is that if I have it on my own hardware running on my floor, then ultimately, I have more control. That as soon as I put it into some kind of public cloud, I have less visibility. I have less decision making visibility, and my control goes down. Is that right?

Jason SorokoThat's correct.

Tim CallanAnd there is an implied assumption there that more control is better, which I think we need to discuss whether or not that’s true.

Jason SorokoThat is correct. But let's talk about the mega trend, just real quickly and then let's talk about some of the areas in which, you know, regulated industries, for example, that have been told they have to be on-premise and how that's even changing.

So, November last year, November 2023, Gartner actually put out a public report saying that cloud adoption by 2028 will no longer be disruptive but will be essential. That's a big statement.

And let's think about now, like the financial industry being a really good example of hey, you wanted to sell into the financial industry, you had to have an on-prem product, otherwise, they wouldn't even look at you. Those are folks that they're absolutely, you know, control freaks for good reasons and want to be as secure as possible for very good reasons. But let me give you some examples. Nasdaq's GEMX options trading platform is now entirely in the cloud. You're starting to see an inflection point right now, Tim, where even some of the most stalwart industries such as finance are moving operations to the cloud, because I think they're asking the question, is extra control worth it? And are you getting anything other than more control when you keep things on-premise?

Tim CallanWell, and again, is more control even better? Like, and you and I have discussed this in the security space in particular in the past. But do I really think that I - and maybe if I'm one of the largest banks in the world, I do think this. But if I'm a regional bank, and across a couple states, do I really think that I'm better at this kind of thing than the people at Google or AWS or Microsoft?

Jason SorokoOr Sectigo?

Tim CallanOr Sectigo? Sure. Right. Yeah.

Jason SorokoWhen it comes to specifically PKI and CLM and standing up a private CA for example. I think the answer to your question, regardless of the use case is no.

You know what they're good at? Giving customer service to their banking customers. I certainly as a Sectigo employee, I can't do what they do but they shouldn't pretend to do what I do either.

Tim CallanRight. And just as I wouldn't think about sitting and building my own servers, right? Why am I doing this? Yeah, exactly.

Jason SorokoTim, I'd like to, maybe you can help me fill in some blanks. But I came up with a shortlist here of what is the opportunity cost of that control? Because I think you said it best. Is control even something you want? Well, you're getting it. You're getting control when you go on-premise, but what's the opportunity cost? What are you actually giving up? I think you absolutely are giving up speed to market regardless of your use case.

Speed to market. I think if you go to cloud, Tim, it's remarkable right now the amount of innovation that is just absolutely being driven by, my goodness, I can stand up systems so quickly and not have to worry about individual servers in my server room. It's just truly incredible.

Tim CallanSure. Speed to market. I agree. That's one.

Jason SorokoI think another one that's really clear - How in the world can you beat cloud for scalability? That's just almost a no brainer, right?

So I think we could pass that real quickly and move right on to I'm going to combine three important IT topics in one. I'm going to say updates, as well as availability and resiliency.

So you know, is there anybody out there who's enjoyed a patch Tuesday?

Tim CallanYeah. Uptime and security. Absolutely.

Jason SorokoYou got it and so I just want to rhyme off the list and then we can choose to maybe dive into some of these just a little bit further.

Tim CallanOk. Can I try to add one or two more?

Jason SorokoYeah. Sure.

Tim CallanFuture proofing out. So do I think I'm going to be the better person to stay current with developments, either in general in hosting a cloud platform as opposed to the folks at AWS? Do I think I'm going to be better at staying current in terms of a specific niche, as opposed to the folks that offer that SaaS product? So I think future proofing is a big one that we need to talk about for sure.

Jason SorokoHuge. In fact, Tim, that is on my list. I have it listed as innovation, but you got it.

Tim CallanAnd then lastly, is just efficiency. You know, you and I just recently did a pair of podcasts about the pernicious IT skills gap that plagues every industry, every segment, every geography in the world and this helps me mitigate the impact of that skills gap.

Jason SorokoTim, you got it. In fact, I would almost put that under scalability, but I think it's so important. It almost deserves its own bullet point for sure.

Let's talk about now two things. One is, I think when you're dealing with a, not just a general public cloud, but if you're dealing with security, something that's fundamentally important in your infrastructure, such as PKI, CLM, etc., if you go on-prem, you're not gaining a security partner, necessarily. If you're dealing with somebody who is managing that for you in their environment, and is essentially then to you a cloud service, you're not gaining a security partner. And I think that's an opportunity cost of on-prem to some degree.

And some of that, of course, wraps in efficiency and innovation and scalability. Right? That's part of what it is. But security is something really specific.

And I think there's one more I wanted to add other than security itself, which is, you know, for those of you who think that backwards compatibility, those of you who are telling me, Jay, I need to have my on- prem because of backwards compatibility, I'm going to argue to you that you actually don't have to, in the case of PKI specifically, don't have to give up backwards compatibility when you're dealing with a cloud PKI provider. Somebody who can stand up private Certificate Authorities for you.

So in other words, what's the opportunity cost of control? I can tell you one thing, that it's not. You are absolutely not going to lose by backwards compatibility by working in the cloud. And there's ways that I'd like to talk about that, Tim. But that is the list.

Tim CallanOk. Are there advantages to control that we want to list?

Jason SorokoYou know, I tried to make that. That was actually going to be some of the final sentences I had. But let's just talk about that for a moment because it’s worth bringing up. Do you really need control? What's the true benefit to on-premise? And I would say look, regulated industries, where rules have not caught up with reality.

Tim CallanThat’s the first thing I thought of is I have no choice. Someone who has influence over my success has told me I must, and I can't appeal it. Right?

Jason SorokoExactly.

Tim CallanThat's the first thing that occurred to me.

Jason SorokoSo you know, Tim, we've talked about how legal frameworks and regulation they lag, especially regulations on IT. They always are going to lag the state of the art.

So what is the real need for control? Oh my God, I almost hate to almost say it, but I'm gonna say it. I think it's a need that is more connected with human nature, emotion and psychology. In other words, I need to wrap my arms around the server to feel like it's safe and I don't think that's true. But you know, I can see how the psychology of some people think that that is what they're getting out of control.

Tim CallanYeah, absolutely. And we see so many aspects of this. This is how come in horror movies, the scary monster is always the one you don't see. Right? It's this lack of knowledge, lack of information, lack of control. It's just fundamentally anxiety creating for people in a real basic way.

Jason SorokoSo I'm just going to double click now on some of that list that we just put out. Speed to market and scalability. I don’t think we need to talk about too much. But in terms of updates, availability and resiliency, you know, has anybody who ever worked in the server room enjoyed Patch Tuesday. And I say that tongue in cheek, but look guys, Risk Officers, CIOs, CISOs, maybe you’re miscalculating the amount of risk that goes into that activity.

If you think Patch Tuesday is a good thing. It's not. It's a huge risk every time you go in and do your official patches. And I'll tell you, it's no different than if you're running CLM software or PKI software. There's gonna be updates. If you're not hosted in the cloud, if you don't have the experts doing it for all of you and making it seamless, there is risk that I don't think people are calculating correctly.

And Tim, I gotta tell you, I know you keep up on it. I keep on it. But this whole world about infrastructure as code, we've had podcasts about that. Topics such as continuous improvement, continuous delivery, CICD pipelines. I think you need to rethink how you consider how cloud operations and how cloud applications are actually implemented. And it just blows the doors off of anything that happens on-prem. And that's just the truth.

In other words, I find it interesting, Tim, that the best controls now for how to actually implement software are now the state of the art is pointing to the cloud. Not on-prem.

Let's talk about security partners for a moment, right? Do you really want to roll your own? If you do, my God, you better have a very, very specific reason.

Tim CallanRight. And this goes back to my earlier point about do I really think I'm better at this then? Who employs more career security engineers? Amazon or me? And unless I'm one of the largest financial institutions in the world, the answer is Amazon.

Jason Soroko100%. Tim, to bring it really close to the vest for you and I, you know, for a lot of people who are standing up private Certificate Authorities, do you know exactly what kind of certificate profile you need? Do you have staff that can write a certificate profile or a CPS documentation?

Tim CallanWell, and this is the one we just hit. If you want to take it back to PKI, we just did an episode about should a private PKI service provider, do anything the customer wants, and what we came down on the end of is probably not. There should probably be some boundaries and you should say no, I won't give you that product. The very fact that you're working with someone who is expert in that area, is an advantage over sitting and trying to make these decisions yourself. Maybe you do make a poor decision.

Jason SorokoYou know, Tim, what I was thinking about is if you're dealing with a security partner, that partner such as a Sectigo - I gotta go there. It's not about selling, it's just as an example. we've seen every use case there is for private CAs. We really have. And we know which certificate profiles work for that.

And you and I had a podcast about what happens if the customer asks for things that are just crazy. Is it ethical for us to allow that to happen? It touches on that topic. And I would say that you want to speak to a security partner in order to understand what the same defaults are for your environment. Don't do it yourself. And let's go further, Tim. Do you have staff that can set up and maintain an HSM? That's such a specialist thing.

Tim CallanAbsolutely. Is your staff going to try to learn on the job? Are they going to learn as a little bit of a hobby? Would you rather have somebody, you know, doing that? Taking a Pluralsight course and then cracking his knuckles and getting into it? Or would you rather have somebody who has done this hundreds of times?

Jason SorokoTim, I got one for you as well. This is one of my favorites at the moment. So you've set up a Microsoft Active Directory certificate services. Let’s say in recent times. I'll forgive people who've done it years and years ago. But let's say you've recently set up that on-premise Certificate Authority for private trust uses.

Tim CallanOk.

Jason SorokoHey, Tim, what's your post-quantum plan?

Tim CallanYeah. Sure. Absolutely. Yeah.

Jason SorokoAnd that gets to your point of forward compatibility. In other words, are you future proofed? And I'll tell you, there's many, many on-premise many solutions right now for private CAs. You are not future proofed at all. At all.

Tim CallanI mean, and that's such an interesting one. Just as an example of the more general principle, you know, it's something that's going to happen to everybody. There's no avoiding it. Nobody knows exactly what it’s going to shape like. Like nobody in the world. There are, you know, real, sort of intense, technical and mathematical and standards based conversations that are happening. How is the average IT department ever going to track that stuff? Like, that's just, that's a hard ask to ask somebody to be current on what's going on with PQC and what do I need to do to make sure that my organization is ready for it, and I take a sensible PQC strategy. That's just a hard ask for anybody.

Jason SorokoTim, before we get into security, which is the way - - I think it'll be the final chapter of this podcast. I want to talk about this backwards compatibility idea. There are many of you who have legacy on-premise systems that you cannot get away from, especially with respect to not necessarily CLM but PKI. Right? Private CAs. And maybe you can't get away from it. Maybe you do have that Microsoft Certificate Authority certificate, you know, Microsoft Active Directory certificate service running. Keep in mind that a modern CLM cannot only integrate with it, right, so there's many ways to integrate with your legacy on-premise CAs, which is great. Then you can take advantage of monitoring and, single pane of glass for all your certificates. All those great things.

But keep in mind that when you talk about PKI, you can also subordinate a modern issuing CA that's in the cloud to expand your capabilities. And so therefore, there's lots of ways to augment, monitor your legacy environments, as well as to actually create new issuing environments that are modern, able to integrate into all sorts of use cases and operating systems that legacy on-prem was never able to do.

Tim CallanAnd doesn't that also tie into a future path of actually getting off of those legacy systems that I don't want to be on? That I can augment that with a modern, cloud-based SaaS-based solution with the idea that somewhere along the line, I'm going to pull the plug on that thing on my floor, and just use the SaaS?

Jason SorokoTim, exactly. What happens if you have maybe one key domain connected - and I'm talking about the Windows environment here - you know, one main domain connected environment where MSCA is handling that use case very well and it has been for many, many years. But now I want to use, you know, iOS use cases, Android use cases. I want to be able to put certificates into, you know, Linux systems. I want to do all kinds of modern IT use cases that the older on-prem CA cannot do. And you can maintain that one or two legacy use cases, as well as, use it because if your governance program is very much tied into this old system, you can then augment it with a modern system that can tie into all these other things. Therefore, from a PKI standpoint, because we can not only integrate, but also utilize trust models that allow for this, your options are wide open. And so therefore, I think there's a difference, Tim, between what would you architect 10 years ago, versus how you would architect something today in a legacy environment.

I don't think you have to give up anything anymore. By going with a modern, cloud-based PKI, I think that you get all that backwards capability and you get all the future and innovative capabilities, and future proofing that you were just talking about Tim. You can get all the benefits. I'm gonna make this statement. Anybody who is architecting something net new right now, even in big finance, for example, I'm not sure that on-premise is your best solution. And I'd argue it comes down to psychology.

Tim CallanSo what about the scenario - and maybe the answer is this isn't actually real scenario - but what about the scenario where I agree with you, I'd much rather do it this way but I feel I have some kind of external, let's call it regulatory, or standards or SLA requirement such that I feel that I cannot.

Jason SorokoIf you are under some kind of a rule that strictly says you cannot use a cloud-based Certificate Authority for private trust use cases, for example, then you probably have to be bound by that until the regulators open their eyes.

Tim CallanMaybe you need to think about what you can do to open their eyes for them. Who can you contact? What body can you get involved in? You know, like places like PCI, like you can go join them. You can walk in and say, I think this is a bad regulation, it should be changed and become a member. Organizations can do that. And the big well-resourced ones do.

Jason SorokoYes. And I think, Tim, we're actually speaking the book of big finance now, anyway. I think that there's so many big finance systems that are net new, that are built on Cloud infrastructure, and they're taking advantage of all the things that it gives them and they're realizing that the psychological control is not gaining them anything other than a good emotional feeling, not any technical result.

Tim CallanSo even if I feel like I'm stuck by a regulation today, number one, maybe I can get involved in explaining why that regulation was fine a decade ago or two decades ago but isn't fine now. The other thing is, if I do believe that it's only a matter of time before these regulations change, maybe I start thinking about how do I gear my strategy and my architecture and my decisions now, so that I'm not going to be locked in and stuck, but I will be able to take advantage of these changes when they do occur.

Jason SorokoYou got it. I suspect, Tim, that big finance, who relies heavily on, you know, the big auditors to determine these kinds of things, I think that there's a world change going on under our nose right now.

Tim CallanYeah. You’ve got to imagine. And that would be another one. If the problem is your auditor, and your auditor’s interpretation of the Reg, because there's two things, right? There's the actual wording of the regulation and then auditing firms, either individually or in consortia, come up with their own interpretations of it. It's like, you know, it's kind of like there's a US Constitution and we all know what the words say but then there's a body of law that interprets what those words say. The same kind of thing happens with these regulations. And the, again, that's another opportunity to be involved. You can sit down with your auditors. I've done this with auditors, you know, on the WebTrust side. You can sit down and explain why you don't agree with their viewpoint and sometimes you can change their viewpoint. And that's also a path forward to think about if you've got a regulation as a problem.

Jason SorokoThat’s a good thought, Tim. That's a really good thought. And if enough of you do it, then I think that it would make a lot of sense.

So let's arm you then, Tim. Let's arm the audience with the big elephant in the room, the objection you're gonna get, in terms of interpretations with regards to security. Ok. And let me just call this one right now. I have spoken to people who really truly believe and this is - - It's funny how this comes down to emotions and psychology and topics of faith, rather than real, measurable truth. But if you really believe that you can put better controls around a server on your on-premise system compared to a cloud environment, well, yes, in the cloud, it is someone else's server, but the controls that are put around it are typically going to be far better just even due to the way that things are specialized and isolated.

Tim, you and I talk a lot about putting better locks on the door.

Well, if you have a mixed enterprise environment, as well as this, you know, crown jewels of PKI and CLM, what kind of locks can you put on the door? What kind of isolation can you put into place? If you can't isolate it enough, are you able to put the necessary monitoring into place? Do you have the dedicated staff to enable all the security technology? The answer for all that is, look, no, you don't? You don’t.

Tim CallanWell, and also, isn't there something fundamental about that architectural decision, which is just the compartmentalization, the unavoidable compartmentalization of your network functions? The unavoidable walling off that occurs. You've just made lateral movement, so insanely, much harder. And isn't there just inherently value there alone?

Jason SorokoTim, that is the heart of my argument from a security standpoint. So let's then flip it on its head. What problems have we seen with the cloud from a security standpoint?

Look. Human error. You have seen things like storage buckets, right, that have been exposed publicly. Well, that's not something you see in a dedicated cloud PKI or cloud CLM. Right? You're just not seeing that. In terms of configuration errors, yes, you can absolutely have cloud configuration errors that lead to certain kinds of security problems, but you know what, I consider that a scratch because you can just as easily have those mistakes on-premise.

And, you know, I gotta call this out. I think, Tim, one of the biggest bugbears people have about putting stuff from the cloud - in other words, somebody else's server - is how many times have we heard about insider staff at a cloud provider being malicious?

Tim CallanYeah, um, I can't think of one.

Jason SorokoYou know what? If that happened, we would bloody well report on it on this podcast wouldn't we? And we haven’t.

Tim CallanAnd that would be hard. There are a lot of controls in place to prevent that. Even down even down to simple things like locks on cages and cameras in server rooms. Right? And, also, in terms of IT-based, you know, software-based controls and logs and log reviews and there's a lot, there's a whole lot of effort that goes in to making sure that somebody can't just waltz in with a USB drive and walk out with your data. It's not that easy.

Jason SorokoAnd it's so it's so not easy, Tim. I personally haven't heard of it. And I remember when the cloud was first getting big. That was like, the number one bugbear on people's lists about security concerns. It just hasn't manifested.

I'm gonna throw one more in. It's gonna get into the weeds a touch, Tim, but we've talked about, you know, because of the fact that a lot of these isolation technologies between a multi customer environment in the cloud have to do with things such as - let's just call it this. Flaws that are taken advantage of by bad guys within the virtual machine isolation.

And I can tell you that I've seen those talks at BlackHat and those are ridiculously difficult types of attacks. Here's the thing. They can be mitigated by patching of the VM systems at the cloud level, you know, all at once. And furthermore, there are other controls. Remember, I talked about better locks on the door? You still have to authenticate it. And so, in other words, this would be a very difficult attack. I'm never going to call it impossible. But if you were to compare it against lateral movements on-prem - give me a break. I saw the BlackHat talks around, you know, red-pilling and blue-pilling VM environments, and those were done by some of the smartest white hats in the world. And the mitigations for those kinds of things are so sophisticated at the big public clouds and at any of the providers that you're dealing with, Tim. So I would say it's a very in the weeds argument, but I wanted to call it out, right. Let’s compare it to on-prem, give me a break. That's a 10 times harder attack than a lot of the attacks that will happen on-prem.

So Tim, I just wanted to now just, you know, get into the security context a little more. I think some of the fundamental flaws on the on-prem argument are your enterprise network is probably nowhere near as isolated as you think it is.

I think that endpoint security controls are really a speed bump to the worst attackers that are going to be going after important targets such as your PKI, or your CLM, for example. I've also seen the argument from some people with the, you know, the premise of on-premise saying, hey, you know, I actually, I don't have a problem with staff monitoring my on-premise platform, because I've shopped that all out to a SecOps provider in the cloud. Well, isn't that hilarious, Tim? It's kind of like, oh my God, you now have staff that have, you now can wrap your arms around your servers. That's nice. But you're now remotely monitored and administrated by the cloud. And so what the heck is the difference?

Tim CallanRight. Yep. Absolutely.

Jason SorokoSo now you just have more expense. The only reason to do that is to do what you just said, Tim, is if you're in a regulated environment where you don't have a choice, hey, go off and get your cloud SecOps and dust your hands off and feel good. I think that's a good decision. But don't architect something that way unless you absolutely have to.

Tim, I want to call it just a few last things in terms of security. Let’s get really specific with PKI, for example.

Tim CallanSure.

Jason SorokoThe security of cryptographic keys. In other words, Tim, the generation of public and private key pairs. My goodness. Please let the experts host that and create your root and issuing CAs for you.

You know, there's a reason why we have elaborate key signing ceremonies in our industry. And the reason we do that is because we are better than all y'all. We do audit ourselves. We do all the technicalities.

Tim CallanSpecific logging, specific process, specific logs, specific visibility, specific hardware. Yes.

Jason SorokoAnd so in other words, the associated questions are, do you really need your own HSM? Do you have the kind of specialized staff that can do that?

Tim CallanWell, and HSMs ain't cheap. Like that could be a big expense item for something that you use relatively little, and you might find yourself using 1% of the capacity of that piece of hardware, but paying 100% of the price tag.

Jason SorokoThat is actually one of the sad truths of that industry. But yeah, you're absolutely right.

Tim, physical security. Right? My God. What does it take to be a private – not only a private CA, right? What does it take to be a public CA, Tim Callan?

Tim CallanYeah. There's hundreds of pages of regulations around it and it includes physical security and network security and process and, you know, employee background security and all kinds of things. Absolutely.

Jason SorokoSo, my God, you know, Tim could do 10 podcasts on that topic alone. And you're not doing it as an average enterprise. A CA is doing it. Please leave it to the CAs to do that for you.

Tim CallanRight. And the risk reward arithmetic, which is part of what you're talking about here, is different for a public CA, or for that matter, for a SaaS managed PKI cloud service provider. That's a mouthful. Than is for the average medium sized business. You may have in your medium sized business, have a different, you know, set of costs that you're prepared to indulge - monetary costs, personnel costs, etc., than you're going to see in those other services. So this is where consolidating that investment in one place where one company makes sure that they're really doing everything titanium plated, and then they service a larger number of customers could just be a fundamentally better way to allocate resources.

Jason SorokoYou got it, Tim. I'm going to move on just one of my last points here, which is partnering with security experts. This might seem ridiculous, but I think this is the majority of cases, Tim, where the worst case scenario for any enterprise is to leave the creation of a private CA to a developer or to operations staff who are just general developers and operations staff.

So if you're a CIO, if you're a CISO, if you’re Risk Officer, if you're a Director of IT, if you don't know whether your developers or ops staff are just simply choosing defaults in whatever private CA software that they're using - you shouldn't be doing it. If you can't answer that question - stop what you're doing right now. Because I can tell you right now, a Sectigo – and again, not an advertisement, just trying to give an example - we have vast, vast experience in all these use cases that you're setting up private CAs for, so helping to set up your certificate profiles and you trust models properly so that - - you know, because these are going to be systems that live on a long time.

Tim CallanHere's a litmus test I would say, Jay. If you don't know what your CPS says, you probably shouldn't be doing this. Let's start with that.

Jason SorokoAnd believe it or not, Tim - -

Tim CallanOr if you don't have a CPS - -

Jason SorokoYeah. Yeah. Yeah. Do you know what it stands for? Right?

Tim CallanYes. Exactly. Yeah. Good point. Well, I'm not going to tell you. You guys have to look that up on your own.

Jason SorokoYep. There's your homework. I'd have to look up former podcasts. But I gotta tell you, that's one of my final points. And the reason I bring it up is because there's your homework, everybody. There’s your homework. Ask yourself that question. Because you might say to yourself, yeah, but we don't stand up a private CA every day. Well, you might. Are you standing up Kubernetes? Do you have developers and ops people right now that are standing up container clusters? You're standing up private CAs.

Tim CallanYeah. Rogue CAs. We call them rogue CAs. You and I have used that word in the past. Yeah.

Jason SorokoUnmonitored, un-anything and the person choosing the defaults for the certificate profiles just probably hit enter to do all the defaults quickly. That's the truth.

Tim CallanAbsolutely.

Jason SorokoAnd I wanted to end it on that apocalyptic point, which is doing it extremely poorly is now more common than ever.

Tim CallanRight. Yeah.It's so ubiquitous. It's so available, right? And, you know, we're all doing some kind of DevOps cloud architecture. And it's just right there.

Jason SorokoAnd the reason I bring it up in this podcast is because that's the ultimate in worst practices of on-premise CAs. And they're becoming more and more numerous and more and more common, and that is your homework CISOs and CIOs, Risk Officers, Directors of IT. You need to sniff those things out because your developers and your ops people are - - if you think shadow IT of buying a rogue SSL certificate that you need to discover before it expires on you is bad, wait until you start finding out you have private CAs running SHA-1 certs all over the place.

Tim CallanRight. Yeah. And you may. You may. Ok, Jay. So we could say that the premise of on-premise is a false premise?

Jason SorokoI think it's a false premise, Tim and, you know, when I was putting through my brain, you know, I wanted to make a fair argument and I wanted to answer that question you posed perfectly at the beginning. Is there advantage to that control? I couldn't come up with it.

Tim CallanYeah. I think so. And I think you can see where there was and you can see where people who cut their teeth, got their education, formed their attitudes and their habits in a certain era that isn't that far in the past could be making that assumption without reexamining it.

Jason SorokoOh, if you implemented Microsoft Active Directory certificate services, you know, 15 years ago, 10 years ago, I don't blame you for doing it at all. But you've now realized how much it really costs you and you now realize how limiting it is for you. So net new, would you do it again? I think the answer is no chance at all. Unless Tim - and you said it perfectly - unless some regulatory body has their thumb on you, and you need to influence your way out of it.

Tim CallanAnd even there, right, even that we should think you may have resources and options you're not thinking about like we discussed. And also, you shouldn't expect that to sit static forever. Like those, even the most Luddite regulatory body, somewhere along the line is going to catch up.

Jason SorokoAnd I think they are, Tim. I think some of the biggest Luddites in the business have seen light and you now have full blown trading systems in the cloud. You now have all kinds of other major, you know, true big money sloshing across the world in the cloud and doing it safely and doing it securely and probably more securely than if it was in you know, some bank vault in New York or Switzerland.

Tim CallanRight. All right. Ok, Jay. I love it. This is a great topic. I think this is a new one for us. And we'll probably be returning to it but that was a really good overview and framework today.

Jason SorokoYeah. Thanks a lot, Tim.

Tim CallanAll right. Thank you, Jay. This has been Root Causes.

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