Jim LaRoe Podcast Transcript
Jim LaRoe joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive podcast.
Welcome to the Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Jim LaRoe. Jim LaRoe is Ian’s dynamic leader with a special combination of skills, experience, and insight that has driven Symphions success since inception to the world’s leader in print fleet cybersecurity. Jim is a Rice University engineer, accomplished trial lawyer, and repeat successful entrepreneur.
Symphion, founded in 1999 is based in Dallas, Texas, is a software and services company specializing in print fleet cybersecurity. Its flagship offering print fleet. Cybersecurity as a service is a fully managed vendor agnostic solution. Designed to secure one of the most overlooked and vulnerable segments of the network printers.
Well, good afternoon, Jim. Welcome to the show.
Jim LaRoe: Hey, Brian, how you doing today?
Brian Thomas: Amazing, my friend. I appreciate it. And jumping on a podcast with me today is one of my favorite things in the world to do, and you’re just hailing outta Dallas, Texas, so you’re just south of me. We’re in the same time zone. But Jim, if we could, let’s jump into your first question.
You have a rare combination of skills engineer, trial, lawyer, and entrepreneur. How have these diverse experiences shaped your leadership style approach and growth at Symphion?
Jim LaRoe: I think they absolutely have in all aspects of it. You know, that our approach at simply, I can be summarized with really three things.
Uh, we have a relentless work ethic and that kind of maps to the successful trial lawyer. You know, those guys, if they slack off, they lose and they’ll get paid. So that aspect of it draws from there the. We focus on listening to customers and continual innovation. You know, I’ve been trained as an engineer.
I come from a family of professional engineers, and I’ve worked with some of the top in the world. So at Symphion, our technical leadership and technical abilities are really our foundation and they’re unmatched. We have the, I. Smartest engineers on the planet in this space. And you know, really a third thing about our approach that kind of maps to me is our focus on excellence in customer service and delivering value at all times.
And those are really key entrepreneurial traits that you know you gotta have for a successful business. You asked me about growth. We hire smart, like-minded, apprentice them and to the Symphion way, and then really empower them to contribute and grow their careers.
Brian Thomas: Thank you so much. I appreciate that. And you’re absolutely right.
I’ll highlight a couple things that I thought were interesting, that relentless work ethic obviously comes being a trial lawyer. I can only imagine the stress going into that, but having that background in engineering, you have a strong background within your family and that has also helped. What I heard is you’re listening to customers, customer service obviously, but that helps you continue to improve and innovate.
Around your platform, so I really appreciate that. Jim. Print Fleet Cybersecurity is often overlooked in enterprise security strategies. What makes printers such a vulnerable attack vector, and why do you think they’ve been neglected for so long?
Jim LaRoe: Oh, why are they vulnerable? That’s a big question, but it’s a combination of three things.
The, the state of the devices themselves sitting out on the network, you know, they account for 20 to 30% of the endpoints on everybody’s network. The lack of awareness of the risks that the businesses that depend on them have, and. Exponential growth of the cyber crime industry. Printers are really complex business machines.
It’s not just a printer anymore. You know, for 40 years the manufacturers have all competed across the world with, uh, adding features and they’ve got incredible from the camera to the. Document sorter. They’ve laid incredible business enabling features on top of it with multiple servers built in like a web server, an email server, a fax server, an FTP server that’s downloaded and uploading software, limitless communication protocols built in a huge hard drive.
They transmit and process and store our most sensitive data, and they touch these other systems in our businesses that are, you know, really essential that with stored credentials to those systems that are like our email and file server and credential server. But the printers, and we’ve been doing this a while, we, they’re on the corporate networks un hardened, sitting at factory defaults.
Unprotected unmonitored and unpatched for the most part. Sitting out in, like in healthcare, sitting out in the middle of the hospital with complete physical access and, and not visible, they’re really not being accounted for. You take that situation and put it in today’s cyber crime reality, and it’s just a recipe for disaster wanting to happen.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely. And coming from operations technology background for many years working in healthcare, I see a lot of that. Obviously, there’s a lot more sensitivity around printers over the last decade and a half, the way it stores PHI and that sort of thing. But I wanna highlight those three points. You know, you talked about the state of the devices, that 20 to 30% of your enterprise endpoints are printers, which that’s a big number, right?
Then the lack of awareness, obviously, of the vulnerability of these devices just by the general staff, even in the traditional IT shops, right? And then the exponential growth of the cybercrime industry has really made this just really another target for them to go after. So I appreciate you sharing all that.
Jim LaRoe: You asked me one thing I didn’t answer you about why they’ve been neglected, do you think. So they’ve grown up largely in supply chain and procurement, especially in healthcare and outside of it, you know, and is so, no one’s really owned printer security in the, especially in healthcare industry, there hasn’t been a line item for it.
So it’s, that’s contributed to the lack of understanding of the extreme risks involves and how to eliminate those too. We’re out here educating folks. That’s why we’re talking to guys like you to bring this to the front of, uh, thought, you know, to help prioritize this risk.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely, and I appreciate that.
That’s such a big deal these days. Jim, Symphion’s Print Fleet Cybersecurity as a service is positioned as a fully managed vendor agnostic solution. Can you explain what that means in practical terms for IT teams and CISOs, especially those working within healthcare?
Jim LaRoe: Absolutely. So it’s a service like electrical service to your house, but our service protects print fleets for customers.
That’s all the printers that make up their, their printer endpoints, and they don’t have any operational lift to do that. We do it all for them, and we do it all for, uh, an affordable fee that includes the licensing of our software and our trained professionals to operate it. As a service. So like healthcare systems, they’re our biggest focus.
Uh, we’ve got customers with 30,000 devices in their fleet. Printers are mission critical for that patient care for, you know, departments like admissions, discharge, uh, ER, pharmacy labs. And they’re throughout hospitals, even after the adoption of, of electronic medical record systems. Yet these companies that we see, they’re gambling with no approach or dated ineffective approaches to addressing this risk.
And printers really, even though they’re mission critical and they handle. The most sensitive, like you were talking about EFI and regulated data. They aren’t priorities. They haven’t made them priorities, you know, even though they’re really valuable to criminals. So a lot of them that we’re seeing now, especially in healthcare, it’s like, you know, they’ve gotta get hacked before they find Jesus in jail, so to speak, like we say here in Texas.
But. You know, so we’re out there educating and, and trying to help them protect. This is a, a turnkey solution. It, it solves the problem Firm takes their lift off and is a very economical solution to get it done at the highest level.
Brian Thomas: Thank you again. Really appreciate that having that service, right? You talked about your service protects print fleets, a hundred percent hands off for the customer, and it’s just a low cost, which everybody likes, kind of outta sight, outta mind knowing that that’s taken care of.
But many healthcare systems don’t have any strategy for protecting these endpoints, and I’m glad, as you mentioned, you’re continuing to educate and protect your customers, and I think that’s so, so important. Jim, the last question of the day, what advice do you have for enterprise leaders trying to build a more holistic cybersecurity strategy?
That doesn’t overlook physical or legacy infrastructure like printers?
Jim LaRoe: Well, the short answer is kind of self-serving. If they can contact us, give us a call. We do briefings all day, every day across all the US time zones. We listen, provide guidance. It’s no charge. It takes about 45 minutes. We hear about their current challenges and goals, discuss the available options, the pros and cons, the approximate cost associated, and answer any questions and, you know, we can point ’em in the right direction, even if it’s not us, you know, or not us now.
And you know, another thing that they could do is for the ones having trouble that, you know, most information security folks, they know, uh, that they have this risk out there. But they may have trouble getting buy-in. So we’re offering, we’re launching in August a one-time electronic cybersecurity assessment for all, or a portion of customers fleets.
It’s a, it’s a paid gig ’cause we’ve got a pretty heavy lift up front. But it’ll have the proof, you know, of their exposure for any non-believers that they have inside the company. And, and we’re offsetting that cost against the full program too. So maybe you’ll have me back to talk about that in the future.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely. I really appreciate that. The big thing I took away from that is obviously, you know, people can reach out to you and get some amazing but free education. And again, what I really liked is providing that information at no cost. No matter where they shop, no matter what they decide, they walk away armed with some really good information from you.
And I think that’s the best way really, to build that tribe, that community around what you’re trying to do. And obviously in the end, you’ll have customers come your way. So I appreciate that. Jim, it was such a pleasure having you on today, and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Jim LaRoe: Brian, thank you so much for having me today.
Thank you.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Jim LaRoe Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s Podcast Page.
