Oktane19: How Secure Collaboration Powers Television Hits

Bryan Mann: So, again, thanks for joining us today. My name is Bryan Mann, I'm head of enterprise architecture and a principal architect at Dropbox. So I've been at Dropbox for about four years, which for our company is quite a long time. Prior to that I was at General Electric where I was chief enterprise architect of our security and enterprise architecture group. Crazy company, big wild processes. The scale was pretty amazing, but lots of fun. Before that at Cisco doing various things in the desktop and client space. And then prior to that a long stint at Micron.

Bryan Mann: So, I come to you as a 20 plus year veteran in IT. Somebody that has been in your shoes, has implemented lots of different technology. When I was at General Electric, I actually implemented Box. Now I'm happy to be at Dropbox, a company that everybody loves to use. So it's been a fun journey so far.

Bryan Mann: So I think everybody is familiar with the collaboration space today. And as you look at how collaboration is working in the enterprise, everybody is familiar with the masses of tools that are out there. You've got lots of tools about email and communication, you know, is somebody pinging you on Slack or GChat or iMessage and you are just confused about where to go for things. And it's creating this weird environment for lots of workers where they're just confused and their joy level, as we call it, is declining rapidly because they're just confused about where to go to get their tools to actually do productive work and not necessarily the work about work, right? Trying to figure out how to get functional things done. And I think more and more of what we see is that the collaboration that is happening is very distributed. It's not just happening within the enterprise, but it's often happening out of the enterprise as well where you're working with partners and you're working with people that, from an identity perspective, may not be part of your organization. And how do you merge those people in or bring them into your organization in a good way, a secure way, to bring in the that collaboration.

Bryan Mann: And the tool set and the proliferation of that is not helping either. If you look at most enterprises, there's 30 plus or so cloud applications. How many of you are set on a cloud first journey and trying to implement cloud solutions? Yep. Good. That's a great thing in our eyes, but also I think from a security perspective it's a great thing as well.

Bryan Mann: In the past where I was at other companies and we were starting to implement cloud solutions, we actually look at that as a security control. There's lots of different things that you can do with SAS applications to have more fine grained controls than what you actually had for your on premise enterprise applications: the legacy stuff, the file servers, etc.

Bryan Mann: So, it's actually a good thing, but it's also a challenge for end users to understand, you know, that shift from, I used to have this map drive of where all my content was stored to now how it's represented in a cloud solution, or how communication is happening with things like Slack.

Bryan Mann: So Dropbox has been around for about 12 years and you probably all know it as that consumer brand that was a great place to store your pictures and share your cat photos and that sort of thing. Well we've actually had a business product for about five years. It's surprising to still here that people don't know that we have a business product. How many of you were unaware that we had a business product? Okay, a couple of hands. So maybe we need to improve our marketing, but I think overall we built a great product that has a lot of the great controls that enterprises need to make it an enterprise class solution, but still keep the simplicity and ease of use that people were used to on the consumer side. I think that's one of the great things about Dropbox is that people love to use the product. It always really worked well. And now we've added in the administrative controls to help provide that enterprise grade solution.

Bryan Mann: It's funny, as you walk around the vendor hall and look at the various placards and banners that are behind the booths, I've seen probably two or three different slides or placards like this that have that company in the center where they feel that everything is swarming around that organization and how collaboration is done. But I think what this really represents is that the SAS environment is a mesh of applications that are all working together somewhat. There's still improvements that can be made but really it's that fabric that is going to help push collaboration to the next level and how we actually can connect with those other applications, surface things like messages into other platforms, surface things like content into other platforms to really give this fabric the best feel for the user.

Bryan Mann: Now Dropbox, like, lots of companies has their zen slogan line. And I think that that ... This is ours, that we want to create a more enlightened way of working. Now that's going to apply differently for lots of different organizations and how they implement their solutions, how their workflows are driven. You know, I think a lot of organizations are moving into a mode where it used to be the IT administrator of the IT folks that were driving how collaboration worked, but now it is really driven by the end user. And they are choosing the solutions that they bring in and they're figuring out, you know, what is their enlightened way of working? What are the best solutions and tools that make them most productive? And we hope that Dropbox is part of that.

Bryan Mann: Now I've said collaboration a few times within this presentation, and frankly, I think it's an overloaded, overused, and tired word. And so we actually break it down into a few further buckets. The coordination aspect of collaboration is something that we see happening with Asana's and Trello's where you're trying to organize different aspects of an organization around projects and how you can create a project board and pull in people as appropriate and necessary. And then you have the communication space, which is largely driven by things like Slack and Teams and how to keep everybody on the same page through these communication layers.

Bryan Mann: But what we also see is that end product that people still create is usually an artifact. It's some sort of document. And that's something that best lives in a solution like Dropbox where we can actually be that central storage unit for where that content is stored, and we've become essentially the Switzerland for content. Wherever there's a data element for any of these applications, a great place to store it is Dropbox because we're going to have that connectedness to the other applications in the environment.

Bryan Mann: So how does Dropbox relate to Okta? What you're all here for. So, again, we've had our business product for about five years. One of the first things that we realized was that identity management, the user lifecycle management process, needed to be the first thing that we tackled. Okta was right there and was one of our first partners that we created an integration with. And so they really help simplify how we can lifecycle in and out the users in your environment and that's done very, very quickly as far as how people can be provisioned in Dropbox, and as they exit the organization, how we suspend or disable those accounts and then actually do something with the content that those people had access to before.

Bryan Mann: And as you have other systems of record or sources of truth AD or open directory or other things that house your groups, you can easily replicate those over to Dropbox so that folders can assume the same permission models off of those groups.

Bryan Mann: And I'm sure most of you probably have lots of iPhones and Android devices in your environment. Maybe some of you are using the UEM product from Okta. We've got a great integration with that so that you can deploy the Dropbox EMM client, manage that, and manage the profile around that application.

Bryan Mann: So where do we see things moving in the future? So, with Dropbox business today, we have a solution called Account Capture. And so in lots of organizations, again, we see this organic growth that happens over time where you had users that, again, were using it for storing their family photos and that sort of thing. They might've been at a university and that's how they move documents around, made sure that it was always on their laptop. They then realized that, "Hey, Dropbox is a great solution to bring to my work context." And so we have a lot of our organic usage within organizations that has come in naturally.

Bryan Mann: Now enterprises say, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, we need to get control of that because Bryan just went and signed up for a Dropbox account with an identity that I own." So, account capture actually gives you a way of pulling those people in to your team, managing them, and really getting control of all of the content that those people had. So we're improving that integration with Okta so that's a lot more streamlined.

Bryan Mann: We're also looking at standards based ways of improving the provisioning process. So some of these standards have been around for a number of years. We're going to formally adopt those so that we have an easy way of onboarding people very rapidly into an organization. And then we're also looking at some other standards that have been around for a couple of years to have support for that so that you have easy ways of provisioning, de-provisioning, users and groups within the Dropbox organization.

Bryan Mann: Recently we also released something called multi-team admin. In many organizations you might have teams that have popped up organically over the years, but now IT wants to get control of some of those teams. And with multi-team admin, we give the ability for an administrator for one team to grant access to an administrator of another team. That will allow, say, the finance team that had a Dropbox team that they were managing to grant access to that IT administrator so that they can manage users and the policy and settings within Dropbox. What we're looking at in the future though is a more granular permissions and a better and tighter relationship between teams, and really excited about that.

Bryan Mann: We actually have a number of product managers that are here in the session and then also at the booth. So if you'd like to talk to anyone about some of these features, more than happy to do that, and look for us down in the vendor hall.

Bryan Mann: So, with that, we're going to move on to the interview and very, very excited today to have Gabe Cortina, he is the CTO at Bunim Murray productions to talk about his experience with Okta and Dropbox. How are you doing Gabe?

Bryan Mann: So, Bunim Murray productions, for those that don't know, is the founder, I'll just say, the founder, of reality TV, producing such as as The Real World, Project Runway, Keeping up with the Kardashians, some of those, frankly, I don't know much about. I've heard of the Kardashians, I'm sure everybody's heard of the Kardashians.

Gabe Cortina: Actually, have any of you guys heard of Bunim Murray before? Raise your hand if you have. Yeah, not too many. I mean, before I went to there I didn't hear of them either. But, what happens is most time I say I work for Bunim Murray and then people are like, give me those stares, "We do the Kardashians," then they go, "Oh, yeah. Okay. I get it."

Bryan Mann: Yep.

Gabe Cortina: But, I mean, we really work on, like ... We've built like hundreds of shows, but typically, you know, we're at the very end after the show. We sell our shows to networks like an MTV, E, now Facebook, Snapchat, Netflix and so forth.

Bryan Mann: Yeah, great. And you've been in the industry for quite a while. I mean, your focus is really to optimize and scale the business at Bunim. You've had a number of accolades that you've gotten over the years, including a Presidents Award, product innovation award, and then also being nominated for CIO and CTO by the LA Business Journal. So you've been around and have been in the business. Can you talk a little bit about your role as CTO at Bunim and what are the areas of business that they really cover?

Gabe Cortina: Yeah, I mean, actually I came in from a different industry, so I've only been into entertainment for three years. I spent most of my career doing big Pharma and medical device. And when I entered into entertainment, actually I was kind of concerned. I was like, "Wow, these guys must be really high tech." You know, I had a little anxiety coming into the job. And my first day on I realized, "Oh wow, these guys are not very high tech." In fact, the industry was quite a ways behind, technically. In my third week on the job, we had 10 terabytes slip out of our firewall over a course of two weeks. So, actually in my first week already, we had somebody ... An intrusion.

Bryan Mann: Welcome.

Gabe Cortina: Yeah. And when we found out where the server was and stuff like that, I was like, "Why was it placed there? Why wasn't in the DMZ?" "We didn't have a DMZ, right? "Well, where did the server come from?" "It came from a vendor." "Okay." And then when we looked at the vendor we found out the vendor never changed the root password.

Gabe Cortina: And fortunately, through networking with other people, we were able to find out that basically they were used as a relay server. So people were relaying information over there.

Gabe Cortina: But that was kind of like a big wake up for our management. Our management's like, "Wow. We have under invested in technology." And it was kind of a journey for me as well.

Bryan Mann: Right.

Gabe Cortina: Right? And so, our business only ... We do primarily just four things. We ideate shows and sell them the networks and then they give us the money. Then we go out and staff, and then we do a lot of staffing and we have a really great competency in staffing and attracting talent. Then we go out and do production, and the nature of reality TV means that production is done somewhere else, not on site, not just in the United States, working on projects all over the world. And then we come back and do post production. And the post production is pretty tricky because imagine taking hundreds of hours of film and then trying to push it down and condense it into a story that can be told over like 30 minutes. A lot of people think that they're scripted, right? They're not scripted. It's just a lot of work to get that story in there, right? So, that's the four things that we do. Key to that is attracting talent.

Bryan Mann: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Interesting. Yeah. So lots of different areas of the business. What are some of the collaboration challenges that you faced as ... How'd you manage all of that? And as you bring in talent and just kind of the movement of people.

Gabe Cortina: Well, there was a lot of challenges. I mean, if you think about the workforce, particularly production, it's distributed all over, right? Kind of give you some stats on our business, last year we had 2,500 unique employees, about a height of 900, 8,000 rehires. And so, all W2 employees. And so, what that means, we got a lot of people coming and a lot of people going. And with a lot of people coming and going, one of the key things for us is making sure that we do attract talent and especially right now because of the new entrance with Netflix, Hulu, Amazon and the shift over towards streaming, which has really increased the demand for content a lot. I mean, it's great for us, because, you know, we're doing better than ever.

Gabe Cortina: At the same time, it's having a talent suck in the whole industry, right?

Bryan Mann: Right.

Gabe Cortina: And so when I look at things amongst our employee base it's how can we make sure that the employees really enjoy themselves, and they look at Bunim Murray as a really well organized great place to work, right?

Bryan Mann: And what's the number of employees that you have at any one time and kinda the turnover.

Gabe Cortina: It goes quite a bit, but we'll be at a height of say 900, right?

Bryan Mann: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Gabe Cortina: But what would happen, let's say somebody works on Kardashians for three months and then they're off for a month or something like that.

Bryan Mann: Yep.

Gabe Cortina: Then we basically have to de-provision all their accounts, shut everything down, and then when they come back, do it all up again, right? And so, you can imagine, doing that 8,000 times a year. It's a big job, right?

Bryan Mann: Yep. Huge challenge.

Gabe Cortina: Huge challenge.

Bryan Mann: And I imagine that with that influx and just kinda movement of the transient worker, or the contingent workforce, there's a lot of intellectual property that you need to protect along the way.

Gabe Cortina: Yeah. And, you know, when I first got there, too, the company had spent a lot of money on SharePoint. And that's a natural fit. We're on prem Office 365 and so, you know, I get the thinking behind that. But you know, when I started going inside the SharePoint drives and look in the folders I realized barely anybody was even using it. And then when I started to talk to the employees and find out why aren't they using it? Well you know, we're 80% OSX, we have a huge workforce that's mobile, and a lot of DYOD going in. And so, you know, the SharePoint just wasn't conducive to the type of needs that they had.

Gabe Cortina: And so, I started to look around and I talked to like four or five different vendors looking for a better solution and you know, I know OneDrive wasn't it either, because I couldn't even figure out how to use that at first, myself. And so when I came across Dropbox, they actually pulled all the corporate accounts, their personal accounts, but they're all using corporate emails, right?

Bryan Mann: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Gabe Cortina: We had over 300 accounts that our employee base were using. To me it seemed like, "Oh here's a natural fit. They're already using it. They like it. We'll just adopt it." And then Dropbox also has a program where it's really easy to convert the personal accounts into corporate accounts for us.

Bryan Mann: Account capture.

Gabe Cortina: Yeah, account capture, right? And so that's what we did. And, actually, that was a really good win for me at work because, you know, at the same time, I divide my job into four chunks, right? I gotta protect the business, I gotta keep all the services running, I gotta help it scale for growth, and then work on business transformation. But I can't be working on growth and transformation if I can't even protect the business-

Bryan Mann: Yep.

Gabe Cortina: Keep the services running.

Bryan Mann: Yep.

Gabe Cortina: And so maybe a blessing in disguise that we had that intrusion at first because I was able to get a lot of money pumped in for security. But after that I had to figure out what kind of strategies could I do that would secure the business, but drive it toward business imperatives, not toward, like, insurance. Because the management doesn't want to just keep buying insurance, right? So, you know, Dropbox fit really nice in that strategy because here was something that I was doing for the users, but at the same time it was protecting our intellectual property and providing more security for us as well, too.

Gabe Cortina: We also had corporate shares as well, too, right? To access corporate shares you have to have VPNs. And that was another issue too is that you know, how do you VPN from your iPhone, right? Because a lot of people just use iPhones. Well they can use Dropbox on their iPhone, right?

Bryan Mann: Right.

Gabe Cortina: Works out really well. And so that in itself was a great way to drive not only adoption but also be able to sell the costs of Dropbox over to our management team, make users happier. It makes me happier because protecting our IP and securing our business.

Bryan Mann: It's sad that, still, a security incident is the primary way of driving funding and rearchitecting to do things the right way. But I guess that's the state.

Bryan Mann: So I imagine that since you have so many employees constantly coming and going, you know, it's critical that you provide the tools so that they hit the ground running immediately and you know that projects become successful very, very quickly. How do you accomplish this to make sure that their limited time, as they are a contingent workforce, is productive as possible.

Gabe Cortina: Right, I mean, the other thing is ... It was kinda hard to like piecemeal solutions and stuff like that. So I had to really developed something with our management team and I've heavily partnered with our HR and we came up with a slogan called, "First day, best day." And that is one employee arrives at our company, their first day will be their best day, right? And that's really a good opportunity for us also to kinda, you know, anchor in a new employee's feelings about the company.

Gabe Cortina: And so basically we went back and worked with all the departments in trying to figure out all the little touch points that happens when an employee arrives-

Bryan Mann: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Gabe Cortina: And try and make those seamless. Like, they shouldn't have to know which department has what services, right? Those should be kind of catered up to them. And we've been working on it. It's still ... We have more work to do on it. But this year, too, we're also launching another program called employee journey where we're trying to map out all the touch points throughout their lifecycle, throughout their journey across the company so that each one of those points can be not a pain, but we'll start it with first, right?

Bryan Mann: Yeah. Maybe.

Gabe Cortina: And then hopefully later, yeah.

Bryan Mann: Yep.

Gabe Cortina: Delightful.

Bryan Mann: Yeah. Absolutely. So, that's fascinating. I think that a lot of organizations face that challenge of creating the good first impression and like the competition that happens within organizations today, that first impression and all of the perks and everything else that you provide employees is super important. The first day program is interesting because, you know, I think there's so much of a steep learning curve with tools. You talked about SharePoint in the environment. That probably contributed to some of the learnings. You had people that were coming in and-

Gabe Cortina: Sure.

Bryan Mann: "What is this."

Gabe Cortina: Yep.

Bryan Mann: And have used other tools. And so, what are you doing to decrease the barrier of some of these new tools coming in?

Gabe Cortina: Well, there's a couple things. One, I had noticed that a lot of our users are using Gmail.

Bryan Mann: Yep.

Gabe Cortina: Right? Which meant they're already used to being online, using online tools. And so, you know, like many of you who raised your hands earlier, you know, pushing folks online was a big step, right? You know how to be done systemically. At the same time, we're starting to push people online, there's another good reason for it and that is we're building a brand new, state of the art campus and there's a lot of risk in physically moving servers and things not working. And so, we put Office up online, Exchange online, and then started to look for what kind of tools could we also put online.

Gabe Cortina: And Dropbox was the first one that we put online, then Office 365, and then afterwards Okta.

Bryan Mann: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Gabe Cortina: And I kid you know, Okta's amazing because it was the first time we were able to aggregate all of our applications, right? And then what we want to do is drive people online right away. So, basically, a lot of the employees, they don't have a choice. I mean, we don't install the desktop apps. They come in and they have to log into Okta and then they see all their applications there, including Dropbox and a bunch of our other online apps.

Bryan Mann: Right. Interesting. So, as your role as a CTO, what are the key priorities and strategies with the Okta and Dropbox relationship? How does that play out? What are the other things that you're looking for to bring in to create that integration?

Gabe Cortina: Well, I mean, you know, a key strategy is I don't want to spend a lot of my time in the job working on security and keeping the services running, right? You know, what I want to be doing is helping work on business transformation and scaling the business. But to do that, I have to free up resources, right? I have to have my IT working on higher value activities. And so when we step in there, or when I first came over there, we spent a lot of work doing help desk stuff and administrative stuff. For example, provisioning and de-provisioning account, right? That soaked up a lot of time.

Gabe Cortina: Another thing is that IT was in charge of actually doing file permissions for every single folder in the company.

Bryan Mann: Yep.

Gabe Cortina: Yeah, I mean it would ... And then to compound it, because we're using Max, Windows File Shares, they would get corrupted. And sometimes you'd be like, half a day in there going through each file folders and redoing permissions and stuff like that.

Gabe Cortina: And so, like, a key strategy is figuring out how do you automate a lot of those activities, free up IT time-

Bryan Mann: Right.

Gabe Cortina: And then push them up the ladder toward higher value activities.

Bryan Mann: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Gabe Cortina: And so, Okta's doing that, Dropbox is doing that. And then, you know, about everything that I try to do, my job is about that. And over the course of the three years that I've been there, we've really kinda transformed and we have a really robust security model, our servers are up and running all the time, and now we're really focused heavily on business transformation basically because the industries changing so much.

Bryan Mann: Yep.

Gabe Cortina: Right? I mean, with the new entrants coming in, Netflix, Hulu's, and everything like that, our business, itself, needs to change the way we do business and experiment in different business models.

Gabe Cortina: And so, an important part of my job is researching technology trends and looking at how we can adopt more technology capability in our business, right? Because our new entrants are very good in cloud computing, machine learning-

Bryan Mann: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Gabe Cortina: And they actually produce shows almost like they develop products.

Bryan Mann: And I imagine, being in a creative space, you have people bringing in new things, right? So there's your sanctions set of services and then likely a lot of things that are just brought in by the creative folks that, "Hey, I found this new thing and it can help me do blah blah, x, y, z faster and cooler and better."

Bryan Mann: What do you look for in applications to say, "Okay, well, let's let's formally sanction it, let's get it in to an identity service/" What else do you look for in those services to sanction them, or do you have a set of applications that that's fine to just let them run on their own and not get under the IT control.

Gabe Cortina: Yeah, I mean, it's actually very hard for IT to have control over production.

Bryan Mann: Yeah.

Gabe Cortina: Right? Because, you know, production, they're off campus. Sometimes you might not even have network connectivity. That's another reason why I chose Dropbox, too, because they could use it not connected to the network, and then when they get back on the network, they can sync.

Gabe Cortina: But the criteria for it is basically driving as much as I can online one. And then the other thing is just making sure applications integrate. And right now really, you know, fundamentally Okta's really important for us because, like, if an application doesn't integrate with Okta then more than likely we're not gonna get it.

Bryan Mann: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Okay. That's interesting. So, I'm guessing that, for many of your employees, Dropbox is just one of many SAS apps that are in use. What do you see as the challenges managing across your SAS landscape? What are some of the approaches that you're taking? And what are the gaps? Because there still are gaps. I mean, as you look at how things are managed from a policy perspective, it's different across every SAS application. How are looking to simplify that and manage your portfolio of apps?

Gabe Cortina: Well, I mean, that's really tough because it's easy to control and get apps from the interface area, right? They can give a cohesive user experience, that's what we really want. But it's more difficult behind the scenes on the back end to do all the integration and passing data from one app to another app-

Bryan Mann: Are there standards that you're looking for? I mean, we've talked about the identity world standards been around forever, but are there other standards that you're trying to push vendors to support so that you have a common layer for integration?

Gabe Cortina: Well, I mean, honestly a lot of the work has to first be done just by us. Because our IT's not very mature, so we don't have robust data standards.

Gabe Cortina: Before I got there different departments actually adopted different systems, right? And so we created basically are data silos- from the different department.

Bryan Mann: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Gabe Cortina: From the different departments. And so, one challenge is wrangling in the departments and producing a vision for them that says, "Hey look. We all are involved in the customer experience. We all want talent here. And so we need to make this a really great experience for you."

Gabe Cortina: And then having to drive those things, they realized, too, that the more we start integrating across these silos, actually the less work they have to do. Pretty soon our post production teams, which have a separate set of servers that they use for doing editing, and they handle all the file permissions and things like that-

Bryan Mann: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Gabe Cortina: Pretty soon those will be integrated into Okta as well, too.

Gabe Cortina: We're working with Dropbox's product development team right now, looking at how can we download film clips to Dropbox and then annotate those and share those with some of our customers and-

Bryan Mann: People who are part of the production process. 

Gabe Cortina: Collaborate with, yeah.

Bryan Mann: Production process, yes.

Gabe Cortina: Yeah, exactly.

Bryan Mann: Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, so I imagine working in a production company there's definitely some interesting use cases that you've come across. Can you talk a little bit about that and how Dropbox has helped, how Okta has been an enabler in helping with that.

Gabe Cortina: Well, I mean, the great thing about Dropbox, I mean, is once we released it ... Like, I didn't have to have a special program for it-

Bryan Mann: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Gabe Cortina: I didn't have to be like, "Oh, hey everybody. This is gonna be Dropbox. We're gonna introduce it and, by the way, we're gonna have training sessions," or, "Here's your 24 page document with screen clips on how you use it."

Bryan Mann: Right.

Gabe Cortina: What I did was I just found, like, a few users who I knew were kinda like, super power users in Dropbox-

Bryan Mann: Champions.

Gabe Cortina: Champions.

Bryan Mann: Yep.

Gabe Cortina: And just release it to them and it just grew organically. That combined with the conversion tool of converting people over. And it's grown organically and, as I was mentioning earlier, the great thing is we're out of the business now of having to set file permissions, right? Those are pushed down to the people who know who should have access to those files. Because that was another problem, too, is people might not get around to telling IT, "Oh, these people left," or, "This happened," or what have you.

Gabe Cortina: So, now kinda that responsibility is delegated out, which frees up a lot of time for us, and provides more security at the same time.

Bryan Mann: Right. That's cool. And I've heard that there's some pretty interesting use cases around use of mobile and iPads and how you're out on production or out doing production and the bystanders, the people that are part of the production process. Can you talk a little bit about that? The blurring?

Gabe Cortina: Oh, sure. Sure. So, I mean, that's another area too ... And we're just getting into that now, too, is that traditionally, when ... Let's say you're filming something on the Kardashians, and they're over at a hotel, and everybody that the camera hits, we have like five people that have to run out there with a piece of paper and have to write down ... Sign a release-

Bryan Mann: Right.

Gabe Cortina: Saying, "It's okay to be on TV." If we don't do that, we've gotta auto blur them out and it takes a lot more editing effort to go and auto blur them out, right?

Gabe Cortina: And so we worked on an app that integrated Dropbox so that people could use their iPads and go out and just, "Here, can you take a look at this?" They look at the release, I don't think they really read the full thing because it's one of those legalese documents.

Bryan Mann: Nobody reads the agreements. Come on.

Gabe Cortina: Yeah. But they go ahead and sign it and then we take a picture of them with the iPad and that automatically goes over into Dropbox, the release with a picture, and then they're timestamped and everything like that so that the editors can basically say, "Okay, this person, this person, they all signed releases."

Gabe Cortina: And, you know, it helped out a lot because we get more people signing releases, plus we're able to automate that entire workflow that was all paper based. I mean, they take all those papers, they come back, scan them in, and then they would try and match them with the pictures. I mean, it was a real labor intensive process.

Bryan Mann: Yep. Very interesting. Awesome. Well it definitely sounds like there's some cool use cases in how you've used Dropbox, simplified the onboarding offboarding with Okta, and just the overall management of your structure in Dropbox with all of that.

Gabe Cortina: Yeah, I mean, I don't know how you guys felt, but when I watched the opening of this event and learned about the product road map, it felt really good. I was like, "Wow. Okay. I made the right choice with Okta." Because they're gonna solve other integration problems that we're having as well, too.

Gabe Cortina: But the other thing, it's like with Okta and both with Dropbox, I felt like I've had really good partnerships with them. And so, with both companies I've been able to share with them the problems and challenges I'm facing and these people hustle and get the right people on the phone for us and, hey, if they don't have it they say, "Well, we can't help you with that one." But if they can, they let us know, and if it's something that is related to their product road maps, they take in the requirements and ask a lot of questions. So, like I said, we're anxious to get a lot of the new features that we've been working with your product development teams at Dropbox.

Bryan Mann: Well, Gabe, thanks so much for taking the time-

Gabe Cortina: Thanks.

Bryan Mann: And thank you all for coming. I really appreciate the time. And, again, we do have a booth down in the vendor hall, product management is actually down there and would love to talk to you. We also have a number of solution architects, so if you'd like a demo of Dropbox and Okta, they'll be more than happy to show you. But thanks again for coming and I hope you enjoy the rest of the event.