Turning Your Survival Skills into Real-World Wins

Summary

Security teams often stall because they're afraid of picking the wrong first step, but doing nothing carries its own risk. Zero Networks Principal Customer Engineer Ken Ward and theCUBE's Jackie McGuire discuss how to break security paralysis. Their advice: weigh the risk of inaction, explain security friction in business terms, celebrate small wins, take the next best step instead of chasing a perfect end state, and treat vendors as trusted advisors before an incident hits.

Key takeaways

• Doing nothing is a risk too. Jackie borrows a framework from finance: avoid, reduce, or transfer each risk, and formally accept what's left. If leadership won't fund a fix, documenting the risk as accepted often changes the decision.
• Explain friction in business terms. People accept a badge reader on a sensitive door, but digital controls feel abstract. The extra seconds of MFA are worth it against the hours of cleanup after an incident.
• Celebrate small wins. The security team's best day is when nothing happens, so nobody notices. Storytelling, tying security to revenue, and showing how a protected team enabled company growth all help prevent burnout.
• Take the next best step. Teams that feel behind often freeze. A maturity model shows where you are and the one or two moves that get you to the next level. A 90 to 95% automated solution today beats waiting for a perfect one, and three-year plans go stale fast.
• Fundamentals still win. Most breaches still come from bought or reused credentials, not zero-days. Asset inventory, Active Directory hygiene, and broad security literacy matter more than chasing the newest threat.

Speakers: Ken Ward, Principal Customer Engineer, Zero Networks · Jackie McGuire, Practice Lead and Principal Analyst for Security, theCUBE

Why do security teams get stuck?

Ken Ward: My name is Ken Ward. Um, I've been doing this for a while now, um, with Microsoft, the federal government, and now with Zero Networks. And through that journey, I've seen a lot of, um, organizations that are trying to get to either a zero trust, or whatever the buzzword of the day is, architecture. Right? But no matter what you call it, they all seem to struggle with the same things. And so, um, today, uh, Jackie and I are gonna talk about some of those. Jackie?

Jackie McGuire: Hello. Hey. Thanks for having me. I'm, uh, Jackie McGuire. I'm the practice lead and principal analyst for security at theCUBE. Uh, so I'm, uh, kind of a catch-all for security. I work with a lot of vendors. I've worked with Zero Networks for a long time. Yeah. And I'm, I'm really happy to be here. When we were talking about, you know, what we should cover in the, the final session, uh, in this, I was like, you know, what always is an issue for myself and my CISO clients is — uh, one of my fond, fond traits as a ADHDer is executive dysfunction. Right? Is that, like, I know there's all these great things that I should do, and I just got all this information. I'm really excited, but what do I do first? And I think a lot of times, you know, teams are worried to do the wrong thing first, or either pick the wrong initiative, or prioritize things incorrectly. And a lot of times, it just leads to complete paralysis and really not getting anything done. So we thought it would be fun to talk about kind of how to overcome that, and, and where to start. So thank you for having me.

What's the risk of doing nothing?

Ken Ward: Yeah. And that, and that's such a great point, Jackie, because I think organizations, and leaders in particular, like to focus on the risk of what's going to happen in the environment, but too much time, or too many times, they don't put enough emphasis on the risk of not doing anything. And so that paralysis itself has its own risks that I don't think that they're, they're looking at as much. Right? Especially when it comes to IT security products. Right? A lot of organization will look at the risk of, like, okay — oh, man, I have this new tool. What's the risk of, I have to train people on it? Um, there's going to be some sort of business impact. I don't care what tool it is. There's gonna be something that changes in the environment. So they're looking at that. And I think they just focus too much on that, and not on the risk of, well, if I don't do anything, there's a risk there as well. And so, um, just curious to hear your thoughts on, on that.

How do you manage security risk like a financial advisor?

Jackie McGuire: Yeah. You know, I, I've — I think about this a lot. So my, my first life and my first career was as a financial adviser, and the same thing. And, you know, I started in 2005, so just before the financial crisis, and trying to help people of all types. So I started with, you know, very — you know, people with just a couple thousand dollars to invest, and worked my way up the chain to advising very wealthy people, and then even companies. And same thing happens there, and they're like, okay, I don't wanna do the wrong thing first — but not understanding that there's absolutely a risk in doing nothing. And so one of the things that we learned in finance, that this year I started trying to adapt and apply to security strategy, was this kind of ART concept. So the ART of managing risk, which is avoid, reduce, and transfer. So you kind of go through this process where you say, okay, with this new project, what are the risks? And how can we avoid some of those risks? How can we reduce what we couldn't avoid? How can we transfer what we couldn't avoid or reduce to either a service provider or, you know, insurance company? And then at the bottom of that funnel, you have accepted risk. And so I think when you go through this process as a CISO, if you can get your other executives, you know, and your budget holders to understand that, alright, here's the risk of doing something — now let's go through that process again with doing nothing. You know? So if we do nothing, this is the risk, and we really can't avoid, reduce, or transfer it without tools. So we need to accept that this is accepted risk. And I think there's a big difference between, uh, a leader in security saying, alright, well, we really should do something, but if you say we don't have the money, um, or you say we don't have the, the resources — and saying, okay, well, if we don't have the money or resources, we need to document that this is accepted risk that we're aware of and we're choosing to take on. I think sometimes just going through that conscious process helps really sway, uh, decision makers. And so that's — I kinda try to emphasize that to CSOs. You know, I think you and I were talking about: as a security leader, you can't just be great at security anymore. Right? You have to be a diplomat. You have to be a salesperson.

Ken Ward: Yep.

Jackie McGuire: A politician. Yeah.

Ken Ward: Organization. Right.

Jackie McGuire: Yeah. And I'm sure you see that with your customers as well, when they're trying to, you know, to make progress.

How do you explain security friction to the business?

Ken Ward: Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, that's definitely something that, um — you know, security is typically thought of as a cost center, right, of, like, all that you're gonna put in. And that kinda goes back to, well, there's also the cost of not doing, and understanding how to, um, talk to the other parts of the organization in that same language, so that they understand. I mean, you and I have had this conversation as well. I mean, almost every single security product is going to have some sort of trade-off, in terms of — obviously, you want to increase security, but by doing that, you're also impacting the user base. Right? Um, so you're making something a little bit more inconvenient, most likely. And where is that trade-off, and where is the right balance? And how do you, um, you know, get buy-in from the org — other parts of the organization that are gonna have to start buying into this? Right? Because something's going to change when you put this new tool in place.

Jackie McGuire: Yeah. And I think in the, in the digital world, it can be — it's a little bit more abstract when we're talking about what the risks are. And to your point, you know, anytime we're putting things in place to try to slow attackers down, there's a potential to slow people down who are doing something that may be mistaken for something that is risky. And so, you know, if it was a physical building, and we were like, hey, you know, we really don't want badge readers on this door, because it slows us down from getting into the cafeteria — if it was like, well, hey, there's some sensitive stuff behind this door, it's necessary — people kind of accept and understand that. But all of a sudden, when it's a digital world — and it occurs to me too that, you know, how, being a kid of the dial-up and NetZero era, because we were poor, I used to wait, like, minutes for a web page to load. And now, if I tap on a button, and within, like, a quarter of a second it hasn't responded, I'm like, ugh. You know? And so, yeah, I think there's, there's a certain amount of immediacy that we've come to expect from our environments. Um, and it's not always easy for people who are just trying to get a completely unrelated job done to understand how the extra ten seconds it took you to use MFA, or to request access to something instead of having it set to public access in Google Drive, is well worth the hours and hours and hours it's gonna take the security team to clean up an incident. And even if it's only a 1% chance, you kinda have to do that math. Right? And it's just not something we're always good at, and everybody's trying to get different things done by the end of the day. And so I don't think people generally are acting maliciously, or, you know, negligently. They're just — it's not their focus. And yeah. And I think part of our issue comes from: in security, the best day of the security team is when nothing happens. Right?

Ken Ward: Right.

Jackie McGuire: The only time people have to talk to you is when something bad has happened. So it's also, you know — we can hesitate to do something, because we're used to getting patted on the head for flying under the radar.

How can security leaders celebrate small wins?

Ken Ward: No. And that, that's another great point, and something else that we've talked about, right, of, um — security leaders need to ensure that they're celebrating the small wins, the little wins along the way, throughout the journey. Because, again, going back to zero trust, it's not just a product. It's not just something that you're gonna install and be like, alright, we're done with that, let's move on. It's a culture shift. Um, anything, I think, in the IT security realm that is one of those paradigms, or, um, processes — right? — you've got to find ways to celebrate the small wins along that journey, so that you can not only keep your people excited, but the other people that you need their buy-in excited. Um, so just curious if you have any thoughts about, you know, ways that, um, leaders can celebrate those small wins.

Jackie McGuire: Yeah. I absolutely — you know, I, I think highlighting the — we've, I've seen everything in organizations, from organizations that actually pay internal bug bounties, right, to, like, to make security kind of everybody's job, so that if everybody's out there looking for issues, or pointing them out. But, yeah, the highlighting the small wins — highlighting that if, you know, if there's a big breach in the news, and you have mitigations in place that would have prevented that if it had happened at your company. Storytelling is one of the most compelling things that you have going for you, and it's actually something your vendors are usually really good at. So, you know, I think both reaching out to the vendor and saying, hey, you know, I saw this thing in the news, you know, like, how, how are you helping? You know? Just wanna make sure we're in place. And then broadly communicating that to, like, hey, here's some of the work your security team's doing that you don't see, and you don't see it because it works really well. Yeah. And I, I think that kind of lack of broader recognition and appreciation in an enterprise is one of the things I can think contributes to burnout quite a bit in security, because you're like, man, I stayed up until 2 AM on Saturday fixing an issue with one of our virtual firewalls, and nobody's ever gonna know it except my immediate team. Right? And nobody in sales is gonna call me on Tuesday and be like, "Hey, dude, I'm so glad that I could access Salesforce today because you fixed that issue," because they didn't know it.

Why can't security teams scale fast enough?

Jackie McGuire: And so, yeah, I think it's everything from the, you know, making sure there's broader public recognition, to also bringing attention to the scale at which things are changing, and the scale at which your security team is not growing. And that's one of the things that I think is so hard for people to understand: is that the velocity of change has increased exponentially in the last fifteen years. Right? So if you think about, like, we started talking about going to cloud computing — that was what? Like, 2010, 2011.

Ken Ward: Mhmm.

Jackie McGuire: And it was like, "Oh, I'm just gonna hire a cloud person." And then, you know, we needed to do cloud security. So it's like, "Oh, I'm gonna hire a cloud security person." And those people take three to six months to ramp up, and it's a person. And now, I mean, if you think, like, okay, well, so I'm gonna hire an agentic person, and then an agentic AI — you know, an agentic security person — but then I also need a security person who understands how to use agents for security. There's just, there's so much, and you can't scale fast enough. So I think also highlighting the, like, hey, everybody, in the last two years, our security team has grown by this, but they've managed to enable the rest of the organization to grow exponentially. Like, I think the last thing I would say is tying security to being enablers of revenue, because that is something that — without effective security, your business can't produce revenue reliably, and, um, in any way that instills confidence in your customers. And so I, I just think, like, you have to be creative, but there are a number of ways that you can recognize your security function.

How do you avoid driving users to shadow IT?

Ken Ward: Yeah. You have to be creative. And then also, too, you do have to kind of try to listen to your users. It makes me think of the college campuses, right, that don't put the sidewalks down, and they just let it go for a semester to see kinda where people are going. I think sometimes, with your user base — now, obviously, you still need to put guardrails in place, but you do kinda need to see how are they using things, what are they trying to do, and then find ways to make that, um, available to them in a secure fashion. Because at the end of the day, if you make — if you make it so hard, then you're gonna get a ton of shadow IT, because they'll — the work is always gonna find a way to get done. And so our goal is to make sure that they're doing it securely. Right? Because you don't want them going outside of the organization to do the thing that they need to do.

Why should vendors act as trusted advisors?

Jackie McGuire: Yeah. You know, one of the other things that I, we, we were talking about a couple days ago, that I think is probably important, and I, I just alluded to it, but it's kind of the changing role of the vendor. You know? So twenty years ago, if I needed — you know, if I wanted to do something with my network, I bought some hardware. I hired a network person. And unless my hardware went sideways, I probably didn't talk to that company again. But we have — things are so much broader now. And, again, our ability to scale with technology has changed so much that vendors are no longer just the people you buy hardware and software from. They've really had to become these kind of trusted advisors and partners of your organization. You know? And that, it was one of the things that I really appreciated when I started talking to Zero Networks — not to be too much of a, of an ad for Zero Networks, but you guys really get it. Like, you understand what your customers are facing. You understand what your role in that process is, and that educating your customers and selling them what they want is not enough. You really — to your point on a zero trust journey, that's not a, I'm gonna buy this product to solve this problem, and then we have zero trust. That's literally — every time something new connects to your network or your infrastructure, that's another step in the zero trust journey. And so you have to have vendors in place who you not only trust, but can also kind of integrate into your security team, to act as that, you know, kind of expandable team in the event that something goes wrong, or that you need to accomplish more than you have the, the resources for. So, I mean, you've worked at a whole bunch of different places. Are you seeing this as well? And that even in, like, your salespeople and your solutions engineers and your post-sales, like, they really kind of have to be advisers too. Right?

Why shouldn't perfect be the enemy of good?

Ken Ward: Advisors, and then also, um — I find myself, you know, doing a lot of technical still, but then also trying to advise customers on things like, don't let perfect be the enemy of a very good solution, especially in IT security, and kinda going back to the quick wins. Right? I mean, obviously, Zero Networks has an automated solution. And there are times where, when you talk to someone, they'll look at that automated solution, and then they'll try to nitpick of, like, well, it didn't go down to the nitty-gritty detail that a human may have. And I'll, I'll agree with them. Absolutely. Right? It's automation. It's not there to give you a 100% solution. But I think a 90 to 95% solution right now is a really good win, and something that you can celebrate and show leadership of, like, look, we've got this in place. Is it perfect? No. It's not. And I don't know if you'll ever get to perfect when it comes to IT security. Right? Because there's always going to be that tension of, the organization needs to move forward, and then you're trying to make sure that you're, you know, securing it properly.

Jackie McGuire: Yeah.

Ken Ward: But our job is to, to show them, look, this is really good, and here are the things that we can do on day two to shore up. But, man, man, now we've got MFA on all your privilege ports. We've got, you know, things locked down to, um, certain environments. Yeah. And just really trying to educate them on that, and get them comfortable with it, so that they can then take that next step.

How do you stop feeling behind on zero trust?

Jackie McGuire: Yeah. And I think you guys have also done something that's really helpful in establishing maturity models, because one of the other things that I see is a huge — and, again, this, it's interesting how many lessons from finance are adaptable to security, because it's also a fear- and risk-based business. You know? And, like, the, the only two — they say the only two things that motivate people in money are fear and greed. It's kind of the same thing in security. Right? Like, you're either on the good side because you're afraid, or the bad side because you're greedy. And so I would have these, you know, these customers who had — even some of the customers that had lots of money, and they'd come in, and it's sitting in cash. And you're like, well, why is it sitting in cash? And they're like, "Well, I don't know how to invest, and I'm so far behind where everybody else is." Or you would say, hey, you're making, you know, 6 figures, why are you not investing in retirement? And they'd say, "Well, I'm so far behind. Like, what's the purpose of starting right now?" Um, you know, and, and it was really based on this kind of very anecdotal view of the world and their concept of where other people were financially. I find the exact same thing in security. So these CSOs will be like, "I am so far behind my peers. You know? I, I can't — I just can't catch up. We're not where we need to be." And I blame a lot of vendors for this, because a lot of vendors will come into a company and be like, "Oh, you need to be fully zero trust, fully segmented. You know? You need MFA on everything." And do you? Absolutely. Is that an ideal state? Yes. But the reality is, you need to focus on where you're at today, kind of assess where you're at related to your peers, and focus not on where the other end zone is, but, like, the next set of downs, to use a really terrible sports analogy. You know? Because if I'm standing at the one-yard line, and, like, "Oh, I gotta get all the way down to the other end," that's overwhelming. And so I think, you know, you guys having a maturity model to say, okay, here's where you're at, here's the, like, one or two most important things to get you just to the next level — not to Nirvana, but just a little bit better than you were today. Um, and that's also one of the things that I try to emphasize with people: is, like, you just have to take the next best step. And right now, the world's changing every 90 days. You know? So any, any three-year plan that you have is not gonna be relevant. Like, if you think about, if you'd made a three-year plan for security two years ago —

Ken Ward: Yeah.

Jackie McGuire: How little of that would be relevant today? And so I, I also —

Ken Ward: Like, was that even — ChatGPT a thing at that point? Right? And it's like, now the world has completely changed. Yeah. Just because of that. Right?

Jackie McGuire: Yeah. And so, you know, I think having, having a vendor that can also provide a perspective of what are other customers doing, where are they finding success, and what are the two things that they did when they were at — and also saying, hey, guess what? A lot of companies your size are at the exact same place you are, and they all think they're behind. And are they behind the companies with billion-dollar security budgets? Yes. They are. But can they get to the next stage, where they're at right now? Absolutely. And so, like, incremental progress, you know, baby steps, is better than not doing anything because you're already so far behind. What's the point?

Ken Ward: Yeah. And that is one of the things that I enjoy, um, about being here: is I can go into a small or medium business, or even a large enterprise. Right? But we can typically get off the ground very quickly. We can start — at the very least, start giving them visibility into stuff that they've never seen before. Right? Um, uh, help them validate the other security controls that they thought they had in place. Right? And then get them to that next step of, of segmentation with very little effort. Right? And again, not to make this a, um, a commercial, but, right, I've done this numerous times, where we can deploy in an hour, and then within the thirty days, um, it's up and running. Not perfect, but much better than what you had before. And then it's educating them on, okay, well, what do we wanna do on those next steps? How do we wanna lock it down even further? What are some of the other things that you want to tackle? But now we kinda have that, um, knowledge, or that, that safety blanket of, okay, we've got at least this part done. Now let's start moving on to, um, some of the harder stuff.

Does AI change the fundamentals?

Jackie McGuire: Yeah. Absolutely. Um, so what, what else are we missing? I, I feel like — I mean, this is a pretty comprehensive overview of, you know, kind of what, what are the things that we covered the last few days? You know, we've all survived the island. I wore my survivor hat today, just in case. But, you know, what are the, what are the most common things you're hearing from your customers right now, in terms of — I think one of the most, one of the things that's top of mind for me is, we have to say AI at least eight times, or we won't — our SEO will be trash on this. Right? So agentic AI, agentic AI, agentic AI. Um, but one of the things that I think is so exciting and really terrifying about this technology is velocity. Is that, you know, one of the things that's always protected us in the enterprise is that it takes attackers a while to do stuff. Right? And so, usually, these alerts start popping up in your SIEM, and you can start doing things about it while the attackers are doing things. But AI happens at the speed of information. And so we're talking about milliseconds to execute multiple different things, find a CVE, exploit it. And that can be terrifying. And while this isn't, um, necessarily an ad for Zero Networks, I think some of the technology you have in microsegmentation can help kind of alleviate some of that fear. And that, while, yes, the threats can still happen at a very high velocity, the blast radius is also contained. Right?

Ken Ward: Yeah. I mean, what's funny, though, is, it, it — and I've been in this now for twenty years — and the new thing will pop up, whether it's containers, or cloud, or now AI. Right? Those things will keep evolving. But the fundamentals have stayed the same since I started in this business. Right? And I still see organizations struggling with the fundamentals. And what I mean by that is knowing what your universe of systems are. Right? Having it — and I know that CMDB, you know, you throw that word out there, and people are just like, uh — that's another one where they just get paralyzed. I'm like, oh my goodness. But it's like, understanding what your inventory is, what is valid, what versions are things at, you know, what — do I have good hygiene? Um, we interact a lot with Active Directory. Active Directory hasn't changed in, what, twenty years? Right? Because I remember I left government back in 2015 to go work for Microsoft, and, and I did nothing but cloud for eight years. And then I came back, and I was, like, working in Active Directory again. I was like, oh, I need to brush up. And I was like, wait, nothing has changed.

Jackie McGuire: Nothing's changed.

Ken Ward: Nothing's changed. Maybe gMSAs came out. Like, that was it. But still, organizations struggle with the fundamentals of, of Active Directory. Right? Um, and even along that, I could kinda go into — Microsoft has kind of adjusted some of what they've been telling people before. They used to say have multiple forests. Now they're like, yeah, there's other ways that we can do that, um, and we can obviously help with that. But I, I guess, going back to your question: yes, those new things will pop up, and we need to find ways to secure them, but we still need to do the basics. You gotta do the fundamentals, just like, um, in anything that you're gonna do. So I would say, let's, let's continue to work on that. Zero Networks can help you to an extent with that, because we'll give you more visibility, but I'm not gonna solve that, that challenge. Right? Because I'm still gonna hook into your Active Directory, your asset repositories. I still — I'm gonna rely on those being somewhat accurate, so that I can get, um, access to your machines.

Why does security literacy matter?

Jackie McGuire: Yeah. Yeah. And it's, it's almost mind-blowing how much — how many large breaches — you know, people wanna think that people are out there, like, exploiting zero-days, and, like, hacking into — they're not. They're buying login credentials from the dark web. Your employees are reusing their personal passwords on their enterprise machines, and then installing on their phone that steals credentials. And, you know, and it, it's very, very — it's still, like, from a, a broad-based perspective, a somewhat simple game of basic security hygiene. Um, but, again, it's still something we're getting incredibly wrong across the board. Some of that, I think, is because there has been some level of mysticism and gatekeeping in security in general. So because security engineers are not the most — I'm gonna paint broad strokes — they're not the most personable people, and they don't spend a lot of time talking to normal people about what they do. Um, security's always kind of been, like, this mystical thing that people don't really understand. I really feel like that's gonna fundamentally change. I feel like cybersecurity has become not only — is it arguably the fifth front of war, and our largest threat as in, you know, from a nation-state perspective — but it's also the thing that now is connected to our bank accounts and our insulin pumps. And so I think we, as a people, are going to have to get significantly more security literate. And I — and it's especially within enterprises — I think we need to trust all of our employees who are touching anything that writes data or edits data with basic security knowledge. And, you know, I think you're right. I, I hope that AI is a good way to accomplish this, and that it'll — you, you can't necessarily easily create 10 different security trainings for 10 different groups within your company based on what they need, but I think AI can. So I'm hoping that we can turn this into a, a benefit, and that, you know, hey, maybe the finance team needs to understand different things about how to interact with your bank's API than the HR team does about how to manage PII, and things like that. And so we need more broad-based security literacy in general. Um, yeah, and then to kind of trust people with — with the worst-case scenario, and explain to them what the actual risks of what they're doing are. Um, because, again, I think a lot, a lot of it is more ignorance than malice.

How can automation reduce security toil?

Ken Ward: Yeah. That — and, I mean, I'll admit that, you know, I'm a geek, in that I like the new whiz-bang features. Right? And I don't wanna have to toil on some of the things. So what I try to do day in and day out is find ways that I can leverage AI or automation to get rid of some of the toils, so that I can then — I can focus on some of the higher-level stuff, because, yeah, it, it's, it's important. It needs to happen. But as, as humans, we find that very boring work. Right? Going through a spreadsheet and validating, like, is this system still online? Is someone still using it? Right? I, I should leverage as much automation. I'm still shocked to this day of how many organizations will do things manually inside of Active Directory, or with an API. And it's like, that's what scripting is for. Right? If you're doing it manually, then there's a lot of room for, um, mistakes and errors. Let's try — and I get it. Sometimes it's just a lot easier. But it's like, if you can spend that five minutes to find a way to automate that task, so that next time it's repeatable, then you're gonna be in a much better position. And that's, that's my hope for AI and cloud and all these other tools that are coming to us: that, that will make that better. But we'll, we'll see. I mean, um, I don't think any of us has a crystal ball, but we can hope. Right?

Jackie McGuire: Uh, if I did, I would have so much money right now.

Ken Ward: Right?

Why build vendor relationships before a breach?

Jackie McGuire: Yeah. Absolutely. This has been fantastic. I mean, I, I — again, I, I like the team a lot. So I know this isn't supposed to be a Zero Networks ad, but, uh, I, I'm doing this because I, I really like the team. I love the way you guys interact with customers. I hear great things about your customers. So I just wanna encourage people again. Um, I think old-school security has a hesitancy to using partners and, you know, bringing in outside consultants and things like that. But I don't under— I don't think, until you've been through a significant breach, it's really easy to understand that you can't both do the day-to-day work it takes to continue to protect your organization and respond to a breach. You can't both do the work it takes to, you know, migrate off a service that all of a sudden got hacked and doesn't work, or their DNS is misconfigured. So establishing relationships with your vendors ahead of time, understanding what they offer for services, understanding who to call and when, when things hit the fan, um, is really, really important, because trying to make those decisions when things are on fire, and figure out, you know, who your partners are, who, what your resources are, is the worst time to be doing that. So I would highly encourage everybody to reach out to Zero Networks. They have a lot of really smart people, super helpful and knowledgeable, um, and can start to help you put together some of those plans for — you know, this may never happen, but at least you know, if it does, you're not gonna be scrambling just to find an email address, you know, to, to get some help to respond to something. So, um, yeah. And this isn't just with Zero Networks. This is with all of your vendors. You guys just happen to be really good at it.

Ken Ward: Well, thank you. Alright. Well, with that, I think we've run out of time. I do appreciate your time this afternoon.

Jackie McGuire: Yeah. Thank you for not voting me off the island.

Ken Ward: Yeah. I don't have, I don't have that voting capability, but, uh, I wouldn't, even if I did.

Jackie McGuire: No. Thank you.

Ken Ward: Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for joining us. I hope you enjoyed Containment Island, and we'll see you on the other side.