#196: Building Cyber Warriors: UTSA's SOC & Elastic's AI Secret Sauce [EDUCAUSE 2024]

Joe Toste: Today, we're super excited to have Kendra Ketchum, Vice President for Information Management and Technology and CIO at the University of Texas, San Antonio, and Jared Payne, Director of Solutions Architecture at Elastic. Welcome to the Public Sector Show by TechTables.

Kendra Ketchum: Thank you for having us.

Joe Toste: Super excited to have you both on.

Joe Toste: Kendra, this has been a long time coming. We'll start with you. Just a quick intro for those who don't know you.

Kendra Ketchum: Sure. My name is Kendra Ketchum. I'm the VP of IT here at the University of Texas in San Antonio. And I've [00:01:00] been in higher education now for almost 26 years. So I really work and live in an industry of which I feel is changing society and the community.

Kendra Ketchum: It's giving back in a way that I think is extremely important. And I think the one thing that we can say is building upon knowledge is growth. And growth is what we want. And so that's, I love what I do. And I'm a former Navy girl. So I spent about 10 years in the military. And positioned myself to transition right out of the military and straight into higher ed.

Kendra Ketchum: And I love it. So it's a, it's a. It's a place where I don't feel like it's a job. It's, I'm serving and I'm serving others bigger than myself.

Jared Pane: Yeah, no, I love that. Jared. Yeah. So Jared Payne, director of social architecture. I've been working at Elastic for about six and a half years now. Previous to Elastic, I was at Red Hat.

Jared Pane: And then I worked for the state of California for the better part of 15 years. All I've been doing is public sector from state, local to education. Lately, I've been focusing a lot more education, higher ed and K 12s over the past couple of years, just because of where Elastic is growing in that community.

Jared Pane: And because of [00:02:00] our open source roots and where we are, it's really easy to give. Education, universities, and K 12s like actual access to things when budgets are really tight. Anyway, I'm really excited to be here really looking forward to the

Joe Toste: conversation today. I love it. And I know you're in Sacramento, but remind me, what agency did you work for in California?

Joe Toste: California Department of Justice. Okay, got it. Awesome. Kendra so I've heard you speak before, both at TASC and we took an intro call a long time ago when I was at Disneyland with my family. That's That was commitment. It was a ton of fun. Family was getting food. But I loved the phrase that you had humble, hungry and kind.

Joe Toste: And so first I was curious, what inspired that motto? And second, can you share a recent example of how that helped you at UTSA?

Kendra Ketchum: Absolutely. So we've all heard that antic of brilliant jerks, right? They know everything and they're brilliant, but they're just not nice to people. They don't share.

Kendra Ketchum: They don't ideate. They don't have a community. They don't create a trust mechanism within an organization. And typically, they don't drive results. [00:03:00] Period. And I started seeing that when I pivoted into higher ed, that there was this missing component in technological workspaces that was the smartest, brilliant jerk moved ahead the fastest.

Kendra Ketchum: And usually ended up managing 5 and 6 to 20 people at a time and had no experience. And what I tried to do is flip the script on that is, I don't need a brilliant jerk. Matter of fact, I don't usually hire those. I avoid them because there are things that I can teach you in the technical space, but I can't teach you to be a good person, right?

Kendra Ketchum: We learn behaviors. They're ingrained in us as a small children. And so it's like coming into the workplace. What do you want on your team? Do you want an ideal team member, right? I want to drive to results when I know I have an ideal team member that wants to do the same thing. And so it's creating that synergy of.

Kendra Ketchum: finding people that have behaviors in the workplace that demonstrate and lift others up. And so it's actually a little bit of Pat Lynch. Oni's work, hungry, humble, kind. [00:04:00] And sometimes, though, folks can mistake the kind piece for weakness, right? And so it's trying to navigate that in a way where you pluck those skills out of the people that you bring into your team.

Kendra Ketchum: And you're very selective. If you can only influence culture at higher and fire, why would you want to do it at fire? Why would you not want to do it at fire when you're bringing someone new in? And so that's where my passion lies. My passion lies in building teams just like Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

Kendra Ketchum: It shows you've got trust at the bottom of that and you've got results at the top of that and in between or enablement communication, things that we as leaders are supposed to do. But I think it's a really good place to be to build this off of trust, have a team member that's hungry, humble and kind.

Kendra Ketchum: They're there to serve other people. Don't need you serving yourself, right? And so anyway, that's where I invest. That's where I mentor. That's where I teach and train. I've worked around technological teams that are [00:05:00] extremely technical, but they couldn't be nice to each other, and guess what happens when you can't be nice to each other?

Kendra Ketchum: I stop you from being successful and you stop me from being successful. And now we got this stalemate within our org. And then that type of behavior and culture festers. And I feel like if you want to get past that, we just have to be real. Real talk. Sometimes they always call it real talk with Kendra.

Kendra Ketchum: On Thursday, we're going to have real talk.

Joe Toste: Yeah, okay. So I love this. So I coach high school basketball. Tryouts are November 1st. And every year, you get a new team on the JV squad. Because how it works is The best players move on to varsity, and then the kids who are not moving up, unfortunately, will get cut.

Joe Toste: So there's this, most of the time new kids. And every year, you've got to rebuild the team, rebuild the culture. So you said real talk with Kendra. It's funny I find the team starts to gel when we have fan time, which is when we go to away games, right? When

Kendra Ketchum: it's real

Joe Toste: Yeah, 100%. And you start to get to know the kids at Chick fil A [00:06:00] or In N Out or whatever they're at, wherever you're seeing

Kendra Ketchum: their behaviors, 100

Joe Toste: percent

Kendra Ketchum: you're witnessing their behaviors.

Joe Toste: And sometimes it's a, Hey, this is not the right behavior. You need to come take a seat on the bench. Sometimes it's Hey, actually this, I want to encourage you, you're, this is great. Keep it up. I notice exactly what you're doing. So I often will bring, as because you also have a basketball background bringing that into the conversation, because there's such a team component that I love so much, even within, IT or public sector.

Joe Toste: If you can't get the team right, the whole thing is going to collapse. Jared, Elastic is known for its secret sauce in AI Search. Breakdown for us how Elastic is helping to address the unique cybersecurity challenges. Faced by higher ed and maybe throw in an example of a university that had a wow moment using Elastic.

Joe Toste: Yeah, definitely.

Jared Pane: So like you just said, the secret sauce of Elastic is definitely our AI search. We're a vector database. We pride ourselves on speed, scalability and relevant results like at all time. The snap of a finger. And when you're dealing with it from like a [00:07:00] cyber security perspective, I like to tell people like that is the difference between being on the news.

Jared Pane: And not being on the news, right? Nobody wants to be on the news because of a ransomware attack or anything else that helps. It's like real in like real time responses to what is happening with your data right now. And so how Elastic is really doing in this that because we're a vector database in the back and because we have this background of search because we were so powerful from a data perspective.

Jared Pane: We've integrated that into our security platform in general, and so instead of searching through petabytes of data, which would take hours, maybe days, depending on what solution you're using, we can do it in seconds. And we do it in seconds, and when you're looking at it from a from a security perspective seconds matter.

Jared Pane: Responses matter. Response times matter. Even in I. T. In general, like you, you need to be fast. Like you don't go to Netflix or Wikipedia and expect like you're looking for if that

Kendra Ketchum: in sits there for more than 30 seconds, you're losing

Jared Pane: your mind or you're leaving, right? And that's the reason it's like instant [00:08:00] gratification.

Jared Pane: And it works just like you were saying, like with tech. And how we're doing that is we're building in a lot of these AI functionalities into our extremely fast search security engine. And we're bringing those results to the top quickly. An example would be like our attack discovery.

Jared Pane: What we have it's inside our security our security application. And what it does is that you have all of these alerts. If you're a security analyst and you have all of these alerts that are coming in at a specific time, you're not going to look through 7, 000 alerts. I remember a couple of my friends who used to work at on the cybersecurity team.

Jared Pane: They would come into work in the morning, they'd get their coffee and they would look at the 2, 500 alerts that just came in and they're like, I

Kendra Ketchum: don't have time

Jared Pane: for this because 99. 9 percent of those are all ridiculous. Like they don't matter. They don't

Kendra Ketchum: correlate. They don't correlate

Jared Pane: to the bigger picture of what you're trying to do, or they're not real threats that are happening in real time.

Jared Pane: So like internally to Elastic attack discovery, it takes those alerts. It uses general AI and it processes all those alerts for you [00:09:00] for the analyst. And it tells you which one has the probability of the highest score that is actually an attack that is happening right now, gives you a summary of that alert of what's happening, tells you where on the attack vector it is, and then how to remediate the next steps and how to do it.

Jared Pane: What that's really doing is just taking hours and days of work that these analysts used to do and compounds it down to five to ten minutes. So That's how we're really happening, and that's how we're helping a lot of the universities and higher education.

Kendra Ketchum: And then I turn around with that piece there, and that time and momentum that's created by the automation and orchestration of their wants, workflows, and workloads.

Kendra Ketchum: I now then take that time internally and allow them to innovate. So the outcome of what you just mentioned It's something that's more valuable than anything in your org, more valuable than any tech. It's the iCAP that comes out when you have idle time, you're able to innovate and ideate. That's the

Jared Pane: thing, you want security analysts to be security analysts.

Jared Pane: You don't want them to be developers. You want them to stop threats [00:10:00] in real time when they need it. And back to the last part of that question, like something that really had a wow moment. I can't mention the university, but we were working with them with a POB. They had a competitor's product, they were looking to get rid of it.

Jared Pane: And they brought us in to say, Hey, can you do a POV? Just show us what Elastic is. We're going to kick the tires. And we're like, yeah, no worries. What do you know about us? Not really much. We just know that a couple of other people of our friends use it. And we've been told that they really like it.

Jared Pane: We'll need it. No problem. We started a POV and within an hour, they were finding vulnerabilities that the other. Software, the other security product they were using hadn't caught at all, period. We were finding vulnerabilities that had been in, that had been living off the land for more than four years.

Jared Pane: And they were like, this is ridiculous. We had a justifiable thing that had actually happened. I found, we found two of them, actually. And these were things that they weren't even catching. But I will say this. As much as the Elastic the soft, the platform is really good. Our team, we have a dedicated team of security [00:11:00] practitioners that build out alerts and detection rules at at all times.

Jared Pane: That's their job. They're out there threat hunting at all times. And that's why Elastic is so powerful is because we want to do, and you said, humble and doing what's right and being kind. Hire the same way. I always want to hire some people who are kind. Who are humble and who want to help others.

Jared Pane: And I always tell people like customers first at all times, period, get them up and running, make sure that they're right. Take care of them. We're not here just to sell software. We're here to take care of them and make sure that the things that they need are handled at all times. Like in short, that's the secret sauce of Elastic is how we take care of our customers, but also the backbone of how good our product is behind it.

Joe Toste: That's great. So last year I threw an event at UTSA in the day. It was awesome. Had a ton of fun and before that, the day before the event, I got to visit the security operations center, which was a ton of fun. Got the whole tour. Even got photos with Thomas and some of the kids. I call them kids because yeah, I'm a little bit [00:12:00] older than them, but yeah it was a ton of fun, had a blast with them, but I was curious, Kendra, I've been meaning to ask you what was your vision for UTSA's SOC being a world class, because it was a pretty awesome operation to go out, tour, see it firsthand, and

Kendra Ketchum: we got to build it, and here's the really cool thing, when we got to build it out, I didn't just sit behind this curtain and say, oh, I want to do this, and this, I got the city of san Antonio to the table.

Kendra Ketchum: They're running a sock. They know what need is needed in a sock. I got the cyber defense folks. I got so many. I got the Department of Energy Department of Defense. N. I. H. Like people that understand the true benefits that are that a sock could deliver. But we all know what a sock can deliver. I actually pulled the onion back another layer and said, okay, tell me when my students leave this sock Would you hire him tomorrow?

Kendra Ketchum: That was the bigger witness test. Would you hire one of my students tomorrow? If we did not have that if they [00:13:00] weren't coming out of that ecosystem, would you? And the answer is no, because they don't understand what the work they're doing. They are unable to correlate the application of the theory that they learn in college, right?

Kendra Ketchum: And so I think that's where and again, this comes back and you asked what inspired what made it in his goes back to a kind of a selfish need. And what I saw coming through is I'm a very non traditional student. And I, like I said, was in the military. I finished my degree. I had a 12 year old at the time that I was, single mommying.

Kendra Ketchum: And I was like, I want more, right? And it was probably the 10th time of me saying that where I finished that college degree and finish all that. So what can we do now that I am in this space? To make other people in my situation that I experienced have a pathway to an education.

Kendra Ketchum: It shouldn't be so hard, right? And I think that's the piece of why I'm doing it. Why I've stayed in higher ed is I want to see people get those opportunities. I want to see them [00:14:00] have that connective tissue. And then I saw a need. The students were coming in. Oh, we're here. We got all of our curriculum.

Kendra Ketchum: We have all of our requirements. And then they graduated and they moved out of San Antonio. That doesn't do anything for our workforce in San Antonio. That does nothing for our community. Does nothing for economic mobility. It has no instantiation into the actual economy here. So I kept thinking, what if?

Kendra Ketchum: What if the FBI could use our students? What if they could come in and use our students? What if we had a program? So I got with Vanessa and I was like I'm one of those wonder and invention are my working geniuses. and my working frustrations or tenacity and discernment. Don't tell me all night while we can't do it.

Kendra Ketchum: I'm going to throw out all these ideas and then I want people to think about how we can. And so finding the right people, getting them in the right place and then hiring them to actually implement and do these things so that we could actually say we started with 12 students. Now we've got 179 students sourced into roles and into the economy here in San Antonio.

Joe Toste: Okay, so I [00:15:00] love this. Does the name Craig Woolley, he's the CIO at LSU. He's coming on tomorrow.

Kendra Ketchum: Oh, nice.

Joe Toste: So I was like, Craig, have you met Kendra? He's I have not. I've heard of her. I've met Craig's

Kendra Ketchum: sister before, but I haven't met Craig yeah.

Joe Toste: I'm like, he has built this world class sock at at LSU.

Joe Toste: And he's gonna talk about it tomorrow. And he is helping other CIOs build SOCs. And I was like, no

Kendra Ketchum: way, you did not

Joe Toste: connect it, how? But, I get it. So Jodi

Kendra Ketchum: Penrod from she is at Marshall.

Joe Toste: Okay.

Kendra Ketchum: She's coming for a visit to our SOC. Okay. And she is trying to stand one up at Marshall. We are Marshall.

Kendra Ketchum: That's I think, going back to the SOC too, is that I want to plug my graduates. How cool would it be to know, as a student, I was sitting next to an analyst that worked for the city, and now I'm looking at and understanding some of the same correlation of data markers that they are, and now I'm driving the depth of my knowledge based on the experiential piece of that of learning together, and I think that's the piece that [00:16:00] comes out of that SOC environment, and when we built it out, I was like, they looked at me like I had four arms coming out of my head because I was like, I wanted to do this, and I want a glass screen when you walk up to it.

Kendra Ketchum: A teaching and learning environment needs to be that. That means I should be able to have people in the background witnessing what's happening inside that classroom, right? That's learning, teaching, right? We made a huge glass screen. You walk up, you push the button, it goes opaque and you can't see it.

Kendra Ketchum: You walk up, you have a class, you want to show them what on the big screen, but, oh no, we have proprietary content, boom, hit the screen, can't see it. It was little things like that just made the students feel like they're part of something big. And so when they start to Feel like they're part of something big.

Kendra Ketchum: They start to contribute to something big.

Joe Toste: Yeah,

Kendra Ketchum: and that's what I was hoping for, was that momentum and churn.

Joe Toste: And I love the job piece on the back end.

Kendra Ketchum: I want to see him get hired, man. I want to see

Joe Toste: him get hired. And

Kendra Ketchum: the other thing is, and I'm gonna be quite honest, if you're in higher ed and you're not churning through your own, what you're not sampling what you produce.

Kendra Ketchum: [00:17:00] Yeah. Okay, that would be like you working in the security industry and you're not using any of your security tools on your laptop. Think about that. Higher Ed's production is knowledge. Why are we not consuming the knowledge that we're creating in these students, right? And developing their skills to go out.

Kendra Ketchum: Yeah, I source now so many of our roles. And by the way, I want to go back to a point you mentioned about coaching, because this is true. Back to the bench piece, right? How cool is it to know that you're that good of a coach, that you're prepping those kids, that they're coming poach them for the next iteration for the next team.

Kendra Ketchum: And I don't know what's better. The one who wins the championship with the team that you built and learned at the beginning. Or the one that watches the teams he built go off and win championships. Because I can tell you which one I would want to be. The one that built him. I don't care about who wins.

Kendra Ketchum: And I just wanted to mention that because that's inspiring. You feel like you invest so much. And I actually have two people here that they invest so much in growing their skills. [00:18:00] Just so you can poach them. That damn sorry. I'm gonna poach them. Because that means you're churning and burning the skills ingrained in what we need.

Kendra Ketchum: And now we're building our own self.

Joe Toste: That's true. Yeah, no, I'm 100 percent with you. Probably. There's coaching the team and winning, especially across down rival. Amazing. Greatest feeling seeing the kids who are the freshman on the JV team, but then their seniors on the varsity team and I'm an assistant coach on the varsity team.

Joe Toste: Seeing them win and even just seeing them play and then doing the whole jersey swap at the end of the season. I'm like crying, like you think I'm a high schooler and here's the thing.

Kendra Ketchum: Okay. So how is that any different? And I say this all the time in my org is I can determine my success.

Kendra Ketchum: If the five leaders I built five more leaders. Okay. Guess what you were talking about. You built five people to go to a championship team. They took off and they just built five more people. Do you see that? And the work we do is often very unrewarded until they start [00:19:00] winning championships until, and here's the other immediacy of the work we're doing.

Kendra Ketchum: We don't find out right now the impact we have on them. You're going to find out in about 10 years when those kids start reminding you and reminding of how you coached them and what they were learned from you. And that's going to be beautiful. I'm sorry. That's where I'm in it. I do it for that.

Jared Pane: No and on a side track So my wife is an educator.

Jared Pane: She's got her edv like that's her passion education is her passion i'm biased. I think she's the best teacher in the world But besides that but we always go to the store like

Kendra Ketchum: and everyone's highness is so intense. Yeah

Jared Pane: As soon they'll walk in like dr. Payne, dr. Payne, and they'll run up to her and they'll give her this hug and She's left a mark on these kids.

Kendra Ketchum: That's your legacy, by the way. That's legacy stuff.

Jared Pane: But that's the thing, you leave this mark on these kids that are going to grow into something that are going to do

Kendra Ketchum: great things.

Jared Pane: We went to a graduation party and that the kid was graduating high school going into college, she's [00:20:00] a senior English teacher, and they invited us, her, specifically, to come to the graduation party and spend time with the family because of the mark that she left.

Jared Pane: On them in general, I think we

Kendra Ketchum: all need that. Imagine the people that invested in you, right? I look back at the people that invested in me, the people that invested in you. And I think oftentimes as leaders, we add to get abdicate our most important duty, which is gratefulness. Man, I go back and talk to my mentors all the time.

Kendra Ketchum: I'm like, thank you for that. What can I do better here? How can I do that? It's about growth.

Jared Pane: One last thing too. And I know like you may have some other questions, but like

Kendra Ketchum: when I

Jared Pane: first became a leader, got Elastic. Nick, he's our Worldwide VP. He called me and he's Hey, I just want to say Congratulations.

Jared Pane: He's you're going to be a great leader. He's if you ever need anything, I'm here. He goes, the only advice I could tell you is that take a look at what the good leaders did for you and mimic that.

Kendra Ketchum: Mirror it times two. Mirror

Jared Pane: it times two. And I said, Nick, I'm on it. But, I go, you know [00:21:00] what drives me?

Jared Pane: Is all of the terrible leaders that I had. And all of the things that they didn't do, like the support and the care and the love of giving you that, that balance of yes, you can do this is yours. Adversity

Kendra Ketchum: does grow champions, like it does. Now, but trauma does not. Let's be, did you hear Brene Brown today, right?

Kendra Ketchum: Like she, we often mistake that, but you're so spot on because that adversity actually fuels me. All it takes is someone to say to me, I was like, oh, you can't do it. I was like, okay, I can't, let's, I think the things that have shaped me even or the jobs I didn't get

Jared Pane: right

Kendra Ketchum: or the bad leaders that came into my life and they were there and they were churning and I opted to learn from them anyway.

Jared Pane: Yeah,

Kendra Ketchum: because you can learn from the bad ones just as much as you can from the good ones. So

Joe Toste: I love this mentorship topic and then we'll jump into the A. I. Power search piece. But so I've got this private community called the Collaboratory nationwide now spans from Seattle and King County down to Miami and in between.

Joe Toste: One of the CIOs in the middle is Craig Hopkins here in [00:22:00] San Antonio.

Kendra Ketchum: He's our city CIO. He's a fantastic.

Joe Toste: His role on mentorship for the other CIOs that are in this group is incredible. I am like, man, if I was a kid and he also teaches too. If I was a kid, I was like, I would love to work for him. He is.

Joe Toste: Absolutely fantastic.

Kendra Ketchum: And we have we share a lot of ideation around like the ideal team player. Yeah, it means right? Yeah,

Joe Toste: he's a huge fan of Patrick and but I just love every time we have these monthly calls I just have this like every time I am learning from something and he is passing it on to There's this wave of like newer CIOs across the market.

Kendra Ketchum: And there's young and up and comers, right? Like I see it right now.

Joe Toste: Yeah. And I just love, I think that's one of the things I like about probably San Antonio, next probably Houston too. It's just there's such a culture of humility and like across at the event I had last year, UTSA.

Joe Toste: It was incredible. It was like meeting Bear County and Evan S. E. P. S. Yeah. And

Kendra Ketchum: yeah, and all of these people and normally the CIA's don't talk.

Joe Toste: Yeah. [00:23:00]

Kendra Ketchum: So when Craig and I got here, we joined about the same time he came to the city and I came to U. T. S. A. And it was one of those things. It's let's be intentional.

Kendra Ketchum: Did he tell you we have a breakfast once a month? He

Joe Toste: does. Yes,

Kendra Ketchum: I'm hosting Friday. Love

Joe Toste: it. Yeah. That's what I'm

Kendra Ketchum: talking about. Love it. I was like, we're going to go eat at the La Pena de Rio. But we all get together at these breakfasts, like 7. and we talk about things that, oh, I'm experiencing that, or oh, I'm experiencing that.

Kendra Ketchum: And then we're able to ideate and share because we're not alone in this, right? And that's the biggest piece is we're not alone. And to drive innovation, I think we have to ideate and understand what you're capable, like what you're, and work that way together.

Jared Pane: If you work in a silo, you're never gonna get things done ever.

Jared Pane: You have to share everything that's going on, like your failures and your successes. It's the only way to do it. Do you

Kendra Ketchum: wanna go fast? Go alone? Yeah. You wanna go Fargo together? Am I saying?

Jared Pane: Yeah, you respond. I tell people that late I hire they'll say on the first day what do the successful people do here?

Jared Pane: And I said, they work with others, like they, they take people together. So when we're, when we are working on a project and [00:24:00] if you fail, that's okay. Everyone fails, but if you fail all by yourself, that's a problem. If you fail in a group, it's okay. That means you asked for help, but you went out and you reached outside of your stubbornness of I've got this, I'm going to do it.

Jared Pane: You ha you have to work well with others.

Kendra Ketchum: Failure is huge.

Jared Pane: Oh, I love this.

Kendra Ketchum: I know. I, you know my theory on failure. I'm like, fail fast, pivot faster. Yes, absolutely. And I tell my people like, I don't care if you stub your toe, fail and be like, oh man, I screwed up and then pivot, right?

Kendra Ketchum: Because it is on the other side of that failure is where that growth happens. That is where the nurturing, that's where you learn about why you fail. And when you learn about why you failed, you tend to not repeat it.

Jared Pane: 100%. And being uncomfortable in that situation makes you better.

Kendra Ketchum: Oh man, I love, and that's another thing is, I love, I am comfortable with being uncomfortable.

Jared Pane: Yeah, absolutely.

Kendra Ketchum: And that's one thing I think people don't recognize is that they think, Oh, you're out doing this stuff. Like even [00:25:00] these types of things, like there are still nerves. You still feel all of those things, right? But if you can talk yourself into being comfortable with being uncomfortable, It's just okay, it'll be over in a few minutes and it's temporary.

Kendra Ketchum: Moving on. It works for me even to this day. Anyway.

Joe Toste: No, I, no I could go all day. I absolutely love that. Jared, I want to let you get a chance to get into the weeds a little bit. How is Elastic's AI powered search analytics helping higher ed institutions detect and respond to security threats faster?

Joe Toste: You've talked a little bit about that earlier, but I specifically want to hone in on, do you have a specific university that you can talk about where you guys ended up saving the day?

Jared Pane: Yeah, actually Texas A& M specifically. There was a ransomware project that went down in 2019 that got hit pretty hard.

Jared Pane: I don't know if it was the state of Texas in general, but at least I know it affected a lot. Yeah, that's, yeah. And Texas A& M literally took our stuff and made it a mandate that any new laptop, desktop, server had to have our Elastic Agent on it. [00:26:00] Because we have 100 percent detection or cost all of the stuff that's going on, like you, we got to get it on there.

Jared Pane: And so we came in and we started ingesting all the logs and Texas A& M, whom worked their butts off to get all this stuff fixed we came in and we helped, they saved the day, like Texas A& M saved the day, but they used Elastic in order to do that, which was it was pretty powerful, it's a pretty powerful story and it was a really cool thing to see that So when I first started here we didn't even have a security solution.

Jared Pane: We had nothing. And I remember when they decided to move forward with a security solution. I was like what is this going to look like? There's so many security solutions out there already. Like why do we need another one? And then I realized that they were taking, Elastico was taking it in a different direction.

Jared Pane: They were taking it to a a vulnerability slash customer first direction of we want security analysts to be security analysts. We want to solve real world security problems and how we have actually built that security solution based upon, like I said, our search. It's been a game changer in the security industry, to be honest with you.

Jared Pane: Like I [00:27:00] see it's, used to go into meetings in a previous role and it was like, and I'm joking when I say this, but I would have to take a shot of bourbon before going into the meeting. Cause it was like, why doesn't your stuff work? How come this stuff isn't doing anything? Like, why am I paying you all this cash?

Jared Pane: And now I go into meetings in Elastic and it's a one 80. It's let me show you what I just built. You've got to see this and it's because we have this developer community and this community of users that really care about the product that have been using us for the past 10 plus years that now we're innovating and doing all this really cool stuff and consistently innovating.

Jared Pane: And they just, they want to show you how proud they are to build something with. Like a base set of Legos that we say, Hey, build whatever you want. But these are the things that are going to make you successful and they're out of the box. Go ahead and use these things out of the box. But if you want to build other things, go for it.

Jared Pane: There was one university that was running Elastic. They still are. And we came in for just the [00:28:00] check and I was in the area and I called him like, Hey, can I stop by, see how you guys are? Absolutely. I show up. And the two security analysts are showing me I've, Jared, I've gotta show you this cool dashboard that I built.

Jared Pane: I said, absolutely. So they took some open source stuff, built this dashboard, and next thing you know, like this alert pops up on the Elastic stack and they both start laughing. They go, what's so funny? And they go, we we have all of our key card readers in the office. We monitor all of the iot devices, is we got our CISOs NFC number.

Jared Pane: And we put it in the system. So when he checks in, we know that we have to start working and that he's coming into the office. And they started laughing. Do you see what

Kendra Ketchum: we have to stay ahead of? Because that is real. That is so amazing. I started

Jared Pane: laughing and I'm like, no, you don't.

Jared Pane: They're like, no, I make, like we work all the time. They're like, but we know when he's here. Is it any

Kendra Ketchum: different than the emails you could set to yourself? When your boss emails you and it's boss emailed, right? And you get a notification so you know to get in there and respond. Yeah.

Jared Pane: But it's hilarious. But that's, we're doing a lot of great things and like I said [00:29:00] earlier the team that I have, that we all work together is the best team that I've ever had in my entire life. I have no problem rolling up my sleeves and digging down and building out like SQL code or Yes.

Jared Pane: QL code, whatever it is that I need. Like I'm all, even though I'm the leader, like I'm here to help the rest of the team do whatever they need to. So we're at, we're in it to win it.

Joe Toste: So Kendra from coaching basketball to cheerleading, to breaking barriers in tech. So you've got a pretty diverse playbook and you were overseas for a while too.

Joe Toste: How are you using all of these life experiences to, to shake up the way that this is the way it's always been done mentality.

Kendra Ketchum: Oh, which drives me crazy.

Joe Toste: I know. I know. Give me an example of some of that out of the box thinking that led to a major win recently.

Kendra Ketchum: Okay. So one major win, I want to say, and I actually go back to the team.

Kendra Ketchum: And so when I mentioned my strengths earlier, wonder and invention, that can also be a curse for a lot of folks who are trying to really hone into [00:30:00] their operation, right? Because I keep telling him new things or new ideas or share this or share, and think about this or what about this.

Kendra Ketchum: And so the first thing I did was I made every one of my engineers go back to design thinking. They all had to go back. And so when I arrive in his organization, I typically look at how they're staffed. And I call it my 30 60 90 litmus test. I look at what they're staffed at, what services they're offering.

Kendra Ketchum: Do the services they offer enable their capabilities? Is it true enablement? And when I start to see a picture of we're doing a hundred things at 40 percent and none of it's really Working and jiving and so I'll then at my 60 days draw it all in. Okay, this is what we're gonna do This is the plan.

Kendra Ketchum: This is how we're gonna go forward But I think the biggest piece of that is in an organization that hates change You put someone like me who's a change agent and Using change leadership [00:31:00] skills, I can get the buy in pretty quick. Because guess what my third working genius is? Advocacy. It's galvanizing.

Kendra Ketchum: And galvanizing is advocacy, right? So if that's a strength of mine, I know I can go out and galvanize what they're doing and get buy in from the folks and get the road cleared and the path cleared for them. I think that's the biggest thing that sometimes folks don't do is they go into an organization and then they become part of that culture.

Kendra Ketchum: But you have to remember, you were hired externally for a reason. Why would you want to come in and be just like that? Six most expensive words in business, that's how we've always done it. You tell me that, I'll arm wrestle you right now and prove to you. And I'll lose, I am going to lose an arm wrestle.

Kendra Ketchum: But I'll show you that, think outside of the box. Because what if that chocolate didn't know that peanut butter over there, when combined, was going to create a resease, right? No one knew, it could have created something yucky. But my point is somebody tried [00:32:00] it and somebody went and they tried it.

Kendra Ketchum: And I think that's the pieces that I try to do in houses. Let's try it. Let's see if it works. Let's mirror the behaviors. When we act walk the walk and act, talk the talk and act the act. And we're part of it. They tend to become part of it too. And the reason I can say this is now working in an organization with many of these different pieces in a piece that got us ahead was I eating, I'm just like, what about this?

Kendra Ketchum: What about this? And so what they came up with was a prototype. That you would have been like what in the heck I want to create our own internal and don't you guys anyone take my ideas No, I'm just kidding. There's a camera right there. It's a camera. I want to create Runner GPT forget this whole chat GPT like that doesn't matter to me But think about what we as workers need at our desk How many times people say go to SharePoint and find that go find it here go find it on the internet Go find it here.

Kendra Ketchum: Go to the single sign on go to the same sign. I want all that gone I want a tool where I can go Where's the HR policy for that? And I hit [00:33:00] runner GPT and she says, notice I said she, she says there you are, it's located here and because you have access to it, here's what the file looks like, here's where it is, and you don't have to search for anything else I can help you today, and this has been tested in areas, I tested it, I have a very close colleague right now who's doing Triton GPT at UC San Diego, Vince Callanan, so yeah, so they're doing it and he's, they've got safety built into this model.

Kendra Ketchum: They're running it on llama three, I believe, and it's all open source. And so thinking about the technical architectures here, but, why would we not bring safety into it? So we uploaded a picture at this event and I wanted to see how safe I was like, okay, who is this picture of? And Triton says, Oh, it's this person.

Kendra Ketchum: They're sitting on the side of a mountain. They're doing this. And then. I asked a question is how old are the people immediately shut down the whole session shut down I'm unable to share that information with you. It's a safety thing. I can start identifying this So my point is if we start doing that at [00:34:00] design all this bad design things and the results of those don't affect us as much Yeah, and so anyway, it's a long way around it but I think that we have to sample do and try and then turn around and Challenge every single thing with why because people want to know why and I was actually thinking about that wall again when you said something is when you get a group of people that put the authority where the information is and they know the why of what they're doing, do you say you are going to have a Super Bowl championship that year because that team is going to turn and they're going to burn and they're going to be like, let's go and let's go.

Kendra Ketchum: And so I started sampling that in house. I started making small tiger teams. Let me see what this group would do. I put comms people, I put people, I noticed I'm looking like this, I put people that had zero technology skills in specific locations to see what could happen there and the technologists [00:35:00] started learning about behaviors.

Kendra Ketchum: Anyway. It's good stuff. I think that if we don't challenge it, and because I am a change agent, and by the way, you can tell me no, and I'll be like, okay, give me the yes. Yes. How can we get to yes? Without breaking the give me the yes. And that typically means you've got to be a little uncomfortable and I've got to be a little uncomfortable.

Kendra Ketchum: And that's okay. You

Joe Toste: don't. Yeah. It's in the media space, building tech tables from zero to one from scratch. Everyone told me couldn't do it. I've actually been to conferences where people told me this podcast. is D. U. M. B. There's no one. All people want to talk about are their top three priorities.

Joe Toste: That's ridiculous. And I was like, that's pretty boring. Notice we didn't

Kendra Ketchum: talk about a lot of bits and bytes. And then we got a little technical, but like the bits and the bytes are like, they're there.

Jared Pane: Getting to know like how you do business, why you do business, why you do the things that you do.

Joe Toste: That's what the secret is.

Joe Toste: Yeah. And the craziest thing about that is [00:36:00] that. So many folks still don't understand that, which is why I'm sitting in the carousel booth right now, recording this podcast. And it's very hard because I'm actually almost single handedly trying to change the market. And it is risky. It is a grind and

Kendra Ketchum: it's failure and it's 10, but you know what?

Kendra Ketchum: You keep going. Pivot.

Joe Toste: Pivot. Because those failures

Kendra Ketchum: you pivot and you learn from it and you're like, oh, that approach didn't work. What about this? Yeah,

Joe Toste: Iterate even for the private community I have, it took me probably seven months to figure out the agenda. You'd be like, why does it take so long?

Joe Toste: I'm like I'm not a CIO. So to intimately sit with CIOs around the country to really figure out how do I make this valuable for these folks? And I'm just dissecting everything. And then, around month seven or eight, I really nailed it. I'm like, Oh, this is great. We've got the formula. I love that.

Joe Toste: We've got this guest speaker. They're going to talk about this. We're gonna have this piece and then

Kendra Ketchum: we're

Joe Toste: gonna have a round table for 30 minutes for each member. And we're gonna do a tear it out on their business. So they're gonna talk about their business for 10 minutes. And [00:37:00] then we're gonna have open Q and A.

Joe Toste: You get to be brutally honest about what's going on. Other CIOs could speak into your game plan. Which is a ton of fun. But that community didn't exist. It existed because I'm trying to figure this out. Didn't really have quite the idea. And it actually happened because Craig was a kind of early supporter after the event at UTSA.

Joe Toste: And it's hey, I'm looking for this. And so I'm listening to those whispers, right? Okay, interesting. Looking for this, looking for that. And then we need

Kendra Ketchum: connection.

Joe Toste: Yeah. And that's

Kendra Ketchum: the piece I love about it. And it was first, we're all skeptical, right? We're like you said, where's it gonna go?

Kendra Ketchum: What's gonna what I appreciate is the connective tissue that we make with the craigs with the folks that are like out there in industry. It's that's where we learn from, right? And I think if we're not doing that as C. I. O. S. We're getting our information in a very compartmentalized way.

Joe Toste: Totally 100%.

Joe Toste: So I love the out of the box thinking it is risky. It's tough. But I think, leadership, you're not going to make everyone happy. That's just the role sometimes. But you can be gracious. You don't have [00:38:00] to be a jerk, but you can, You set the tone for the culture that you want and

Kendra Ketchum: yeah, don't mistake kindness for weakness, right?

Joe Toste: Yeah,

Kendra Ketchum: it's like people tend to do that But it's like going back to that is when you nurture and grow people I am just as feisty and fiery in protecting him, too.

Joe Toste: Yeah, I stole this I

Kendra Ketchum: sold for someone

Joe Toste: else. I really love it. So Recently last couple months. So I hired an assistant Riley and she's fantastic.

Joe Toste: I have a slack channel And it's called love proof So anytime there is something a CIO sends me or something about the event or someone is raving I'll take a screenshot of it and it's just me and her and I'll send it to her so that she can start to see the impact that the connections are having in the community It's very hard for her.

Joe Toste: She lives in Maryland So it's very hard for her to see this but

Kendra Ketchum: results of it. Yeah. Yeah,

Joe Toste: so she's starting to see and She's either cc'd on all my emails and so she's wow, that's awesome. Like this woman, Kendra, she's so excited, right? And then this person, [00:39:00] Jared, she doesn't quite know who they are, but she's like slacking me like this is so cool to see this happening.

Joe Toste: And so I guess part of getting your team fired up and getting that buy in

Kendra Ketchum: and then putting her out there. And having her do those things too. You're creating that confidence and skills in her just from an investment. Knowing you and think about when we produce, right? We know people are investing in us and we're like, Oh man, that drives us, right?

Kendra Ketchum: It drives. It does. Because you're

Jared Pane: seeing the success. You want to make it happen. You want to grow things. You want to make things special. I want

Kendra Ketchum: to make it better than when I found it.

Jared Pane: That's exactly right.

Joe Toste: Yeah. I love this. Okay, so we're gonna jump to the closing piece. And Jared, I'll start with you.

Joe Toste: If you could give one piece of advice to a rising technology leader in higher ed, what would it be? That's a

Jared Pane: great question. And I think it goes back to what Kendra said earlier, right? Be kind, be humble care about others. You have to care about others, right? It's what makes good leaders.

Jared Pane: If you don't And [00:40:00] honestly care about others, right? That's the thing. Like you have to be a good human. But also too, you have to see the bigger picture. Putting your teammates and the people that you work with and uncomfortable situations to get better day over day. That's what, that's how you're going to get better.

Jared Pane: And then that's how you're going to grow as a leader. But also too, another thing too, is everybody could always be better at something. Always. And so every day I wake up and there's two things that I think about. One is what am I going to do today to get myself to be a better leader? What could I do to be a better leader today?

Jared Pane: And then two, how am I going to grow the business? So those are like the one two, right? But those are the two things that are important to me outside of my daughters and like my family and everything else that comes along with it. But I think it really just comes down to listening. Being empathetic, being humble, being kind, and being a good person.

Jared Pane: That's what good leaders are. Everything else will happen. Everything else will come. I promise you, it'll come. If you don't listen to others, and you don't take their opinions, and you don't give them a chance to be successful, your team will never be [00:41:00] successful. You will never be successful, and whomever you're working for, or whatever you're doing, is not going to be successful.

Jared Pane: That, that's the best advice that I can give, is It's just be real and be who you are and don't conform you can't conform And I think Kendra you said that earlier you know This is the way we've always done it or he's to some of that extent like but that drives me nuts Like I don't care if that's the way you've always done it.

Jared Pane: Like you want to you want an end goal go get it There's a guy That I used to work with At red hat and he told me this one time and I'm never gonna forget it. He's If your goal is to get to the top of a mountain And you're climbing up that mountain. You're gonna run into a big boulder. You have a couple options.

Jared Pane: One, you can turn around and just go back down the hill, and that's it. And then your goal is still gonna be the top of the mountain, but you've moved on and you went somewhere else. Two, you can figure out how to get rid of that boulder. Dynamite, climb over it, go around it, maybe go try the other side.

Jared Pane: Because once you clear that, then you get to a layer of barbed wire, right? You could also turn around and go like that. But the whole idea is that your goal is the top of that mountain, and you have to keep moving. No [00:42:00] matter what it is, no matter what's in front of you and as a leader, you're driving the people that are working on the projects and the things that you're doing and whatever it is that you have on your plate, you're driving them to the top of that mountain and you're that change agent.

Jared Pane: You're the person that, that drives them up there. And the way that you always do things is not a correct answer 'cause it's not gonna get you to the top of that mountain.

Joe Toste: Yeah, no, it's great. Kendra, if you can give one piece of advice to a rising technology leader at UTSA, what would it be?

Kendra Ketchum: Stay curious. Think oftentimes we don't stay curious, and children remind us to stay curious. And if you ever want to be inspired, go to a mall, sit in a play area, and watch children start to pretend. Watch them Start to remain curious and always seeking that curate that all of what is happening. And I think that if we can stay curious right to what is [00:43:00] possible, then we'll seek whatever that may be.

Kendra Ketchum: And so I think that's important. And then I also always say is just be authentic, be yourself, right? There's no one else like you in the world and that's pretty damn cool. And so lean into that. That means. invest in your self awareness, invest in your ability to communicate, be a listener, be inclusive, right?

Kendra Ketchum: Diverse groups create diverse ideas. Yes. And so I think all of those things help shape, shape that. And then I'm gonna use something that I heard today and I actually had it presented to me when I was very young. I grew up in a very small town in a Presbyterian children's home in Amarillo, Texas and Mother Mary lit to me one day and she's like my goodness Curiosity is gonna get you your and get you in trouble and I think that I look at that [00:44:00] now and I drive that because that curiosity is Actually what has landed me where I'm at And I'm glad now that someone at a very young age, I think I may have been nine, reminded me to stay curious.

Kendra Ketchum: Because that now, curiosity drives the five whys. Oh, we're gonna roll out whatever widget, tool, whatever. Why? Why? Why? And when you get to the fifth why, you find out cause we've had that widget, we know how to use it, it's easy. That's not ideating. That's choosing ease. And what people don't realize, when they choose ease, they actually make it more complex.

Kendra Ketchum: Being complex is easy. Being easy is hard. Does that make sense? Anyway, that's what I would say. All of that, and what you said.

Joe Toste: Okay, so I love that. I gotta, in the words of my friend Ryan Murray, who's the state CISO in Arizona I'm gonna double click on what you said real quick. On the authentic piece.

Joe Toste: Really funny, a lot of people will go, Hey Joe, we're trying to find someone like you at our company, who will do the podcast and stuff. [00:45:00] We just can't find anyone that's like you. And I was like, no, I am honored. I hear you because I am authentically me. You cannot copy me. You cannot copy tech table. It's not humanly possible.

Joe Toste: It is literally. This is the show on this camera that all this happening. This is Joe Tostee. You can't. So I love that authentic piece. I think a lot of people try to be somebody else. You should just be yourself. Yeah.

Kendra Ketchum: And when you are yourself and you know yourself, guess what? You can govern yourself.

Joe Toste: Yeah, and you become very comfortable with who you are, like, this is who I am, this is what you're going to get, it's the real thing, alright, I loved today's conversation, this was fantastic I am curious, is, Jared, is there anyone that you would recommend that I should interview next, for this, who's doing incredible work in this

Jared Pane: space?

Jared Pane: I've got a lot, it's really hard to narrow it down off the top of my head Adam at, seesaw over there he's doing an amazing thing. Sorry about him. Mark Stone. Yeah, Mark Stone. David Lam at UC Davis Health. He's he's fantastic. He's actually, David Lam is [00:46:00] one of the most curious people I have ever met in my entire life.

Jared Pane: He literally breaks Elastic on purpose. Like he's our QA tester. And he'll come in and be like, I'm trying to do these 15 transactions. How do I do it? Anyway he's fantastic. So David Lam's one of those. Gary at UNMC is another great guy. We have so many like amazing users.

Jared Pane: Mark at UC Berkeley. So yeah, I would stick with those six because they're fantastic. I'd say Ryan Murray because I love Ryan.

Joe Toste: But he's been on four times. Has he? Yeah. Three times. Three times. Yeah. Twice in Houston. Okay. Once in Arizona. Have you done

Kendra Ketchum: Frank Fegan's yet? Have you talked to Frank? No. We need to get you with Frank.

Kendra Ketchum: He's UT Dallas.

Joe Toste: Okay.

Kendra Ketchum: Yeah.

Jared Pane: Next time Ryan

Joe Toste: comes on, I want

Jared Pane: to come on with him.

Joe Toste: Yeah. He's so at my Phoenix event that I had earlier this year, Ryan, so Ryan Murray always wears a fedora. So I also had him and I had the states to sew. Ralph Johnson from Washington came down. The two of them both wear fedoras.

Joe Toste: Did you wear one? I did not wear one. But they fought over Because it was the final four, I had a basketball in the [00:47:00] middle. They fought to who gets to put their hat on the ball. And I'm like, whoa. And they were like legitimately no, my hat's going on the ball for this episode. So it's pretty funny. So Ryan's got his hat on there.

Joe Toste: Oh my god, that's awesome. Yeah.

Kendra Ketchum: That is awesome.

Joe Toste: I'll have to send you those episodes. Please do. I talk to Ryan quite a bit. He's a big dude. Yeah, he's a great guy. He, what I actually, side note, because I know Ryan, you're a listener. One of my favorite things about Ryan is he is willing to collaborate with local governments.

Joe Toste: Sometimes the state folks will not do that. And I had him on with Dr. Chris Mitchell, who's the CISO for the city of Houston last year. And it was incredible to have them come together.

Kendra Ketchum: That's when you solve city problems. Yeah. When you bring the researchers with the industry, matter of fact, that's why I love higher ed, government, university, industry, all of that combined together.

Kendra Ketchum: You want to solve a city problem, put them all together, share data, share all of those things. That's why I love working with Craig. And it's what can we do as a research entity to help you propel and accelerate that. So yeah,

Joe Toste: so we're gonna close out with [00:48:00] you. Anyone else that you would recommend for the podcast episode that we should highlight?

Kendra Ketchum: Oh, yeah, so I think you know, you should you definitely should talk to Frank. I think Dr. Vince Kellen He can really lean into some AI concepts for you. So things that they're doing at the University of California, San Diego AI is just, wow.

Joe Toste: I love it. We're going to end the show right now.

Joe Toste: Not going to be out yet, but Vince, we want you on the pod.

Joe Toste: Thank you both for coming on the public sector show by tech tables. Appreciate you both. Absolutely. Thank you so much.

Kendra Ketchum: That's great. Yeah. Thank you.

Hey, what's up everybody. This is Joe Toste from techtables.com. And you're listening to The Public Sector Show by TechTables. This podcast features human centric stories from public sector CIOs, CISOs, and technology leaders across federal, state, city, county, and higher education. You'll gain valuable insights into current issues and challenges faced by top leaders.

Through interviews, speaking engagements, live podcast tour events, we offer you a behind the mic look at the opportunities top leaders are seeing today. And to make sure you never miss an episode. Head over to Spotify, Apple podcast, hit that follow button and leave a quick rating, just tap the [00:49:00] number of stars that you think the show deserves.