Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: So you had to have huge computer labs, which is still the case, but not everything needs to be hardware based or on premises anymore. There's a lot of solutions you can easily build in the cloud and you can then allow your students getting access to those resources easily from home or from your own network or lab environments.
[00:00:27] Speaker B: Welcome to the Edtech Connect podcast, your source for exploring the cutting edge world of educational technology. I'm your host, Jeff Dillon, and I'm excited to bring you insights and inspiration from the brightest minds and innovators shaping the future of education. We'll dive into conversations with leading experts, educators and solution providers who are transforming the learning landscape. Be sure to subscribe and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform so you don't miss an episode. So sit back, relax and let's dive in.
So I'm excited. Today we have a edtech founder who is really building something that higher ed needs. Marcus Schober is the founder of the cybersecurity training company Blue Cape Security and the creator of the virtual Labs platform Cyber Lab Hero. He has over a decade of experience in the cybersecurity field, including his tenure as a principal consultant at IBM X Force. Marcus has dedicated his career to elevating the standards of technical training. He's driven by a passion for delivering realistic and hands on learning experiences. Marcus and his team have developed Cyberlab Hero, a groundbreaking solution that enables blue Cape security and other training providers and educational institutions to easily provision cloud based virtual machines to their students on demand seamlessly through their browser. His passion for building technology products began over 15 years ago during his work as a software engineer for various startups in Europe and the United States. So Marcus, welcome to the show.
[00:02:24] Speaker A: Hello. Thank you for having me, Jeff.
[00:02:26] Speaker B: So Marcus, tell me about your founder's journey. You are a real entrepreneur here.
[00:02:32] Speaker A: Yeah, at this point I am, I guess so. I've always been really passionate about startups and joining small teams and building products. So that has always been kind of what, what drove me, like, you know, by building software solutions products. I always then had a passion for cybersecurity and then, yeah, I used to work for startup companies, small companies. At some point those also get acquired, but big ones, and so went through the entire hoops of getting to learn startups as well as big enterprise environments and working as a consultant also taught me a lot about other organizations, especially in cybersecurity. But I that ultimately led me to gaining a lot of experience and knowledge that I saw that others really wanted to gain as well. It was helpful for them to better learn what to do during cybersecurity incidents and events. And we then came, became more and more into just becoming a training provider, figuring out what's the best way to help them to build skills and knowledge. And we came up with solutions that we saw. Hands on learning obviously was a very effective way to do so, but difficult. So after a while, I then dedicated my entire career, started my current company, which is cybersecurity training, but then developed a tool or platform that helps us also to deliver really immersive, hands on training through virtual labs. And we continue to build this lab platform with my small team that we have around here for other organizations and educational institutions as well.
[00:04:07] Speaker B: Well, that's really exciting question for you. Virtual labs are not really new anymore. Why should hired be excited or most excited about what you're doing with virtual machines?
[00:04:20] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a good question. I think for us it just is the way how to make it immersive and also easy and simple to use.
I've also gained my masters in cybersecurity and network technologies, computer science, basically in Austria. And that's where we had huge Cisco labs in house and was a lot of money, time and effort to get those up and running for students.
And then later on, we learned how we can provide realistic learning experiences to organizations, companies for them to train hands on. And that now with a combination of cloud features and tools that are available these days, I've also seen and taken courses and trainings myself. I've seen what to do and what not to do to make it as simple and easy as possible for the provider and also for the users, such as that you do not have to install all kinds of software, virtual machines, things along those lines, you just are ready to go and running, because that really makes a difference. Also for us at Bluecape Security, when we have students that they click a button and they are ready to use the labs instead of a lot of setup requirements.
[00:05:28] Speaker B: Okay, so being browser based is one of your differentiators compared to maybe the biggest. The big guys out there, they're doing virtual computer labs.
[00:05:37] Speaker A: Yeah, basically you just, lots of courses make you download vms and install software and licensing and creating accounts and things along those lines before you are ready to go. And also nowadays with new MacBooks, you can't even run virtual machines so easily anymore because of the new architecture of their processors. So we just leverage the cloud as much as we can because it can scale indefinitely, which is awesome. And so our students with cyberlabhero can basically just click a button, it spins up a dedicated vm for them that is preconfigured within an environment that they can just perform the work that they want to perform. Lots around cybersecurity, but it has the software solutions installed. They get dropped into this vm through the browser, and that's really all it needs because I've seen students with really big labs at home and they are fine to run anything they want it, but there's also students with low cost computers and laptops, and they still want to be able to really get through the exercises and get through the training experience. And if you basically make it all client based, where all you need is a browser, it all runs in the cloud and you don't have any all. Everyone has the same chance of being, completing the training. And that doesn't, you know, that changes everything for us as well.
[00:06:47] Speaker B: Yeah, makes sense to me.
So what are some of the challenges you've seen with specifically with maybe higher education recently?
[00:06:59] Speaker A: Yeah, I think the challenges are, like I said, some of those solutions used to be also pretty expensive or also available on premises. So you had to have huge computer labs, which is still the case, but not everything needs to be hardware based on premises anymore. There's a lot of solutions you can easily build in the cloud, and you can then allow your students getting access to those resources easily from home or from, they are from your own network or lab environments. It's basically a central point, and you basically are fully in control over your configurations of your applications in the cloud. What we facilitate easily is that with Cyberlab Hero, you just basically configure those vms to the students needs so the labs can spun up, it can be spun up, and you get all the access you need. And that it doesn't matter whether the students are working from home or remotes or doing homework, or they actually live in a classroom, they all get to access the same environments. And then there's no kind of struggles anymore that were caused because of software hardware issues.
[00:08:03] Speaker B: Yeah, that is, I think I'm really excited about what you're doing. I've seen so many companies that are pretty antiquated that really haven't been able to pivot. Do you feel like you have an advantage being maybe a newer company going into this space?
[00:08:21] Speaker A: We definitely are, as any tiny startup, definitely much more flexible, so we can listen and we can hear and we can see the features that might be needed and make them happen pretty quickly. But also, we are also our own customer. So Cyberlab here was born out of a need, because we really needed a platform that allowed us to provide training to all of our students. And also we had students in organizations like employees that actually wanted to use their employee workstations and they were heavily restricted. They were not allowed to download any tools and anything. They were not allowed to install vms and especially not in cybersecurity, all the hacking tools that we needed. So really putting it all into the cloud and moving the problem away enabled us even to provide trainings to some of the organizations and to the clients that we are also delivering to. And so being a platform developer at this point allowed us to learn from there and build those features that we need also now making our lives easier as a provider, because now as a provider, there's a lot of features. Of course you can build this in a way where it's a lot of effort to get something up and running or easily. And for us it's pretty simple to monitor the usage metrics of what students, the vms that the students are using. It's easy to update, you make one update to vm, all the students are getting the new vm, the new updates, and they do not need to even do anything, any updates, download any packages, anything along those lines. It's very centralized and easy to manage. That makes my life easier because I'm the only founder who is also providing cybersecurity training. So I'm really very much hands off, except I need to do some updates or configuration changes that easily gets rolled out to everybody.
[00:10:03] Speaker B: Yeah, that's excellent.
You have a security background and you're building this browser based virtual computer lab. How has that maybe helped you or hindered you in your, in your business, your security background? I just think it's interesting.
[00:10:19] Speaker A: Yeah, well that always goes something to security in mind kind of thoughts into building anything, right. And especially in the cloud, anything can be compromised these days or is getting compromised. A lot of times you hear about things that are breaches, you know, compromises, but I kind of, I guess, have a background in understanding or having had seen things where organizations, their cloud environments got compromised. So I guess with that in mind, developing our own software helps us to make sure that we have security first in mind building everything as secure as we can from the get go on. Right. Sometimes you just need to rush and get something out the door. But I guess with myself and also my team's background, we're pretty conscious about best practices. And so we just of course apply, try to apply those as much as we can from the beginning on.
[00:11:10] Speaker B: When you talk to schools. Marcus, what is their biggest concern or question to you when they're considering maybe moving from an antiquated system or bringing on a new virtual computer lab, what are they really concerned with?
[00:11:26] Speaker A: Well, I think generally it's just, you know, change in general is hard. Right? Like people don't know what they don't know. If they haven't seen how hard or easy it is to use a platform as a training provider or as a faculty member, then it's always difficult for them to better to understand or be open to. Hey, this can actually make your life easier. And of course, there's lots of other ones making promises out there, of course. So I think, first of all, it's more like a mental mindset or shift. And then secondly, as always, you need to figure out the cost benefit. Right? Obviously, nobody's just doing this for fun, Orlando, because everything is shiny and new. You need to provide value. The value that we've seen, that we need to really demonstrate here is that it can take a lot of work off of the hands of the teachers, the faculty members, because once it's set up, once you put your vms in there, it's a matter of minutes that you can get up and running. And so things are pretty straightforward. And then secondly, it really, really helps a lot with course completion rates and also students not struggling with setup. Right. You don't have any support tickets or questions or anything, any need of that because things are up and running and it works for everyone, not just for a few. And overall, the experience is just much faster. And as anybody's targeting course completion rates, that's also a big metric for us to make sure people are successfully taking courses. And we want to make sure that they get all the way to the end, at least not with, because they're not struggling because of any technical issues. And that also helps us to then make sure that they are ready so that we can take the next steps with them. You know, they qualify for the next training or they qualify for a bigger or better kind of training experience that we might have now planned in the future for them.
[00:13:11] Speaker B: Yeah. So I always, when I talk to founders, I always like to ask this question. Who is the one person who's inspired you in your founders journey and how did they inspire you?
[00:13:23] Speaker A: I used to work for startup companies previously, and I think my biggest inspiration is a combination of some of those founders that I had the pleasure of working with. I got into this and technical person just trying to solve everything with technical solution and didn't know much about business or about other considerations around building a successful product. Luckily that was not really my concern back then, but I've had really good mentors, also role samples of people that are really strategically thinking this through, of how they made our startup successful. So I can, for example, I will never forget how they treated me and myself in my early years. And that was a huge differentiator for me for wanting to work with them, wanting to work for them, wanting to just learn as much as I can from them. And it was because they were like very, of course, experienced. They've done this before a few times, but also always kind of kept a cool and always were able to make pragmatic solutions and keeping everybody happy and still pushing everything forward. So this kind of, I guess, experience in many ways is something that I still admire and I try to apply my own journey as much as I can, at least.
[00:14:43] Speaker B: That's great.
Well, I'm going to ask you this one last question and just say, is there anything else you'd like to share with our higher ed audience?
[00:14:53] Speaker A: Of course, yeah. I'm always happy to talk about the solution along the lines of what we are talking about here at Cyberlabhero, which is software solution. It's extremely customizable. So we have talked to, we've been talking to organizations that needed a custom solution for it. That's something we can do. It's not an out of the box one way to use it solution, and we've been happy to set up dedicated instances and accounts for them with dedicated integrations. We're using learn management systems to integrate with our cyber lab hero lab platform so that people can enroll, take courses, and also be authenticated and allowed to access the lab environment only during particular times when the courses are, for example, available or for a particular amount of time, like for example, a countdown, so they can only use so many hours for their particular lab time. There's all these features that we've had in mind and that we built because there was a need for it. And so looking forward to just learning more of what people might be using it for, because really any technical training program could probably benefit from it. And so we are more than open to talk about that and listen and see what we can do.
[00:16:04] Speaker B: All right, well, how can people find you?
[00:16:07] Speaker A: You can find us on cyberlabhero.com. this is our main website. You can also find us at demo dot cyberlapherio.com, where you can actually enroll and kind of experience the platform yourself from a student perspective and spin up your own labs and enroll into demo courses. So demo dot cyberlabhere.com or cyberlabhere.com for more information and also then where you can contact us or contact me directly and we can take the conversations from there.
[00:16:34] Speaker B: Excellent. Thank you for taking the time Marcus and good luck to you.
[00:16:40] Speaker A: Thank you very much. My pleasure.
[00:16:51] Speaker B: As we wrap up this episode, remember Edtech Connect is your trusted companion on your journey to enhance education through technology. Whether you're looking to spark student engagement, refine edtech implementation strategies, or stay ahead of the curve in the emerging technologies, Edtech Connect brings you the insights you need. Be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an inspiring and informative episode. And while you're there, please leave us a review. Your feedback fuels us to keep bringing you valuable content. For even more resources and connections, head over to edtechConnect.com, your hub for ed tech reviews, trends and solutions. Until next time, thanks for tuning in.
