Customer feedback is critical to the roadmap for Airlock Digital’s allowlisting solution and the inaugural Airlock Customer Summit in Sydney marked the start of a new phase of customer engagement, event attendees heard this week.
Airlock Digital Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder, David Cottingham, used the event to emphasise the importance of collaboration between customers and the Airlock Digital team, and reminded attendees that the Airlock allowlisting solution was founded from the lived experience of allowlisting practitioners.
The decade-old business’s primary driver continues to be solving the challenge of building software that does the heavy lifting for customers, and its team continues to introduce new features that reduce the friction of allowlisting in customer environments.
David noted that Airlock Digital had delivered enormous growth over the past few years, and that our team had put in a huge amount of work to ensure product performance, regardless of size. Enabling customers to access the product, complete allowlisting tasks and leave quickly, and continuing to improve workflows, remain key priorities
Summit attendees heard a detailed breakdown of the Airlock roadmap, including plans for full and point releases, and the features planned for each. David’s presentation noted that Airlock Digital was investing heavily in resources to grow and deliver on plans and work streams across the business.
These plans included taking a more proactive stance to engaging with customers, including more comprehensive newsletters and product announcements; improvements to the Airlock customer portal; and self-service support and training.
Airlock also plans to improve how feedback is received, processed and filtered through the company to inform product development, support, customer success and other functions.
Customer comments included feedback on communications around bugs and known problems, and a question as to how Airlock attracted and retained quality people to deliver on its business plans. David pointed out that the business had maintained extremely good retention levels and had been designed around a remote model with team members based in various locations in Australia, the Asia-Pacific and North America.
Responding to a customer comment, David also outlined the comprehensive review, audit and analysis processes Airlock Digital applies to manage software supply chain risk, pointing out also the company’s commitment to designing software in a way that minimises risk.
Following a break, Niko Bielovich, Airlock Digital Chief Operating Officer, moderated a highly entertaining customer Q&A session that covered issues such as the length of time typically needed to move from audit to enforcement within Airlock; the role Airlock plays in helping organisations implement the Essential Eight mitigation strategies for application control; how organisations applied allowlisting to development teams; the crucial role played by partners in the implementation of allowlisting and the role of user behaviour change in ensuring the success of cyber security initiatives.
The session then moved into a Q&A moderated by Glenn Mahney, Head of Sales, Airlock Digital, who pointed out that the Australian market was the most mature for application control and security uplift, driven largely by Essential Eight compliance.
The session revealed that customers had assigned management of Airlock to different teams, including infrastructure operations and cyber security, but effective alignment across the business, processes and all affected teams was key to success.
Glenn touched on the fact that Airlock was not the only security solution used to provide defense in depth to customers’ technology stacks and was typically used with endpoint detection and response and other products. A customer pointed out that a singular focus on allowlisting was crucial to Airlock’s success, and Glenn noted that while Airlock had solved allowlisting as a process problem and a simplified outcome, allowlisting itself was not easy and tool selection was critical.
He noted that Airlock’s benefits extended beyond allowlisting to areas such as enforcement of change control and uncovering shadow IT.
The discussion then turned to the importance of change management, including a communication strategy to secure buy-in from executives, business units and team members more generally, including the role of allowlisting champions within teams in accelerating deployment.
Customers also shared strategies for allowlisting exceptions, with some issuing one-time pads through teams or engineers and others moving users who require exemptions from enforcement back into audit mode. The discussion also touched on how customers used blocklisting, the role of code signing and how customers managed allowlisting on development endpoints.
The session wrapped with David emphasising Airlock Digital’s strategy of ensuring sustainable growth based on customer success.
Airlock Digital Customer Success Manager Lauren Murch pointed customers to the feedback portal within the product, which is reviewed regularly, as a key channel to provide comments and suggestions for improvements.
Head of Customer Success, Renee Rooney, concluded the session by emphasising that the customer was the voice of continuous improvement within Airlock Digital.
Watch out for more customer engagement initiatives from Airlock Digital. For more information about us and our allowlisting and application control product.
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