Ev Kontsevoy on the Future of Infrastructure Identity

Well, thanks for having me, Michael.

So, yes, indeed, my name is Ev, and I'm here to talk about Teleport.

We are an AI infrastructure identity company, and essentially the topic of my short presentation is what is infrastructure identity? It's a new market category that we're pioneering and leading in.

And I hope I will be able to explain to everyone why this category, why this product, why this solution is so important now.

But first, quickly teleport at a glance.

So teleport the project.

It was started life as an open source project, was born in November 2020.

So it got started by a bunch of engineers, myself included, from hyperscalers, from companies that measure servers by millions.

Because at that scale, a lot of things change.

And we just noticed that at scale, companies use very different technologies to protect their infrastructure, to provide remote access for their engineers.

And we are essentially bringing these technologies mainstream.

So let me maybe explain the problem that we have using this as an example, okay? So first of all, we usually sell our solution to whoever is responsible for infrastructure.

Oftentimes it's a platform team or platform engineering team or cloud platform engineering team.

So if you are, if you're running that team, or if you work on that team, one of your core responsibilities is to protect data.

So data is your crown jewel.

The data is right here in the middle.

So whether consciously or subconsciously, you are going through this, like you're enumerating in your head, you're running this loop, you're enumerating all the possible ways how this data could be accessed.

how this data could be stolen, how it can leak.

And you usually begin with the obvious thing.

So if it's data, data lives in some kind of database.

It could be MySQL, could be Oracle, Postgres, whatever.

So database listens in a network socket.

So you need to harden this access path.

So there are all kinds of things you should do.

Like, yeah, you should probably not let this port to be exposed to the internet.