Interview with IT Manager Paul Lanzi

Paul Lanzi is the COO and co-founder of Remediant, an IT security startup that has created a product to protect privileged accounts. Prior to this startup, he worked for many years as an IT manager in the biotech field, managing various engineering teams for Genetech and then Roche.

Back 11 years ago when he started at Genentech, the first security problem he helped tackle was dealing with managing multiple accounts. “Everyone had multiple accounts and multiple passwords, and we built our own home-grown system to consolidate these accounts, and make it easier for everyone to use a single username and password to get all of their work done. That actually improved security, since lessened the chance that someone would have to write down their multiple passwords somewhere — but it also made it easier to ensure that every employee had the right access to do their job.”

Of course, today we have both single sign-on products to federate identities, such as Okta and Ping Identity, and identity governance products such as Sailpoint and RSA Archer. But back then this was hard work.

Lanzi’s best security tool has been multi-factor authentication. “I turn it on wherever I can, it is truly one of the most under-appreciated tools around. While it isn’t perfect, this technology sits in that rare sweet spot between simplicity and security,” he said. In his present firm he uses a combination of Google Authenticator and Yubikey Nano devices for this purpose. “I am amazed at how much crypto they can cram into that Nano form factor,” he said, which is about the size of thumbnail (shown here).

A decade or so ago, Lanzi was involved in rolling out 110,000 iPads globally at Genentech/Roche. “At the time, it was the largest non-education deployment of iPads in the world, and we used the MobileIron’s MDM software to protect both our data at rest and in flight. Their MDM-based security capabilities gave us the ability to remotely wipe the fewer than 20 devices that were lost or misplaced each month. Its combined capabilities gave us assurance that when those devices were lost, the data on them was still secure. We could also enforce minimum OS version standards, to ensure that users were keeping them up to date with OS security updates.”

Genentech/Roche had a very unusual security staff, composed of folks from different departments. “We had separate teams for patching desktops, maintaining our network infrastructure, an IT Security policy writing group, an account provisioning engineering group for maintaining that piece, and an overall Security Architect as well. They contributed to an overall defense in depth because they were mutually supportive and worked together. That isn’t going to be possible in every enterprise, but we had terrific coverage across the various skills and potential threats areas. And given that we had personnel split across South San Francisco, Madrid and Basil, Switzerland, it was pretty impressive.”

How has security changed among his various employers over the years? “It really depends on the level of support at the executive level. At Genentech/Roche, we had executives who understood the risks and the investment needed to minimize the security risks. Other places were behind the curve and more focused on creating policies and lagged with their investment in security infrastructure. Part of the issue is that unlike in the retail or government sectors, biotech hasn’t had the big-news breaches to motivate organizations towards security improvements.”

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