Images: KnowBe4 KB4-CON, Plus Partner Awards
More users attended this year, and so did more partners. Highlights and a recap in our slideshow.
![KnowBe4 KB4-CON Gallery KnowBe4 KB4-CON Gallery](https://eu-images.contentstack.com/v3/assets/blt10e444bce2d36aa8/blt4e04f27d2f9f6a03/65245b80d03b4fa679908d32/KnowBe4-KB4-CON-Gallery.jpg?width=700&auto=webp&quality=80&disable=upscale)
Attendees gathered for the Welcome Meetup and Drinks Reception. KnowBe4’s training will be translated to 32 different languages this year. The idea is to have one template that knows what language the users need.
Stu Sjouwerman told
attendees his company has far outpaced its competitors, and now has more
than 2,000 positive reviews on Gartner Peer Insight, and the top three places
in 2019 customer choice.
Erich Kron, KnowBe4’s security awareness advocate and technical evangelist, said the conference is “all about you as our customers and our users. This is about giving you things to learn, take away and actually work with,” he said. “The reason we’re here is to tackle the human problem that has been plaguing our organizations for years.”
The keynote speaker was Apollo Robbins, an expert on
pickpockets, confidence crimes and deception. He made national news as the man who pickpocketed the Secret
Service while entertaining President Jimmy Carter. He has picked the pockets of
more than 250,000 people.
Katie Brennan, KnowBe4’s
technical content director, gave a session focused on best practices for phishing
users. Organizations should increase the difficulty of their tests if few users
are failing, and if some users continually fail, it could be a good idea to add
penalties for failing for additional incentive, she said.
Attendees were provided demonstrations of KnowBe4’s training
and phishing platform in the Security Awareness Lab. KnowBe4 has rolled out two
live-action security training series, “Inside Man,” and “Standups 4 Security”
by Popcorn Training, a company it acquired last year.
The Security Awareness
Lab provided hands-on time with the products, and KnowBe4 personnel were on
hand to answer tech support and managed services questions, as well as provide
data-driven security consultation.
Kai Roer, co-founder
and CEO of CLTRe,
gave a presentation highlighting the work his company had done in providing a
framework and methodology for measuring culture as it relates to security. His
company examines the seven dimensions of security culture, including attitudes,
behaviors, communication, compliance, cognition, norms and responsibilities.
Kevin Mitnick,
KnowBe4’s chief hacking officer, gave a keynote highlighting the latest malicious
hacking techniques, and invited one attendee on stage to show how quickly and
easily his personal data could be stolen. He also said it’s never a good idea
to create your own passwords, and that using a password manager is safer.
Key topics important
to partners were discussed during a Partner Roundtable Lunch. “This type of event
for partners is truly awesome,” said Tony Jennings, KnowBe4’s new senior vice
president of global channels. “If you look at KnowBe4 as a company, we’re in
hypergrowth and I don’t think hypergrowth even covers it when you look at the
numbers. It’s to truly give the partners the knowledge and equip them with the
enablement to enjoy the hypergrowth in their own organizations. So it’s giving
them the tools, giving them the networking, meeting with customers and other
partners, and truly understanding best practices.”
DRS, a provider of
information security, IT risk management and IT governance, was named Most
Valuable Partner during the Customer Appreciation Dinner and Special Awards
presentation.
FutureCom, a provider of consulting services and
products with a focus on cloud and cybersecurity solutions, also was named Most
Valuable Partner during the awards presentation.
FutureCom, a provider of consulting services and
products with a focus on cloud and cybersecurity solutions, also was named Most
Valuable Partner during the awards presentation.
KnowBe4, which provides security awareness training and simulated phishing, drew nearly 1,000 attendees to its KB4-CON user conference last week in Orlando, Florida, triple the number that attended its inaugural conference last year.
Stu Sjouwerman, KnowBe4’s CEO, told attendees his company now has more than 25,000 customers, 24 straight quarters of uninterrupted growth and a new investment partner in KKR. It also is continuing its acquisition strategy with the yet-to-be-announced purchase of a company that’s focused on security culture.
Sara Valtin, KnowBe4’s vice president of channel, said about 60 partners attended last week’s conference, up from about 15 last year, and “next year we’ll probably quadruple what we did this year.”
“The message for partners here is twofold,” she said. “There’s the side of it where they’re really engaged and learning all the same things as our customers are learning, but then at the same time … they can meet with their channel representatives and they can understand if they have questions specific to the platform or selling the platform, marketing and how to market it [and so on], and just being able to get as much as they can so that they leave here ready to hit the ground running.”
“We have hundreds of MSPs or MSSPs that write us into their rollout,” Sjouwerman said. “For these types of organizations, it’s quite a good deal because on one hand you can charge a little more, but your costs are going down because … it saves time.”
Scroll through our slideshow above for highlights and a recap.
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