The Genesis of Mimoto
(aka The Problem We Wanted to Solve)
The Short Version
As with so many technical developments, Mimoto started with a problem a super-smart tech guy experienced. At the time, there was no solution, so he created it.
The Longer Version of Mimoto’s Founding
Many years ago…
Early in his career, Mimoto Co-founder Doug Coburn visited a large US healthcare provider to work on the BigFix system. The person he was meeting put their credentials into a workstation so Doug could access BigFix Console, then walked away leaving Doug to do his work. This granted Doug root access to all of that organization’s 40,000 servers and 200,000 endpoints. Not good.
Jump forward.
Years later, Doug had a similar experience while working in Europe. He was brought into a large international bank. His contact entered their credentials and walked away so Doug could do his work. This time Doug had access to all of the bank’s ATMs, which were on a Java-based system that was not version-controlled. Different location, different industry, same situation, but much worse.
And then we wait.
In both cases, if Doug did something malicious or even accidentally exposed critical data, there would have been no way of knowing it was happening. Unfortunately, 15 years ago, 10 years ago, and even 5 years ago, technology wasn’t able to address this problem well. In fact, the realization that we now have the right combination of environmental factors and machine learning was Doug telling Kris Bondi, Mimoto CEO and Co-founder, “Technology has finally caught up so we can solve the huge problem I’ve been thinking about for years.”
A credential doesn’t equal a person. It’s a simple statement that enables Mimoto to have a level of internal visibility that wasn’t possible until today.