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dnsUNFILTERED: Brett Cheloff, Zorus to DNSFilter
Podcast > Episode 30 | June 23, 2025
Mikey interviews Brett Cheloff, the new Chief Product Officer at DNSFilter. They discuss Brett's journey from Zorus to DNSFilter, the evolving landscape of cybersecurity, and the importance of endpoint security in a work-from-home environment. The conversation highlights the synergy between DNSFilter and Zorus, the significance of automation for managed service providers (MSPs), and the innovative CyberSight technology that enhances security and business intelligence.
Mikey Pruitt
Welcome everybody to another episode of DNS Unfiltered. Today I have a very special guest, Brett Cheloff, the new, what is your title now? Chief Product Officer at DNSFilter?
Brett Cheloff
That's good.
Yep, yep, chief product officer. Bingo-Bango right there.
Mikey Pruitt
Awesome. Well, welcome to the show.
Brett Cheloff
Thank you. Really excited to be here.
Mikey Pruitt
I think we should get the big news out of the way the elephant in the room. Brett is now part of DNSFilter. This is awesome. I'm excited. How about yourself?
Brett Cheloff
Very excited. ⁓ It's been a long process, long six months, kind of planning it out and figuring out how we can do it, but ⁓ ended up making it work and really excited to show the whole market what we can do together.
Mikey Pruitt
Very cool. So tell me about the kind of backstory of Zorus. Like what was your role there and like, did you, what were you guys trying to accomplish and are going to continue to accomplish in the near term? And then, you know, the future term looks like a unified front for DNSFilter and Zorus tech, is like the market is going to go crazy, I think. But anyway, we'll start with the beginning, I guess.
Brett Cheloff
Yeah, so I originally came on to Zorus three years ago as the VP of product and engineering and really take over what is the product vision for Zorus and how do we execute on that, deliver it to market. ⁓ Three years ago, it was just strictly a DNSFilter. ⁓ Zorus was trying to do it in a very creative way through what was referred to as a proxy, which can do SSL inspection and so on and expand. ⁓ As I joined the team and tried to harden that kind of effort, we saw some newer creative ways to kind of change that. And then also some really cool ⁓ opportunities to expand on it. So the vision of Zorus kind of changed in the first six months that I was with the organization. And then it expanded more into like an internet protection slash end user behavioral analytics vision. And what's really cool about this deal between DNSFilter and source is that vision gets to come right in alignment with ⁓ DNSFilter in the platform that we're building. And I know we'll touch in on that, but over the months we kept expanding the product. ⁓ I ended up moving into the CEO role for source in, effectively reporting to a board for the first time. That's an experience for me. I'm more of a product guy. I love building and delivering on products. So reporting to a board and kind of taking the business angle was an experience to say the least, but I really enjoyed that growth and that maturity. And I think that brings a really good dynamic to the DNS ⁓ company.
Mikey Pruitt
So let's back up to that pivot kind of for a second. I don't know the backstory of this, so I'm curious. I'm sure the audience is too. What were you seeing in the market that kind of led to that transition between the SSL decryption and more like endpoint focus?
Brett Cheloff
Yeah, so really what happened right after I, well, right before I joined, COVID kind of hit and then changed the entire landscape of work, right? Pretty much everybody went to work from home and that changed the security posture of just about 100 % of the companies on the planet. Why?
because traditionally speaking, you would have an office that you would sit in and all the technology is kind of in that building or multiple buildings. And now all of those people just went home and nobody owns the router at home. Nobody owns like that infrastructure at home. There's so much compromise. You don't own, you know, the front door and who gets access to that house. And so from a security perspective, it was a complete nightmare.
So it's like, okay, how do we shift our focus to making sure that the device that they just brought home, I just moved mine, I should probably not do that. ⁓ The device we just brought home is protected as well as can be. And that's also why we went the angle of user behavioral. Because if someone's in your home and they're supposed to be there, that's fine.
Mikey Pruitt
That's okay.
Brett Cheloff
but they go and sit at your computer and start using your device and that's already logged in, that could potentially be compromised. Someone could be using it when they shouldn't be and that's a bit unsafe as well, as well as owning the internet at home when you don't own the routers and the modems and things like that. So endpoint focus was really where we ⁓ kind of derived because of that exact.
Mikey Pruitt
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense because speaking of like owning the router, the business, the company doesn't own the router for sure. And I would, a lot of times the homeowner don't, don't really even own the router. And some of them don't even know how to access that. Like they're not IT professionals always. And the settings of that router sometimes are not even accessible to them. So yeah, you have to have to like, there's a new paradigm that was like the rest on us. And you, you guys saw that everyone like endpoint is the new, the new game. ⁓
Brett Cheloff
Yep.
Yep. And so we took a heavy investment and I personally feel obviously it's incredibly biased, but it's the best endpoint filtering tool you can use.
Mikey Pruitt
we're going to have arguments. No, I'm just kidding. Just
kidding. We should probably chat about the DNSFilter, Zora strife, which was like, crazily immediately quelled. ⁓ the day you guys joined, like they're like the Zoras and DNSFilter teams are like meshing so well behind the scenes. I'm, I am stunned to be honest, but it's going really well.
Brett Cheloff
Well, it's actually kind of interesting and I'll share this with the community at large. ⁓ cause we're in your Slack now, right? And so since we're in your Slack now, we can see all your previous messages and we, there was definitely some, some fueled, you know, it's good competition is good and, ⁓ really interesting. it's, but I mean, if you were able to be in ours, you'd see the same thing. I mean, we were toe to toe with each other.
⁓ And we're against each other in every way. Your strengths are very complimentary to us and our strengths is incredibly complimentary to you. There's not like a ton of overlap there. And I think that's what makes this kind of the perfect match. And I think the community at large, we just had our webinar, our live webinar, Ken and I last week. And I think that was really, really well received. ⁓ And I do believe that ⁓
You know, the only beneficiaries to this is our entire customer base on both sides coming together.
Mikey Pruitt
Absolutely.
I'll tell a funny story about joining Slack's ⁓ real quick. One of your developers, Brandon Hood. Hey, Brandon. ⁓ So we have a partner portal where I teach some classes to kind of like, this is how the DNSFilter platform works. And you can comment on those. And by commenting, you kind of earn points that you can then trade in for DNSFilter swag. So Brandon, not thinking that...
Brett Cheloff
Hahaha!
Mikey Pruitt
these messages are read often or at all, commented something about my beard in the video. And it was like, this beard is amazing, which it was a compliment. was like, thanks. Like, thank you, Brandon, whoever that is. And then, ⁓ who wasn't that chimed in? It was, ⁓ Kate Europe, the product person at Zora's time. It was like, Brandon, can see these. So we're like, we had this whole devolved into like how amazing, how, what an amazing beard day it was.
Brett Cheloff
Hahaha
Mikey Pruitt
I sent him some swag and wrote, he doesn't know this yet, but maybe he'll get it by the time he sees this. says like beard King, like from the beard King on there. Anyway.
Brett Cheloff
He is going
to love that. I just got off a call with him on it this morning, like right before this, and he was talking about trying to get enough points to get the little car. I guess he can get a car through it. Well, I think he's gonna love that.
Mikey Pruitt
Yeah. So the Zorus and DNSFilter teams are getting along ⁓ soaringly well. That is amazing to see. ⁓ But I am curious about like that. I hate to use this stupid word synergy, but there is a lot of complimentary aspects of both Zorus and DNSFilter. What do you think the future holds for both products being tied together?
Brett Cheloff (12:33)
Yeah, so I mean, the way that I've always viewed DNSFilter being literally the strongest, fastest, anycast network that you can connect to, ⁓ that mixed with the best style of endpoint protection in the sense of what we tried to specialize in of not changing DNS, right? When you don't own the DNS resolver or the network, ⁓
It gets tough to make sure you're keeping people secure without interrupting their internet experience. So those two elements and those two philosophies coming together of being able to own the network when you can own the network, and then also own the device and do it in a way that's not interfering with their internet connectivity is a happy marriage.
right there and that's strictly when I refer to like our filtering alignment and that full like own the entire like chain or the parts you can own. Then on top of that is the you know the end user behavioral analytics that ⁓ Zoros was heavily investing in to help with generative AI attacks, new age social engineering, etc. Where ⁓
Basically people are getting compromised through video, through Zoom videos and voice and phone calls and stuff that sound just like your boss. So you start acting different on your device. We need to try to identify that early. And the best example I always give is when your credit card is being used at a gas station in Texas, but you live in Florida, you're getting pinged from your credit card saying, hey, are you at a gas station in Texas right now? And if you say no,
it shuts off your credit card. That's the same concept Zorus was trying to bring to the table of when it sees that odd behavior on your device, it alerts and tries to, since you're also the filter, you can shut off the internet and still manage that remotely. that's really the key there that I see.
Mikey Pruitt (14:51)
Yeah, that's really good. a protection measure. DNS is really the heartbeat of most companies because if you can't get on the internet, you almost can't do work now because so many apps are in the cloud or at least like on the network somewhere. So DNS is a critical role. It's cool that we were both seeing that as a bigger picture. DNS is ⁓ a great place to add security layers.
Brett Cheloff
yeah.
Mikey Pruitt
And now we get to join forces and do an even better job than either of us could do ⁓ uniquely. And I'm curious, so more on this, like what it means, but specifically what it means for managed service providers. A lot of MSPs are customers. We have a lot of MSP customers for DNSFilter. Xorris is almost solely MSPs, from what I understand. So what is the MSP ⁓ gaining from this union?
Brett Cheloff
Yeah, so my entire background is managed service providers. ⁓ I started as an MSP out of Toledo, Ohio. The MSP's name is Nemesis, still exists. You can look it up, nemesis.com. That's where I originally came from, and I was an automation engineer there. And I obsessed over how do I automate remotely ⁓ engineering tasks to fix devices. I still...obsess about that today. Every aspect of my life I want to automate in some fashion, right? That spun into a product called Lab Tech that we made out of that MSP. We used to call it NEM service. It gave us a competitive edge to other MSPs because we could remotely fix your device much faster than the technician that needed to drive out on site. And then that was acquired by ConnectWise and moved me to Tampa.
Back in 2010 and then I grew lab tech slash what is now referred to as connect wise automate for all the way up until 2022. So from 2004 to 2022, I've been obsessed and entrenched in the MSP space and I understand it very well meeting with lots of MSPs all the time doing the whole growth, the massive growth that connect wise went through between the years of 2010 and 2021. So I think from that perspective, what MSPs are really gaining is a chief product officer that understands them to their core. know, at ConnectWise, we used to say the we are you because ConnectWise is also founded by managed service provider. They have their own MSP, just like Lab Tech was and other products that they invested in. And so I still fundamentally live that way.
You know, I obviously haven't been running an MSP or being a part of an MSP in a long time, but I'm around them all the time and hearing them and hearing their complaints and what they have to deal with. So my design philosophy for products is very centric to how can I enable MSPs for success? ⁓ And I think that's the biggest game for MSPs. I'm not saying that DNSFilter has not done that.
Their product is fantastic. They do have an MSP kind of philosophy with the design. ⁓ With me coming in, it's very much that extra level of attention to ensure that it continues and improves.
Mikey Pruitt
Yeah, this is going to be great for MSPs. I think I've kind of seen, I come from like a DevOps background. My first job at DNSFilter was a DevOps engineer. The first one. So like automation is really at the core of what I do too. Even in now that I'm in marketing, I'm like, how can we like automate a few of these things that I have to do, for example, this podcast. So we have to, you know, package up the video, make some clips. We've got to, you know, get it onto the platforms like YouTube and Spotify and that type of thing. And it's pretty easily automated just clicking here, clicking there. Some of these platforms have APIs. and I've seen like translating that to the MSP space. MSPs in my opinion seem a bit behind in the automation game. And I'm not exactly sure why that is, but I think they are now in the recent past have been really hitting the ground running and like, automation is like a huge differentiator because they can, they can alleviate some of that day-to-day work and get back to what really matters, which is their relationship with their customers. Do you see that too?
Brett Cheloff
Yeah, I mean, I tried to preach that as much as humanly possible through my tenure over the last 20 years, going on 21 years, MSPs are 100 % a client relationship type business. That's how they retain their customers. There's plenty of good MSPs out there. There's plenty of bad ones. And the good ones always end up taking the customers from the bad ones. But why?
What makes them good is their ability to establish a relationship, focus on their on their customers business and help make technology issues vanish. Right. The best MSPs are trying to do more things like QBRs and stuff because they're sick of doing the prove your worth because the good MSPs they're almost invisible to their customer if they don't go there and talk about their business because
Mikey Pruitt
Mm-hmm.
Brett Cheloff
of the automation they put in place and these issues just being fixed, the customer ends up saying, what do you, I pay you a lot of money every month and it goes up when I hire more people. Like, what do I pay you for? You know, like nothing goes wrong. Yeah, nothing goes wrong because exactly. And so they're in this like really weird ⁓ situation like that where like back when I was a part of the MSP nemesis,
Mikey Pruitt
That's why you're paying me.
Brett Cheloff
It was still very much a billable hourly thing. So we were very encouraged to go on site and, you know, charge, but then you're negotiating that bill, which created a negative tension, which is why this managed services and all you can eat models kind of took, you know, effect, but still the manage like that, all you can eat model encourages automation. It encourages less time spent because that's how you become profitable per client that you have. So now.
It's way more focused on the actual customer relationship, making sure you have that and being able to talk to them about their business and how can technology serve them. So you also need to be an expert with all the new stuff. So what's this AI stuff? How do I implement that? And you can help them with those things. ⁓ So yeah, I I preach it every single day. If you're not tracking automation or doing automation, it probably means you're distracted and that distraction can cost you business.
Mikey Pruitt
Absolutely. So the name of the game now is not to not go on site, but not go on site to fix something because that stuff is automated away. Now you're just that ⁓ advisor that the MSP are always striving to be. You have more opportunity to do it with automation.
Brett Cheloff
Exactly. And that's the other kind of angle that we refer to at Zorus, now DNSFilter, as CyberSight. CyberSight is a two-pronged kind of monster. One of them is for threat intelligence during an incident, so your incident response data that you need. The other side of it is business intelligence and being able to go to your customer and say, hey, let me tell you about where time's going in your business.
Let's make sure you're using the right tools. Let's make sure I have visibility of the tools you're using so I can make sure from a security posture you're okay. And start intelligently working on their business with them and that builds the strongest bond you possibly could build and really focus on their business insights instead of just, hey, what can I sell you?
Mikey Pruitt
That's funny. That was actually my next question was kind of focus around No, no, that's great. ⁓ the so the cyber site technology like I guess kind of building on that What do you what are some of the interesting metrics that an MSP can pull out of there?
Brett Cheloff
whoops.
So the metrics that CyberSight can pull, so I'll do like from a business insight standpoint, is that what you're asking, Mikey? Or, okay, yeah, so the metrics it can pull is ⁓ basically all time based on where is everybody in your company kind of spending their time? Is it in Excel? Is it in HubSpot? Is it in like,
Mikey Pruitt
Yeah, let's start there.
Brett Cheloff
Whether it's thick client activity or web activity, you can know these things. So there's a lot of use cases for this. For instance, let's say HubSpot. HubSpot charges per user slash data contacts in there. Okay, well, we see there's only five users in your entire company that actively use HubSpot, but you're paying for as though you had 10, 15, whatever it might be.
let's lower your license count for that. Let's bring it down to help save you some money because these are the only five people that actively use it. So you got a lot of unnecessary licensing. You can do that on any licensable product. I'm just using one as an example. The other element that I like to bring up a lot is around just time on social media. You know, this is more of a productivity play, but ⁓ you know, you have 15 employees spending
You know, 127 hours a month in Facebook. You know, do you want to put that time back in your business and maybe as part of your filtering policy, we say, hey, you know what, social media needs to be restricted to just the marketing team. Let's let them through, everybody else like, hey, come on, this, gotta slow down. So that's putting a hundred, it's quantifiable amount of time back into the company, back into the,
the interests of the business and kind of driving that. ⁓ And then, I mean, so those are, there's training examples of this. know, hey, you have 15 people using Excel. You know, is there any Excel training that we could do to help optimize that time? Maybe they're taking too much time in Excel and that's not your expectation. Your expectation is we should be using this other tool. ⁓ Hey, you got five people in Slack when...
We're clearly selling you and distributing Microsoft Teams. Why is there so much slack going on in here? Would you like us to block slack for you so that people migrate to the proper tool being used? Stuff like that. Yes, yes it is.
Mikey Pruitt
That's called shadow IT. So I'm
asking for a friend, also in the marketing department, just a friend, say this person when ⁓ DNSFilter fully incorporates the source agent, can track time on a site. I don't have the, sorry, if my friend doesn't have the LinkedIn tab active, does that count against the time?
Brett Cheloff
Hahaha
No, the only time that counts is the actual, like for instance right now, it would be saying I'm on this platform doing ⁓ what we refer to as streaming, so streaming activities. ⁓ And that's normally like in the background, ⁓ when it's streaming it'll say hey, this is streaming, this person's streaming, but in the foreground what they're actively doing is Excel. So let's pretend you're on a lot of Zoom calls.
Mikey Pruitt
OK, good.
Brett Cheloff
⁓ It's not just gonna say, ⁓ you're on Zoom calls. If you're working and you're trying to like do two things at once and you're on a Zoom call and you're using Excel, you're gonna see them overlapping and you're kind of like a time. So like it's your actual activity. So a lot of people at work love to listen to music, love to put up YouTube and just let it roll on another screen, right? I mean, it's not actually making you not work. It's kind of like that background noise that some people just like to have.
And every once in a while peer at it and check it out and then go back to what they were doing. It's a completely normal model. So the way that we look at that is very much a, they're actively working in Excel. They have YouTube up, but they're actively working. But for security purposes, it's incredibly important. This goes to the incident response side of what cyber site is supposed to do is if an event happens and it gets triggered on your device, the
Data that's missing in the market today, ⁓ at least for the managed services market, is what was the user doing at that time, leading up to, during, and after that, very specifically, right? And what other products can't do from a filtering standpoint, DNS typically is just the domain. Our product gives you the entire URL. So you know the exact thing.
the exact page they were looking at or the exact URL they clicked that downloaded the file and now your EDR or XDR or whatever is alarming about this file, ⁓ post download, you know that the user actually clicked on that thing and it got through. ⁓ That's where it originated from. This is what the user was doing. Okay, we can see that, blah, blah, blah, blah. Or if it's malicious intent, which is even worse, right? If you have someone internally into the business with privileged access,
you now have all that data necessary from a legal standpoint to say, this is what the user did and report that as you need.
Mikey Pruitt
That's really cool. So you can track left and right of boom and just see exactly what happened and use it in your remediation. That's awesome. And my friend. Gotcha. But in my friend won't be in trouble for looking at LinkedIn most of the day.
Brett Cheloff
Exactly. the user context.
No, I heavily encourage away from productivity talks or the getting someone fired talk. I really hate that. Unfortunately, there are managers, cetera, and business owners out there that will 100 % use the data in whatever way they want to use it. ⁓ That is not how we design the product or ⁓ what have you, but it is what it is.
Mikey Pruitt
So I had a few like kind of questions outlined, but I, want to pivot just a little bit into ⁓ now DNSFilter is like a hybrid workspace because Zorus, the Zorus team has an office in Tampa and you, we're kind of talking about, we're dancing around this hybrid work, work from home system that we're all kind of currently in. I'm curious, what are your thoughts on work from home and all that stuff?
Brett Cheloff (30:35)
Yeah, I mean, I think it's a mindset. ⁓ I think from my perspective, work from home. I personally like hybrid. I'm a 100 % in the office kind of guy, but I like hybrid environments because if you do need to be home and you have the flexibility and the security to be home and work because you you get those six hour windows from the plumber or whatever. ⁓ You want to be accommodating as much as possible.
and also make sure that people are effective. ⁓ But ultimately when it comes to building products, and this is super, super specific, ⁓ it's not the whole business, right? But I try to relate it to like a restaurant. You know, if you go to a restaurant, can't be really, you can't be hybrid. The accountant's probably not there, right? Whoever's doing that. The sales guy that's creating the vendor relationships for the food distributors and stuff, probably not there.
And things like that, but you who is there the hostess the cooks the waiters, right? And the dynamic of that is the service that you're providing this product you're providing needs to be good and they need to be talking and communicating and if there's all of sudden a big line at the front hostess desk like All right, how can we get through? You know customers faster to help the seating process and so on and that verbal like, you know easy quick verbal communication
tends to make things go faster. So when I relate that with software, ⁓ I like when development teams are sitting with each other because I don't want to necessarily say, hey, I have a question for you, I Slack you, and then it's like, let's get a meeting on a calendar for two hours from now. You effectively just created a two hour buffer of potentially getting something done. That could have been a quick little two second little sidebar chat next to the coffee machine. ⁓
Something like that. So from that perspective, I like it when the cooks in the kitchen are all together and talking and figuring it out and moving it along and then being able to push that out. But that does not mean the salespeople need to be around, right? That does not mean the marketing people need to be around. It's just the producers of the goods or services that are going into the market tend to move faster in office.
Every team is different, every dynamic. That's why I said it's a mindset thing too. ⁓ I think people should work in the environments that they excel in. And that's kind of my take on it. So I am very excited that we have an office. And Zoros had the office already. DNSFilter now has that. And I think there's gonna be some excitement around other DNSFilter employees maybe going, hey, you know what? I can take a Florida trip now. I could do a little vacation.
Mikey Pruitt (33:24)
Yeah.
Brett Cheloff (33:26)
Go to the office during the week and then on the vacation I can go to Clearwater or St. Pete, go to the beach. I think this sounds great. I think a lot of people.
Mikey Pruitt (33:32)
Yeah. Like I haven't been able
to go to the office in six years and like, yeah, I actually think that same way. And I've had conversations with some DNSFilter folks like, are you going to the office? Are you going to get that down to the office? Like it's kind of exciting. It's actually odd, but everybody's like, cool. We have an office now, like a home base somewhere to call home. This is great. So I think you really, the phrase you use, certain teams tend to move faster when they're
like in the same physical space. So keep that in mind. And then ⁓ layering on tools like Zorus and DNSFilter can help you track and maintain security and productivity. So just leave it there. I'm curious, Brett. So you were formerly the CEO of a company and now you're the chief product officer. What type of transition has this been for you personally?
Brett Cheloff
personally, well, I really like not having to deal with the other aspects of the business that are producing a product. ⁓ My passion and what keeps me ticking and gives me all of my energy and fills my battery up so I can pour it onto the team is making something really cool that people in the world use.
I don't know if that's just like the creative nature or whatever it is, but I just obsess over that. know, a lot of people will yell at me that they have X, Y, and Z problems and they say, oh, I'm so sorry for yelling at you. And I'm like, no, this is fantastic. I can hear you. I try to translate why are you so mad right now? And then I'm going to go make something to make you never be mad again. that excites me so much all the time. That's what I care about.
Mikey Pruitt
That's great.
Brett Cheloff
What I don't care about, marketing, sales, like every other aspect of the business, finance, like to me that was all boring. So the CEO portion of all those other aspects that I had to get involved in and whatnot was not exactly my cup of tea. I would say they were almost like energy drainers versus buildup. I obviously get to fill ⁓ into the, ⁓ not too many people like the CEO coming into the product and saying, hey, it's gotta do X, and Z. And you gotta let the teams run. ⁓ And Kate was who, our VP of product at Zorus, who is ⁓ now director of product for DNSFilter. So she's part of the go-forward team and really pioneering the same vision that we had into the organization. I guess what I'm saying is technically I get less responsibility and
way more involvement in the product, know, how the sausage is made. Yeah, so if anything, this is a fantastic transition for me and we'll let Ken do all that other stuff.
Mikey Pruitt
Part that you love.
Yeah, and lucky for us, Ken is really good at that stuff. Also, we love when Ken steps into the product role for like five or 10 minutes and tells us to fix. We love it. Ken, we love it.
Brett Cheloff
Yes he is.
Hahaha
Yeah, so I used to have a CEO, his name is Matt Nockdrob, and we called him the seagull. And so I'm starting to see this a little bit with Ken, just a little bit Ken, I do love you too, but just a little bit, know, seagull flies in, poops everywhere, flies out. And then he's like, wait.
Mikey Pruitt
The funny thing about Ken is he'll be like, I noticed this thing and then he'll be like, man, that is bad.
Brett Cheloff
Yeah, he's super, super involved, but he's so scattered that he can only be that way. So I mean, it makes.
Mikey Pruitt
Yes, CEO duties are nothing to laugh at. And you're like, I'm actually looking forward to not having to do as much of that stuff. That's awesome. So what other type of ⁓ partnerships specifically with like MSPs and channel are you looking forward to kind of initiating now that you're director of product at DNSFilter?
Brett Cheloff
Exactly. Yeah. Focus is good.
Yeah, I mean, for me, guess partnerships from like a vendor to vendor or from us to our MSP ⁓ perspective.
Mikey Pruitt
I think let's start with MSPs. Or actually, no, sorry. Let's start with vendors because we talked about MSPs already, but maybe we can talk about MSPs as well.
Brett Cheloff
Yeah, so I mean, from a vendor perspective, the way that I see it is MSPs use a lot of tools today and they have a lot of vendor relationships. So when vendors play nice with each other and integrate nicely and allow for the MSP to use the tools together seamlessly, that is really important to me. So that way, you know, if they're using us as their DNSFiltering provider, it's very visible through their other tools, that they know that it's set up, they know that it's configured properly, that it's working and so on. This goes along the lines of RMMs, which is kind of like my background. ⁓ And so from that perspective, if we're that highly visible, they know, hey, I'm getting the service that I'm paying for through, you know, whatever it might be.
And so I'm looking forward to building, you know, bigger, better relationships with other RMMs. I'm looking to build bigger, better relationships with automation tools and platforms like Roost, which DNSFilter already has an integration with, but I think there's a lot of opportunity for expansion there. ⁓ And again, that just goes back to my roots of just everything should be automated. ⁓ if you can effectively distribute your, you know, you get a new customer and you can distribute your whole kind of stack of tools to them seamlessly and effortlessly, and then you can properly bill for those so you can collect money and make your margins and build your business. That chain from vendor all the way to that bill that you need to collect needs to be nice and fluid. So I try to watch that and make sure that we are where we can intersect ourselves into these different platforms at different intersections from deployment to billing. That's how I would see it.
Mikey Pruitt
That's very interesting because ⁓ there's a lot of, I guess we would say like there's a lot of wood behind the arrow of getting the one platform to rule them all type of thing. Like this platform or this company has pieces of all of my security stack, all of my RMM, it's all kind of built in together. But that puts you in a position where you're not getting best of breed software in certain circumstances. And I think MSPs are in a better position.
than like say enterprises because they are a bit more nimble in that they can choose the products that they enjoy working with. But there's a caveat, which is what you're talking about, is that they still play nicely with all the other tools that you have to kind of build your own, like, you know, bring your own security stack with you.
Oh, I think I lost him.
Brett's coming back, probably. Let me open up Slack.
There he is, he's back. We're gonna have to work on that internet at the office.
Brett Cheloff
Man, just love to have internet issues.
See, look, even the office, you know, sometimes it just, things don't work. How ironic.
Mikey Pruitt
So that is actually really funny because I wanted to ask you about ⁓ like research and development. So Zorus has access to a lot more resources than you had previously. You have some of the DNSFilter technology, DNSFilter technologists and vice versa. Like DNSFilter now has access to all of the stellar work that Zorus has already put in. What are you looking forward to? Like we kind of have some plans to merge everything together into like a unified front.
But that's like with the existing stuff. What do you think is on the horizon of what is next after that integration is complete or perhaps during the integration?
Brett Cheloff
Yeah, so there's multiple streams that are like happening. The DNSFilter team is much larger than the Zorus team was. ⁓ What's beautiful about this marrying of the two companies is we kept effectively the entire Zorus team. So all of the initiative, all the vision that we have been trying to do as Zorus is going to get integrated in and continue.
So if you've ever seen me on my roadmap webinars and stuff like that, ⁓ all of those things I talked about are still gonna happen. But what's also awesome is the fact that so many other things can also keep happening. So DNSFilter has their own little slices of heaven that are gonna, you know, I don't know yet which ones have been announced, which ones haven't. So I'm not gonna spill any beans on ⁓ the like really cool initiatives already.
Mikey Pruitt
You don't do that.
Brett Cheloff
that have been in flight within the DNSFiltering organization. I'm sure you'll see me on our roadmap webinar that I plan to continue ⁓ announcing some of those things as they get closer. ⁓ But the harmony between what DNSFilter was actively already working on and the harmony of what I refer to as cyber site is gonna make a very nice story, holistic story ⁓ together as that kinda comes to life and together and then comes to market.
I don't believe I'm allowed to talk too much to that yet.
Mikey Pruitt
Not too much yet, but I'm looking forward to it and I'm sure the audience is and I'm curious, like in the customer sense, what are some of the amazing customer stories from Zorus?
Brett Cheloff
Well, some of them got me in trouble. Yeah, that's actually how we said this. Ken said this story on ⁓ and it's probably, in my opinion, the most amazing customer success story you can have. So Ken said this story right at the end of the webinar last week. And effectively how Ken and I met is because I stuck up a comparative page on our website, the Zorus website.
Mikey Pruitt
They always do. They always do.
Brett Cheloff
That compared us with DNSFilter. And we had a customer quote in there that was effectively along the lines of like, know, Zoris doesn't break my internet or something like that. Ironically enough, as my internet breaks during this podcast. But the what what's hilarious about it is Ken and Lauren, Lauren is the inside counsel for the legal department for DNSFilter, sent me a very, very nasty
Mikey Pruitt
legal
Brett Cheloff
⁓ Ceasing to desist order via email, which I happily responded to with all my factual information and the customer testimony that I was like, this is just your ex customer that said it, not me. ⁓ He did not like that. And so he wanted to get on a call and him and I got on a call and we basically became best friends like in step brothers. with it, it was supposed to be a 30 minute call. It lasted like two hours.
⁓ And because of that customer testimonial, we are now in the same team. So I mean, that's a pretty amazing customer testimonial, but kind of cool security based ones are more along the lines of cyber site and incident response. We have several customers that unfortunately people were breached and they didn't really understand how they got breached.
There are EDR tools and XDR, MDR, all those, you know, SOC stuff that it shows you processes and how the processes were talking to each other in this kind of kill chain that it's trying to contain, but it doesn't really give like how did it get here in the first place was a user involved in that. And we were able to see one of them was a malicious intent. He purposely got through and downloaded malicious software.
to then distribute on the network and they were able to see that pattern of that person. Unfortunately, we didn't have the automation to stop him from doing that, but we at least had the data that kind of got the evidence there. And then there was other people that ⁓ links that were on good websites. So for instance, Drive or Dropbox, they're going to files thinking it's safe. And DNSFilter would say, hey, this is
Dropbox, yeah. Yeah, and so, but there's a malicious file hosted there. And so they download it, run it, and so having that data there really was kind of like a savior to them, because then they can look at that and say, okay, we need to block this across the board, and since Zoris has URL filtering, we can block that full URL, even though the domain is safe, that URL would be blocked. ⁓ To help prevent,
Mikey Pruitt
Yeah, drive.google.com totally fine.
Brett Cheloff
any further damage to any of your other customers or to that customer again, right? From somebody else maybe being tricked by the same email that might have gotten through or so on. but yeah, that's.
Mikey Pruitt (47:54)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, like unfortunately there's typically a patient zero, but that does mean that the rest of the customer base gets protected from that same malicious threat.
Brett Cheloff
Yeah, it's impossible to be 100 % coverage. So you gotta put your layers up as best as you can. when, it's not if, it's when an incident response, considering MSPs typically have 100-ish customers, you wanna be able to protect all the other ones from the same damage that might have just happened. And you also wanna minimize the damage as much as possible, like the second you see it, like prevent further escalation.
Mikey Pruitt
Absolutely. And I would like to call out one more time the the origin story of this Zorus DNSFilter union occurred because of essentially legal hot water that you put yourself in, which is like the best origin story ever. Typically, as like nerdy folks, we get into computers for something like a little, you know, in a gray area, sometimes all the way in the gray. But it turns out the union between the two companies occurred because of
Brett Cheloff
Yup. ⁓
Mikey Pruitt
A slightly gray area.
Brett Cheloff
Hahaha
Mikey Pruitt
Well, I'm glad we sent you that cease and desist breath. Welcome to the team. Well, Brett, thank you for joining me today. Any last words for the for the guests and where can people find you online?
Brett Cheloff
Yeah, yeah. Now I'm sitting with you today. Yep.
Yeah, so I'm on LinkedIn. I don't know my handle right off the gate, but I do know it ⁓ should be a public ⁓ thing if you search for my name, Brett Chelloff, C-H-E-L-O-F-F. ⁓ And as far as being able to see me, I try to be as visible as possible in live formats, and that is via the product roadmap webinar. And I highly encourage, if you're watching this, to look out for the links. We'll be sending those out through marketing emails and so on to all partners of ⁓ DNSFilter and Zorus, where you'll get constant live updates from myself and the product organization here at DNSFilter to go over what have we recently released, what are we currently working on, what are we working on next, and take live feedback every single time.
that a level of accountability and visibility and access doesn't really exist a lot anymore in the space for MSPs. And I strive to continue that in as scalable a way as humanly possible as we grow together ⁓ to help benefit the masses. And that's how I'll end it.
Mikey Pruitt
Well, I'm looking forward to it. Thank you, Brett.
Brett Cheloff
Of course. Thank you, Mikey.
Mikey Pruitt
Okay, that was good.
Brett Cheloff
Yeah, other than the internet blip.
Welcome everybody to another episode of DNS Unfiltered. Today I have a very special guest, Brett Cheloff, the new, what is your title now? Chief Product Officer at DNSFilter?
Brett Cheloff
That's good.
Yep, yep, chief product officer. Bingo-Bango right there.
Mikey Pruitt
Awesome. Well, welcome to the show.
Brett Cheloff
Thank you. Really excited to be here.
Mikey Pruitt
I think we should get the big news out of the way the elephant in the room. Brett is now part of DNSFilter. This is awesome. I'm excited. How about yourself?
Brett Cheloff
Very excited. ⁓ It's been a long process, long six months, kind of planning it out and figuring out how we can do it, but ⁓ ended up making it work and really excited to show the whole market what we can do together.
Mikey Pruitt
Very cool. So tell me about the kind of backstory of Zorus. Like what was your role there and like, did you, what were you guys trying to accomplish and are going to continue to accomplish in the near term? And then, you know, the future term looks like a unified front for DNSFilter and Zorus tech, is like the market is going to go crazy, I think. But anyway, we'll start with the beginning, I guess.
Brett Cheloff
Yeah, so I originally came on to Zorus three years ago as the VP of product and engineering and really take over what is the product vision for Zorus and how do we execute on that, deliver it to market. ⁓ Three years ago, it was just strictly a DNSFilter. ⁓ Zorus was trying to do it in a very creative way through what was referred to as a proxy, which can do SSL inspection and so on and expand. ⁓ As I joined the team and tried to harden that kind of effort, we saw some newer creative ways to kind of change that. And then also some really cool ⁓ opportunities to expand on it. So the vision of Zorus kind of changed in the first six months that I was with the organization. And then it expanded more into like an internet protection slash end user behavioral analytics vision. And what's really cool about this deal between DNSFilter and source is that vision gets to come right in alignment with ⁓ DNSFilter in the platform that we're building. And I know we'll touch in on that, but over the months we kept expanding the product. ⁓ I ended up moving into the CEO role for source in, effectively reporting to a board for the first time. That's an experience for me. I'm more of a product guy. I love building and delivering on products. So reporting to a board and kind of taking the business angle was an experience to say the least, but I really enjoyed that growth and that maturity. And I think that brings a really good dynamic to the DNS ⁓ company.
Mikey Pruitt
So let's back up to that pivot kind of for a second. I don't know the backstory of this, so I'm curious. I'm sure the audience is too. What were you seeing in the market that kind of led to that transition between the SSL decryption and more like endpoint focus?
Brett Cheloff
Yeah, so really what happened right after I, well, right before I joined, COVID kind of hit and then changed the entire landscape of work, right? Pretty much everybody went to work from home and that changed the security posture of just about 100 % of the companies on the planet. Why?
because traditionally speaking, you would have an office that you would sit in and all the technology is kind of in that building or multiple buildings. And now all of those people just went home and nobody owns the router at home. Nobody owns like that infrastructure at home. There's so much compromise. You don't own, you know, the front door and who gets access to that house. And so from a security perspective, it was a complete nightmare.
So it's like, okay, how do we shift our focus to making sure that the device that they just brought home, I just moved mine, I should probably not do that. ⁓ The device we just brought home is protected as well as can be. And that's also why we went the angle of user behavioral. Because if someone's in your home and they're supposed to be there, that's fine.
Mikey Pruitt
That's okay.
Brett Cheloff
but they go and sit at your computer and start using your device and that's already logged in, that could potentially be compromised. Someone could be using it when they shouldn't be and that's a bit unsafe as well, as well as owning the internet at home when you don't own the routers and the modems and things like that. So endpoint focus was really where we ⁓ kind of derived because of that exact.
Mikey Pruitt
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense because speaking of like owning the router, the business, the company doesn't own the router for sure. And I would, a lot of times the homeowner don't, don't really even own the router. And some of them don't even know how to access that. Like they're not IT professionals always. And the settings of that router sometimes are not even accessible to them. So yeah, you have to have to like, there's a new paradigm that was like the rest on us. And you, you guys saw that everyone like endpoint is the new, the new game. ⁓
Brett Cheloff
Yep.
Yep. And so we took a heavy investment and I personally feel obviously it's incredibly biased, but it's the best endpoint filtering tool you can use.
Mikey Pruitt
we're going to have arguments. No, I'm just kidding. Just
kidding. We should probably chat about the DNSFilter, Zora strife, which was like, crazily immediately quelled. ⁓ the day you guys joined, like they're like the Zoras and DNSFilter teams are like meshing so well behind the scenes. I'm, I am stunned to be honest, but it's going really well.
Brett Cheloff
Well, it's actually kind of interesting and I'll share this with the community at large. ⁓ cause we're in your Slack now, right? And so since we're in your Slack now, we can see all your previous messages and we, there was definitely some, some fueled, you know, it's good competition is good and, ⁓ really interesting. it's, but I mean, if you were able to be in ours, you'd see the same thing. I mean, we were toe to toe with each other.
⁓ And we're against each other in every way. Your strengths are very complimentary to us and our strengths is incredibly complimentary to you. There's not like a ton of overlap there. And I think that's what makes this kind of the perfect match. And I think the community at large, we just had our webinar, our live webinar, Ken and I last week. And I think that was really, really well received. ⁓ And I do believe that ⁓
You know, the only beneficiaries to this is our entire customer base on both sides coming together.
Mikey Pruitt
Absolutely.
I'll tell a funny story about joining Slack's ⁓ real quick. One of your developers, Brandon Hood. Hey, Brandon. ⁓ So we have a partner portal where I teach some classes to kind of like, this is how the DNSFilter platform works. And you can comment on those. And by commenting, you kind of earn points that you can then trade in for DNSFilter swag. So Brandon, not thinking that...
Brett Cheloff
Hahaha!
Mikey Pruitt
these messages are read often or at all, commented something about my beard in the video. And it was like, this beard is amazing, which it was a compliment. was like, thanks. Like, thank you, Brandon, whoever that is. And then, ⁓ who wasn't that chimed in? It was, ⁓ Kate Europe, the product person at Zora's time. It was like, Brandon, can see these. So we're like, we had this whole devolved into like how amazing, how, what an amazing beard day it was.
Brett Cheloff
Hahaha
Mikey Pruitt
I sent him some swag and wrote, he doesn't know this yet, but maybe he'll get it by the time he sees this. says like beard King, like from the beard King on there. Anyway.
Brett Cheloff
He is going
to love that. I just got off a call with him on it this morning, like right before this, and he was talking about trying to get enough points to get the little car. I guess he can get a car through it. Well, I think he's gonna love that.
Mikey Pruitt
Yeah. So the Zorus and DNSFilter teams are getting along ⁓ soaringly well. That is amazing to see. ⁓ But I am curious about like that. I hate to use this stupid word synergy, but there is a lot of complimentary aspects of both Zorus and DNSFilter. What do you think the future holds for both products being tied together?
Brett Cheloff (12:33)
Yeah, so I mean, the way that I've always viewed DNSFilter being literally the strongest, fastest, anycast network that you can connect to, ⁓ that mixed with the best style of endpoint protection in the sense of what we tried to specialize in of not changing DNS, right? When you don't own the DNS resolver or the network, ⁓
It gets tough to make sure you're keeping people secure without interrupting their internet experience. So those two elements and those two philosophies coming together of being able to own the network when you can own the network, and then also own the device and do it in a way that's not interfering with their internet connectivity is a happy marriage.
right there and that's strictly when I refer to like our filtering alignment and that full like own the entire like chain or the parts you can own. Then on top of that is the you know the end user behavioral analytics that ⁓ Zoros was heavily investing in to help with generative AI attacks, new age social engineering, etc. Where ⁓
Basically people are getting compromised through video, through Zoom videos and voice and phone calls and stuff that sound just like your boss. So you start acting different on your device. We need to try to identify that early. And the best example I always give is when your credit card is being used at a gas station in Texas, but you live in Florida, you're getting pinged from your credit card saying, hey, are you at a gas station in Texas right now? And if you say no,
it shuts off your credit card. That's the same concept Zorus was trying to bring to the table of when it sees that odd behavior on your device, it alerts and tries to, since you're also the filter, you can shut off the internet and still manage that remotely. that's really the key there that I see.
Mikey Pruitt (14:51)
Yeah, that's really good. a protection measure. DNS is really the heartbeat of most companies because if you can't get on the internet, you almost can't do work now because so many apps are in the cloud or at least like on the network somewhere. So DNS is a critical role. It's cool that we were both seeing that as a bigger picture. DNS is ⁓ a great place to add security layers.
Brett Cheloff
yeah.
Mikey Pruitt
And now we get to join forces and do an even better job than either of us could do ⁓ uniquely. And I'm curious, so more on this, like what it means, but specifically what it means for managed service providers. A lot of MSPs are customers. We have a lot of MSP customers for DNSFilter. Xorris is almost solely MSPs, from what I understand. So what is the MSP ⁓ gaining from this union?
Brett Cheloff
Yeah, so my entire background is managed service providers. ⁓ I started as an MSP out of Toledo, Ohio. The MSP's name is Nemesis, still exists. You can look it up, nemesis.com. That's where I originally came from, and I was an automation engineer there. And I obsessed over how do I automate remotely ⁓ engineering tasks to fix devices. I still...obsess about that today. Every aspect of my life I want to automate in some fashion, right? That spun into a product called Lab Tech that we made out of that MSP. We used to call it NEM service. It gave us a competitive edge to other MSPs because we could remotely fix your device much faster than the technician that needed to drive out on site. And then that was acquired by ConnectWise and moved me to Tampa.
Back in 2010 and then I grew lab tech slash what is now referred to as connect wise automate for all the way up until 2022. So from 2004 to 2022, I've been obsessed and entrenched in the MSP space and I understand it very well meeting with lots of MSPs all the time doing the whole growth, the massive growth that connect wise went through between the years of 2010 and 2021. So I think from that perspective, what MSPs are really gaining is a chief product officer that understands them to their core. know, at ConnectWise, we used to say the we are you because ConnectWise is also founded by managed service provider. They have their own MSP, just like Lab Tech was and other products that they invested in. And so I still fundamentally live that way.
You know, I obviously haven't been running an MSP or being a part of an MSP in a long time, but I'm around them all the time and hearing them and hearing their complaints and what they have to deal with. So my design philosophy for products is very centric to how can I enable MSPs for success? ⁓ And I think that's the biggest game for MSPs. I'm not saying that DNSFilter has not done that.
Their product is fantastic. They do have an MSP kind of philosophy with the design. ⁓ With me coming in, it's very much that extra level of attention to ensure that it continues and improves.
Mikey Pruitt
Yeah, this is going to be great for MSPs. I think I've kind of seen, I come from like a DevOps background. My first job at DNSFilter was a DevOps engineer. The first one. So like automation is really at the core of what I do too. Even in now that I'm in marketing, I'm like, how can we like automate a few of these things that I have to do, for example, this podcast. So we have to, you know, package up the video, make some clips. We've got to, you know, get it onto the platforms like YouTube and Spotify and that type of thing. And it's pretty easily automated just clicking here, clicking there. Some of these platforms have APIs. and I've seen like translating that to the MSP space. MSPs in my opinion seem a bit behind in the automation game. And I'm not exactly sure why that is, but I think they are now in the recent past have been really hitting the ground running and like, automation is like a huge differentiator because they can, they can alleviate some of that day-to-day work and get back to what really matters, which is their relationship with their customers. Do you see that too?
Brett Cheloff
Yeah, I mean, I tried to preach that as much as humanly possible through my tenure over the last 20 years, going on 21 years, MSPs are 100 % a client relationship type business. That's how they retain their customers. There's plenty of good MSPs out there. There's plenty of bad ones. And the good ones always end up taking the customers from the bad ones. But why?
What makes them good is their ability to establish a relationship, focus on their on their customers business and help make technology issues vanish. Right. The best MSPs are trying to do more things like QBRs and stuff because they're sick of doing the prove your worth because the good MSPs they're almost invisible to their customer if they don't go there and talk about their business because
Mikey Pruitt
Mm-hmm.
Brett Cheloff
of the automation they put in place and these issues just being fixed, the customer ends up saying, what do you, I pay you a lot of money every month and it goes up when I hire more people. Like, what do I pay you for? You know, like nothing goes wrong. Yeah, nothing goes wrong because exactly. And so they're in this like really weird ⁓ situation like that where like back when I was a part of the MSP nemesis,
Mikey Pruitt
That's why you're paying me.
Brett Cheloff
It was still very much a billable hourly thing. So we were very encouraged to go on site and, you know, charge, but then you're negotiating that bill, which created a negative tension, which is why this managed services and all you can eat models kind of took, you know, effect, but still the manage like that, all you can eat model encourages automation. It encourages less time spent because that's how you become profitable per client that you have. So now.
It's way more focused on the actual customer relationship, making sure you have that and being able to talk to them about their business and how can technology serve them. So you also need to be an expert with all the new stuff. So what's this AI stuff? How do I implement that? And you can help them with those things. ⁓ So yeah, I I preach it every single day. If you're not tracking automation or doing automation, it probably means you're distracted and that distraction can cost you business.
Mikey Pruitt
Absolutely. So the name of the game now is not to not go on site, but not go on site to fix something because that stuff is automated away. Now you're just that ⁓ advisor that the MSP are always striving to be. You have more opportunity to do it with automation.
Brett Cheloff
Exactly. And that's the other kind of angle that we refer to at Zorus, now DNSFilter, as CyberSight. CyberSight is a two-pronged kind of monster. One of them is for threat intelligence during an incident, so your incident response data that you need. The other side of it is business intelligence and being able to go to your customer and say, hey, let me tell you about where time's going in your business.
Let's make sure you're using the right tools. Let's make sure I have visibility of the tools you're using so I can make sure from a security posture you're okay. And start intelligently working on their business with them and that builds the strongest bond you possibly could build and really focus on their business insights instead of just, hey, what can I sell you?
Mikey Pruitt
That's funny. That was actually my next question was kind of focus around No, no, that's great. ⁓ the so the cyber site technology like I guess kind of building on that What do you what are some of the interesting metrics that an MSP can pull out of there?
Brett Cheloff
whoops.
So the metrics that CyberSight can pull, so I'll do like from a business insight standpoint, is that what you're asking, Mikey? Or, okay, yeah, so the metrics it can pull is ⁓ basically all time based on where is everybody in your company kind of spending their time? Is it in Excel? Is it in HubSpot? Is it in like,
Mikey Pruitt
Yeah, let's start there.
Brett Cheloff
Whether it's thick client activity or web activity, you can know these things. So there's a lot of use cases for this. For instance, let's say HubSpot. HubSpot charges per user slash data contacts in there. Okay, well, we see there's only five users in your entire company that actively use HubSpot, but you're paying for as though you had 10, 15, whatever it might be.
let's lower your license count for that. Let's bring it down to help save you some money because these are the only five people that actively use it. So you got a lot of unnecessary licensing. You can do that on any licensable product. I'm just using one as an example. The other element that I like to bring up a lot is around just time on social media. You know, this is more of a productivity play, but ⁓ you know, you have 15 employees spending
You know, 127 hours a month in Facebook. You know, do you want to put that time back in your business and maybe as part of your filtering policy, we say, hey, you know what, social media needs to be restricted to just the marketing team. Let's let them through, everybody else like, hey, come on, this, gotta slow down. So that's putting a hundred, it's quantifiable amount of time back into the company, back into the,
the interests of the business and kind of driving that. ⁓ And then, I mean, so those are, there's training examples of this. know, hey, you have 15 people using Excel. You know, is there any Excel training that we could do to help optimize that time? Maybe they're taking too much time in Excel and that's not your expectation. Your expectation is we should be using this other tool. ⁓ Hey, you got five people in Slack when...
We're clearly selling you and distributing Microsoft Teams. Why is there so much slack going on in here? Would you like us to block slack for you so that people migrate to the proper tool being used? Stuff like that. Yes, yes it is.
Mikey Pruitt
That's called shadow IT. So I'm
asking for a friend, also in the marketing department, just a friend, say this person when ⁓ DNSFilter fully incorporates the source agent, can track time on a site. I don't have the, sorry, if my friend doesn't have the LinkedIn tab active, does that count against the time?
Brett Cheloff
Hahaha
No, the only time that counts is the actual, like for instance right now, it would be saying I'm on this platform doing ⁓ what we refer to as streaming, so streaming activities. ⁓ And that's normally like in the background, ⁓ when it's streaming it'll say hey, this is streaming, this person's streaming, but in the foreground what they're actively doing is Excel. So let's pretend you're on a lot of Zoom calls.
Mikey Pruitt
OK, good.
Brett Cheloff
⁓ It's not just gonna say, ⁓ you're on Zoom calls. If you're working and you're trying to like do two things at once and you're on a Zoom call and you're using Excel, you're gonna see them overlapping and you're kind of like a time. So like it's your actual activity. So a lot of people at work love to listen to music, love to put up YouTube and just let it roll on another screen, right? I mean, it's not actually making you not work. It's kind of like that background noise that some people just like to have.
And every once in a while peer at it and check it out and then go back to what they were doing. It's a completely normal model. So the way that we look at that is very much a, they're actively working in Excel. They have YouTube up, but they're actively working. But for security purposes, it's incredibly important. This goes to the incident response side of what cyber site is supposed to do is if an event happens and it gets triggered on your device, the
Data that's missing in the market today, ⁓ at least for the managed services market, is what was the user doing at that time, leading up to, during, and after that, very specifically, right? And what other products can't do from a filtering standpoint, DNS typically is just the domain. Our product gives you the entire URL. So you know the exact thing.
the exact page they were looking at or the exact URL they clicked that downloaded the file and now your EDR or XDR or whatever is alarming about this file, ⁓ post download, you know that the user actually clicked on that thing and it got through. ⁓ That's where it originated from. This is what the user was doing. Okay, we can see that, blah, blah, blah, blah. Or if it's malicious intent, which is even worse, right? If you have someone internally into the business with privileged access,
you now have all that data necessary from a legal standpoint to say, this is what the user did and report that as you need.
Mikey Pruitt
That's really cool. So you can track left and right of boom and just see exactly what happened and use it in your remediation. That's awesome. And my friend. Gotcha. But in my friend won't be in trouble for looking at LinkedIn most of the day.
Brett Cheloff
Exactly. the user context.
No, I heavily encourage away from productivity talks or the getting someone fired talk. I really hate that. Unfortunately, there are managers, cetera, and business owners out there that will 100 % use the data in whatever way they want to use it. ⁓ That is not how we design the product or ⁓ what have you, but it is what it is.
Mikey Pruitt
So I had a few like kind of questions outlined, but I, want to pivot just a little bit into ⁓ now DNSFilter is like a hybrid workspace because Zorus, the Zorus team has an office in Tampa and you, we're kind of talking about, we're dancing around this hybrid work, work from home system that we're all kind of currently in. I'm curious, what are your thoughts on work from home and all that stuff?
Brett Cheloff (30:35)
Yeah, I mean, I think it's a mindset. ⁓ I think from my perspective, work from home. I personally like hybrid. I'm a 100 % in the office kind of guy, but I like hybrid environments because if you do need to be home and you have the flexibility and the security to be home and work because you you get those six hour windows from the plumber or whatever. ⁓ You want to be accommodating as much as possible.
and also make sure that people are effective. ⁓ But ultimately when it comes to building products, and this is super, super specific, ⁓ it's not the whole business, right? But I try to relate it to like a restaurant. You know, if you go to a restaurant, can't be really, you can't be hybrid. The accountant's probably not there, right? Whoever's doing that. The sales guy that's creating the vendor relationships for the food distributors and stuff, probably not there.
And things like that, but you who is there the hostess the cooks the waiters, right? And the dynamic of that is the service that you're providing this product you're providing needs to be good and they need to be talking and communicating and if there's all of sudden a big line at the front hostess desk like All right, how can we get through? You know customers faster to help the seating process and so on and that verbal like, you know easy quick verbal communication
tends to make things go faster. So when I relate that with software, ⁓ I like when development teams are sitting with each other because I don't want to necessarily say, hey, I have a question for you, I Slack you, and then it's like, let's get a meeting on a calendar for two hours from now. You effectively just created a two hour buffer of potentially getting something done. That could have been a quick little two second little sidebar chat next to the coffee machine. ⁓
Something like that. So from that perspective, I like it when the cooks in the kitchen are all together and talking and figuring it out and moving it along and then being able to push that out. But that does not mean the salespeople need to be around, right? That does not mean the marketing people need to be around. It's just the producers of the goods or services that are going into the market tend to move faster in office.
Every team is different, every dynamic. That's why I said it's a mindset thing too. ⁓ I think people should work in the environments that they excel in. And that's kind of my take on it. So I am very excited that we have an office. And Zoros had the office already. DNSFilter now has that. And I think there's gonna be some excitement around other DNSFilter employees maybe going, hey, you know what? I can take a Florida trip now. I could do a little vacation.
Mikey Pruitt (33:24)
Yeah.
Brett Cheloff (33:26)
Go to the office during the week and then on the vacation I can go to Clearwater or St. Pete, go to the beach. I think this sounds great. I think a lot of people.
Mikey Pruitt (33:32)
Yeah. Like I haven't been able
to go to the office in six years and like, yeah, I actually think that same way. And I've had conversations with some DNSFilter folks like, are you going to the office? Are you going to get that down to the office? Like it's kind of exciting. It's actually odd, but everybody's like, cool. We have an office now, like a home base somewhere to call home. This is great. So I think you really, the phrase you use, certain teams tend to move faster when they're
like in the same physical space. So keep that in mind. And then ⁓ layering on tools like Zorus and DNSFilter can help you track and maintain security and productivity. So just leave it there. I'm curious, Brett. So you were formerly the CEO of a company and now you're the chief product officer. What type of transition has this been for you personally?
Brett Cheloff
personally, well, I really like not having to deal with the other aspects of the business that are producing a product. ⁓ My passion and what keeps me ticking and gives me all of my energy and fills my battery up so I can pour it onto the team is making something really cool that people in the world use.
I don't know if that's just like the creative nature or whatever it is, but I just obsess over that. know, a lot of people will yell at me that they have X, Y, and Z problems and they say, oh, I'm so sorry for yelling at you. And I'm like, no, this is fantastic. I can hear you. I try to translate why are you so mad right now? And then I'm going to go make something to make you never be mad again. that excites me so much all the time. That's what I care about.
Mikey Pruitt
That's great.
Brett Cheloff
What I don't care about, marketing, sales, like every other aspect of the business, finance, like to me that was all boring. So the CEO portion of all those other aspects that I had to get involved in and whatnot was not exactly my cup of tea. I would say they were almost like energy drainers versus buildup. I obviously get to fill ⁓ into the, ⁓ not too many people like the CEO coming into the product and saying, hey, it's gotta do X, and Z. And you gotta let the teams run. ⁓ And Kate was who, our VP of product at Zorus, who is ⁓ now director of product for DNSFilter. So she's part of the go-forward team and really pioneering the same vision that we had into the organization. I guess what I'm saying is technically I get less responsibility and
way more involvement in the product, know, how the sausage is made. Yeah, so if anything, this is a fantastic transition for me and we'll let Ken do all that other stuff.
Mikey Pruitt
Part that you love.
Yeah, and lucky for us, Ken is really good at that stuff. Also, we love when Ken steps into the product role for like five or 10 minutes and tells us to fix. We love it. Ken, we love it.
Brett Cheloff
Yes he is.
Hahaha
Yeah, so I used to have a CEO, his name is Matt Nockdrob, and we called him the seagull. And so I'm starting to see this a little bit with Ken, just a little bit Ken, I do love you too, but just a little bit, know, seagull flies in, poops everywhere, flies out. And then he's like, wait.
Mikey Pruitt
The funny thing about Ken is he'll be like, I noticed this thing and then he'll be like, man, that is bad.
Brett Cheloff
Yeah, he's super, super involved, but he's so scattered that he can only be that way. So I mean, it makes.
Mikey Pruitt
Yes, CEO duties are nothing to laugh at. And you're like, I'm actually looking forward to not having to do as much of that stuff. That's awesome. So what other type of ⁓ partnerships specifically with like MSPs and channel are you looking forward to kind of initiating now that you're director of product at DNSFilter?
Brett Cheloff
Exactly. Yeah. Focus is good.
Yeah, I mean, for me, guess partnerships from like a vendor to vendor or from us to our MSP ⁓ perspective.
Mikey Pruitt
I think let's start with MSPs. Or actually, no, sorry. Let's start with vendors because we talked about MSPs already, but maybe we can talk about MSPs as well.
Brett Cheloff
Yeah, so I mean, from a vendor perspective, the way that I see it is MSPs use a lot of tools today and they have a lot of vendor relationships. So when vendors play nice with each other and integrate nicely and allow for the MSP to use the tools together seamlessly, that is really important to me. So that way, you know, if they're using us as their DNSFiltering provider, it's very visible through their other tools, that they know that it's set up, they know that it's configured properly, that it's working and so on. This goes along the lines of RMMs, which is kind of like my background. ⁓ And so from that perspective, if we're that highly visible, they know, hey, I'm getting the service that I'm paying for through, you know, whatever it might be.
And so I'm looking forward to building, you know, bigger, better relationships with other RMMs. I'm looking to build bigger, better relationships with automation tools and platforms like Roost, which DNSFilter already has an integration with, but I think there's a lot of opportunity for expansion there. ⁓ And again, that just goes back to my roots of just everything should be automated. ⁓ if you can effectively distribute your, you know, you get a new customer and you can distribute your whole kind of stack of tools to them seamlessly and effortlessly, and then you can properly bill for those so you can collect money and make your margins and build your business. That chain from vendor all the way to that bill that you need to collect needs to be nice and fluid. So I try to watch that and make sure that we are where we can intersect ourselves into these different platforms at different intersections from deployment to billing. That's how I would see it.
Mikey Pruitt
That's very interesting because ⁓ there's a lot of, I guess we would say like there's a lot of wood behind the arrow of getting the one platform to rule them all type of thing. Like this platform or this company has pieces of all of my security stack, all of my RMM, it's all kind of built in together. But that puts you in a position where you're not getting best of breed software in certain circumstances. And I think MSPs are in a better position.
than like say enterprises because they are a bit more nimble in that they can choose the products that they enjoy working with. But there's a caveat, which is what you're talking about, is that they still play nicely with all the other tools that you have to kind of build your own, like, you know, bring your own security stack with you.
Oh, I think I lost him.
Brett's coming back, probably. Let me open up Slack.
There he is, he's back. We're gonna have to work on that internet at the office.
Brett Cheloff
Man, just love to have internet issues.
See, look, even the office, you know, sometimes it just, things don't work. How ironic.
Mikey Pruitt
So that is actually really funny because I wanted to ask you about ⁓ like research and development. So Zorus has access to a lot more resources than you had previously. You have some of the DNSFilter technology, DNSFilter technologists and vice versa. Like DNSFilter now has access to all of the stellar work that Zorus has already put in. What are you looking forward to? Like we kind of have some plans to merge everything together into like a unified front.
But that's like with the existing stuff. What do you think is on the horizon of what is next after that integration is complete or perhaps during the integration?
Brett Cheloff
Yeah, so there's multiple streams that are like happening. The DNSFilter team is much larger than the Zorus team was. ⁓ What's beautiful about this marrying of the two companies is we kept effectively the entire Zorus team. So all of the initiative, all the vision that we have been trying to do as Zorus is going to get integrated in and continue.
So if you've ever seen me on my roadmap webinars and stuff like that, ⁓ all of those things I talked about are still gonna happen. But what's also awesome is the fact that so many other things can also keep happening. So DNSFilter has their own little slices of heaven that are gonna, you know, I don't know yet which ones have been announced, which ones haven't. So I'm not gonna spill any beans on ⁓ the like really cool initiatives already.
Mikey Pruitt
You don't do that.
Brett Cheloff
that have been in flight within the DNSFiltering organization. I'm sure you'll see me on our roadmap webinar that I plan to continue ⁓ announcing some of those things as they get closer. ⁓ But the harmony between what DNSFilter was actively already working on and the harmony of what I refer to as cyber site is gonna make a very nice story, holistic story ⁓ together as that kinda comes to life and together and then comes to market.
I don't believe I'm allowed to talk too much to that yet.
Mikey Pruitt
Not too much yet, but I'm looking forward to it and I'm sure the audience is and I'm curious, like in the customer sense, what are some of the amazing customer stories from Zorus?
Brett Cheloff
Well, some of them got me in trouble. Yeah, that's actually how we said this. Ken said this story on ⁓ and it's probably, in my opinion, the most amazing customer success story you can have. So Ken said this story right at the end of the webinar last week. And effectively how Ken and I met is because I stuck up a comparative page on our website, the Zorus website.
Mikey Pruitt
They always do. They always do.
Brett Cheloff
That compared us with DNSFilter. And we had a customer quote in there that was effectively along the lines of like, know, Zoris doesn't break my internet or something like that. Ironically enough, as my internet breaks during this podcast. But the what what's hilarious about it is Ken and Lauren, Lauren is the inside counsel for the legal department for DNSFilter, sent me a very, very nasty
Mikey Pruitt
legal
Brett Cheloff
⁓ Ceasing to desist order via email, which I happily responded to with all my factual information and the customer testimony that I was like, this is just your ex customer that said it, not me. ⁓ He did not like that. And so he wanted to get on a call and him and I got on a call and we basically became best friends like in step brothers. with it, it was supposed to be a 30 minute call. It lasted like two hours.
⁓ And because of that customer testimonial, we are now in the same team. So I mean, that's a pretty amazing customer testimonial, but kind of cool security based ones are more along the lines of cyber site and incident response. We have several customers that unfortunately people were breached and they didn't really understand how they got breached.
There are EDR tools and XDR, MDR, all those, you know, SOC stuff that it shows you processes and how the processes were talking to each other in this kind of kill chain that it's trying to contain, but it doesn't really give like how did it get here in the first place was a user involved in that. And we were able to see one of them was a malicious intent. He purposely got through and downloaded malicious software.
to then distribute on the network and they were able to see that pattern of that person. Unfortunately, we didn't have the automation to stop him from doing that, but we at least had the data that kind of got the evidence there. And then there was other people that ⁓ links that were on good websites. So for instance, Drive or Dropbox, they're going to files thinking it's safe. And DNSFilter would say, hey, this is
Dropbox, yeah. Yeah, and so, but there's a malicious file hosted there. And so they download it, run it, and so having that data there really was kind of like a savior to them, because then they can look at that and say, okay, we need to block this across the board, and since Zoris has URL filtering, we can block that full URL, even though the domain is safe, that URL would be blocked. ⁓ To help prevent,
Mikey Pruitt
Yeah, drive.google.com totally fine.
Brett Cheloff
any further damage to any of your other customers or to that customer again, right? From somebody else maybe being tricked by the same email that might have gotten through or so on. but yeah, that's.
Mikey Pruitt (47:54)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, like unfortunately there's typically a patient zero, but that does mean that the rest of the customer base gets protected from that same malicious threat.
Brett Cheloff
Yeah, it's impossible to be 100 % coverage. So you gotta put your layers up as best as you can. when, it's not if, it's when an incident response, considering MSPs typically have 100-ish customers, you wanna be able to protect all the other ones from the same damage that might have just happened. And you also wanna minimize the damage as much as possible, like the second you see it, like prevent further escalation.
Mikey Pruitt
Absolutely. And I would like to call out one more time the the origin story of this Zorus DNSFilter union occurred because of essentially legal hot water that you put yourself in, which is like the best origin story ever. Typically, as like nerdy folks, we get into computers for something like a little, you know, in a gray area, sometimes all the way in the gray. But it turns out the union between the two companies occurred because of
Brett Cheloff
Yup. ⁓
Mikey Pruitt
A slightly gray area.
Brett Cheloff
Hahaha
Mikey Pruitt
Well, I'm glad we sent you that cease and desist breath. Welcome to the team. Well, Brett, thank you for joining me today. Any last words for the for the guests and where can people find you online?
Brett Cheloff
Yeah, yeah. Now I'm sitting with you today. Yep.
Yeah, so I'm on LinkedIn. I don't know my handle right off the gate, but I do know it ⁓ should be a public ⁓ thing if you search for my name, Brett Chelloff, C-H-E-L-O-F-F. ⁓ And as far as being able to see me, I try to be as visible as possible in live formats, and that is via the product roadmap webinar. And I highly encourage, if you're watching this, to look out for the links. We'll be sending those out through marketing emails and so on to all partners of ⁓ DNSFilter and Zorus, where you'll get constant live updates from myself and the product organization here at DNSFilter to go over what have we recently released, what are we currently working on, what are we working on next, and take live feedback every single time.
that a level of accountability and visibility and access doesn't really exist a lot anymore in the space for MSPs. And I strive to continue that in as scalable a way as humanly possible as we grow together ⁓ to help benefit the masses. And that's how I'll end it.
Mikey Pruitt
Well, I'm looking forward to it. Thank you, Brett.
Brett Cheloff
Of course. Thank you, Mikey.
Mikey Pruitt
Okay, that was good.
Brett Cheloff
Yeah, other than the internet blip.