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Hello and welcome to Full Tech Ahead.
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I'm your host, Amanda Razzani, and I'm so excited to be here at Qualis's big annual event, Rock On 2026, with Kanal Modite Morasia.
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And he is the senior vice president, product management, go to market and growth at Qualis.
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So how are you doing today?
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Hey Amanda, I'm doing good.
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And then thank you for hosting me, reporting live from uh Qualysis uh Rocon, the Risk Operation Conference here in Austin.
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Nice weather.
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Uh, I see the Bay Area vibe here.
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That's where I live in a San Francisco Bay Area.
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So pretty same uh vibe here, and with uh uh hundreds of customers already checked in uh for the training today.
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A lot of energy, a lot of positivism, and a lot of hallway chats around AI and attacks and whatnot.
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So we'll we'll walk you through that.
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But yeah, no, super excited.
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Fantastic.
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Well, can you first, just for our audience who may not know, can you share what Qualis provides?
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Yeah, no, great.
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So QuALIS is a leading cybersecurity company uh founded in 1999.
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So he's been in a business for the last uh uh 25 plus years with a single mission.
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The mission has always been that Qualys wants to help uh customers globally in managing, communicating, and eliminating their cyber risk, which is basically created by the cyber attackers, right?
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So the simple goal, simple mission to help organization in do business safe and secure way by securing or by managing the cyber risk.
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That's the vision.
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That's the mission of the company.
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Wonderful.
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Well, can you start first by sharing what is the overarching message at this year's event?
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Yes, great question.
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Look, the overarching message is all about the agentic AI, as you can imagine, Amanda, with agentique AI, the it is giving an advantage to the attackers also, and attackers are leveraging agent uh AI uh to basically launch the attack at the machine speed.
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So the overarching message, you know, one-liner, if you were to ask me, Kunal, tell me one liner, what's the message?
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We our message is that use AI to fight with AI.
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That's the only way to do this.
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There is no other way.
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Absolutely.
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Well, so AI is really changing the game.
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Can you share from your experience how is AI helping attackers exploit vulnerabilities a lot quicker?
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Yes, no, great question, Amanda.
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And before we talk about that, but if you look at some of the uh data points that are available in the market, right?
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You see the Verizons, the DBIR report, and all of that, right?
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I mean, the vulnerability exploitation is the number one thing that attackers are leveraging to land into the organizations to start doing bridges, right?
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So that that remains number one.
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Second, now coming back to your point, with the AI models like a mythos and other frontier AI model, what attackers are able to do is to build the exploit chaining.
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Build the exploit chaining at the machine speed because the model will help them build those exploits very, very rapidly.
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So if we go back historically, when the new disclosure, new vulnerability disclosures comes in, then a month later, two months later, attackers would start thinking about how to write the exploit and etc.
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Right now that window of disclosure to the writing the exploit and chain of exploit to get into the organization.
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Why?
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Because attackers are now leveraging the frontier AI model for bad purposes.
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While, like a good citizen like you and me, are using the model to build the business, to drive the productivity.
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For them, it is a different type of business.
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So that's what the AI is giving them an unfair advantage and which is helping them reduce that window of disclosure to the exploitation.
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What's slowing security teams down when it comes to fixing these attacks?
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Very, very great question, right?
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And if you really look at some of the data points, uh and today actually is a patch Tuesday, so we are waiting for that.
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But if you see the last one, September uh 13th or 12th, I think there was a patch Tuesday when Microsoft releases the disclosure, right, about their uh environment.
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Uh and then they release the patches.
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So the number of uh disclosure only with one vendor that's a Microsoft had gone to 972 patches, which is 10x compared to the last year September, right?
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So the disclosures are increasing in an order of magnitude.
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And if you think about this, think of this as a top of the funnel where all of
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these disclosures are coming, and then the bottom of the funnel, you see here the number of vulnerabilities that are getting exploited.
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See, all of the disclosures are not necessarily risky, the ones that that are getting exploited by the attackers, which is think of that as your bottom of the funnel.
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Okay.
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Now, since the top of the funnel, which is the new disclosure amenda, that are increasing in an order of magnitude, like a 10x, 20x.
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So that is increasing from here to here, right?
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And the bottom of the funnel is also proportionally increasing.
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And to my point that I said that the AI model is giving them an unfair advantage, so they are producing those exploits faster.
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So you see the bottom of the funnel is also increasing.
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So now the question is how can a security team quickly fix those bottom of the funnel, prioritize finding before attacker actually launched the exploit, correct, and get in their environment.
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And the only way to do it, the only way, Amanda, practically possible, humanly possible, is to have an automation, leverage the agency KI and start eliminating the risk that is applicable in your environment, which is validated that hey, this risk is applicable in your environment rather than worrying the top of the funnel, focus on a bottom of the funnel and figure it out which ones are applicable, validated in your environment.
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And then start automating them by leveraging the AI.
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Okay.
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Well, and you're unveiling a new solution, the True Risk Eliminate 2.0 at this event.
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So what's the difference?
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Oh, yeah, no, great question, right?
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And this is where uh one of the key themes uh for this year's Rocon conference is the uh we we call it as a three musketeer agents, right?
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And uh so the agent KI powered agents, agent insta.
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So what it does as soon as the disclosures are coming, the new findings are coming, agent insta, which is instant detection, it helps you detect all of those in your environment.
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Number one.
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So that's the first agent.
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The second agent is the agent validation, agent val is how we call it, agent well.
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Okay, what it does, it takes those exploitable vulnerabilities and then tests it in your environment that can attacker exploit in your environment.
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If yes, then it is risky, otherwise, it's a theoretical risk.
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So that's a second musketeer agent.
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The third one, which is the big launch today, is the agent Sarah.
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That is for the zero-day remediation.
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So the one disclosure or vulnerabilities that are validated can be exploited in your environment.
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Agent Sarah fix those and helps you with the planning on what to fix, what not to fix, what kind of controls that you have in your environment, how to remediate them faster without deploying the patches and etc.
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So that's the exciting announcement, Amanda, which is the True Risk Eliminate 2.0 product.
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That's the latest and greatest announcements with the agent Sarah, which is part of our three Musketeer overarching theme that we are uh reinforcing at Aqualis, and then Agent Sarah is the new capability as a part of our True Risk Eliminate 2.0 launch, which is going to help organization in planning, preparing, and remediating the disclosure at the machine speed that is the AI fighting with the AI.
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Absolutely.
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So, can you also share how does the true confidence help teams move faster while making sure that the fixes are safe?
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Great question, and glad that you brought it up, right?
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So, as a part of our true risk caluminate 2.0, we are unveiling true confidence, which is our AI-powered remediation intelligence and the orchestration engine.
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Now, Amanda, if you think about it, whenever there are disclosures, vulnerabilities, and all of that is coming in, in order to fix them, organization really had always had an option of automating those patch deployments or automating those mitigation and all.
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But still, as you see the data, the or or the way organizations are operating today is by creating the ticket and waiting for a 60-90 days SLS and etc.
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So, though the automation to automate and fix those vulnerabilities was never the blocker, the real blocker amenda was the confidence.
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The confidence in, hey, will this remediation work?
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What if I deploy this patch?
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Then how would my system or my business will behave?
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For example, if you are a banking customer and if you are deploying the patch, your biggest concern is what if after the patch is deployed, if it brings down my banking application?
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Now that's the billions of dollars of loss for your organization.
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So true confidence with our AI-powered remediation intelligence and orchestration engine gives that confidence and a trust to the security team in remediating the findings before even you start about it, and then during the remediation and after
remediation is done, it is monitoring your business for a resiliency that if business is not going down.
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Right.
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And I can I can talk a bit more, but true confidence before the patch deployment or a remediation, during the patch deployment and mitigation, and after the patch deployment and mitigation is what we call it as a true confidence everywhere.
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Fantastic.
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Thank you for sharing that example.
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Well, from a vendor neutral standpoint, what is one step that security leaders could take today to close the gap between finding risks and fixing them?
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Of course.
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That is a great question.
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And as I said, the overarching theme or message for the security leader that guys use the AI to fight with AI.
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There is no other way.
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Human cannot outpace the machine speed.
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This is proven, it's nothing new, and you got to leverage the AI.
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And you have to be comfortable to live in an uncomfortable environment where the disclosures are going to balloon and the number of exploits going to also increase.
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And you need to leverage the zero-day remediation strategy by deploying the agents, and especially like agent Sarah that quality says launched a year back, and now we refresh with a lot of exciting things.
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Where now we help we are helping the security team in planning what to fix, what not to fix, and when what to fix is available, then is the patch is available.
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Can they do the third-party mitigation by using their existing Zscalar, CrowdStrike, and all of the control that they have already put into place?
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Right.
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And then during the patching, they need a strategy that what if the patch goes down?
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Right?
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And after the patch is deployed, how is my business going to remain resilient or not?
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Right.
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So, security team, our advice to them is not to get overly concerned about the automation.
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Automation is here to help, leverage the AI.
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And when you are thinking about remediating the risk, think holistically that what to fix, what not to fix is also important.
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And when you think about it, you have to look at your existing compensatory control that you have already applied.
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That means risk is already covered.
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If you patching is the right strategy, then you apply the patches with the confidence that it's guaranteed to work.
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And if anything goes wrong, you have ability to roll back.
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And if patching is not the right strategy, then think about the mitigation.
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That how can you minimize risk, right?
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So this is how we qualists uh recommend the security leader in approach this uh uh from holistic strategy perspective, planning perspective, and that's where we introduce the autonomous REM-ups remediation operation center, which is the new platform concepts that qualicies or new market category that we are creating called autonomous RAM-ups, which is a general open architecture with the six different stages.
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First, fix the validated one, then give a credit for the existing control that you have deployed, then figure it out what is the right strategy for you, whether it is a patching or a patchless remediation.
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Then you figure it out what's your resiliency strategy and what if the patch goes down, right?
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So, this is a general framework that we are announcing today called autonomous REMOPS remediation operation.
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And as a part of that, the true risk eliminate 2.0 with the true confidence is the implementation of that autonomous REMOPS platform.
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And that's what we are advising to our customer.
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And I just walked out of the product advisory board meeting that is happening right now, and I can tell you, Amanda, we have a 22 member coming from large banks, retail, financial industries, healthcare, they are all sitting in the room and I'm I was listening to their introduction.
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Everybody is worried about one word remediation.
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How do I quickly remediate?
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Fantastic.
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That was gonna be my next question is what were people saying about these announcements?
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What were they most excited about?
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What were their biggest concerns here at the conference?
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So you brought up remediation.
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Can you share a little bit more about that?
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You know, kind of window into the biggest concerns or the issues of your customers and why they came to this event today?
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Totally.
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Look, I mean, one of the key draws here for them to come here is to learn from a Qualices CEO leadership, and then we have industry thought leaders that are coming in tomorrow when the actual conference starts, right?
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And so they are coming.
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So they want to hear about latest trends, what's happening in industry, how Qualys is innovating.
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That's one.
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Second thing, and I can tell you this, I'm already hearing.
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Security practitioners are telling us that their CISO, their CIO, chief information officer, are now asking them, hey, can you patch this?
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Can you remediate in the next 48 hours?
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Earlier, the CIO and CISOs will tell the security team that can you create a ticket?
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And then my guy will look at when they have a bandwidth.
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That bandwidth comes after 60-90 days.
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Now they are telling us, hey, Qualis, do you have a solution for us to patch it or remediate or mitigate the risk in 48 hours?
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In hours.
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You remember, Amanda, earlier it was months.
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Now they are asking us that can you help me remediate in hours?
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And the biggest draw so far with all of the signage that we have is the three musketeer agents that I told you.
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And they are very, very curious about agent Insta, which is for instant detection, agent Val to validate what exists or exploitable in your environment, and Agent Sarah, which is a remediation.
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So they are very, very curious.
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They have been asking a lot of questions, and hey, not months, not years for the remediation.
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How can I remediate in a 48 hours?
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Wow.
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Well, if there was one piece of advice you could give business leaders on how to prepare for this rapidly advancing technology, as in regard to the future, what would you tell them?
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Yes, like I said, right?
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You have to be comfortable to live in an uncomfortable environment and learn to leverage AI, embrace the AI, to fight with the AI-powered attackers who are going to continuously increase the attacks, speed, and accuracy.
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And the only way to fight is to leverage the AI.
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And so start looking at how the agents, AI agents are going to help in your organization.
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And look, like any other technology, whenever the new tech technology comes, it always has some downside.
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But our recommendation to them, Amanda, is that if the benefit outweighs the risk, then you have to take that risk.
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And there is never ever going to be zero risk in your in your life, in your enterprise IT cyber hygiene, you will always have some risk.
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So if the benefit outweighs the risk, take the risk and go for it.
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And that's where leveraging the AI is going to be extremely important.
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We firmly believe the next decade will be dominated by the agents with the human in the loop.
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And they are those organizations who are embracing them early are the ones who will drive their business agility with the safety and the trust that is needed to build for their customers.
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Absolutely.
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Well, thank you so much for taking time out of this busy conference to speak with me today.
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And I can't wait to hear more sessions and speak with more people.
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Thank you, Amanda, for having me.
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And I look forward to seeing you uh later today in the evening.
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We have a reception.
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And guys, if as you are watching the show, please go to the COLIS and figuring and look at our three musketeer agents on how they are going to help you uh fight against the AI using the AI.
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So thank you so much, uh Amanda, for hosting me.
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Thank you.
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And thank you to our audience.
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If you have any questions or comments, leave them below, and I'll try to respond back as soon as possible.
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And until the next podcast, have a wonderful week.