View Blog

Today I had a nice chat with CEO of BeyondTrust John Moyer. We talked about the Microsoft acquisition of his previous company, DesktopStandard and where he's going with BeyondTrust.

The Old
--------
On the subject of the acquisition, former DesktopStandard CEO, Moyer said, “we had a great run with DesktopStandard and greatly appreciate all the support from our customer base and thought leaders like you, Jeremy. The acquisition validated not only the capabilities of the DesktopStandard team, but also Microsoft’s commitment to Group Policy. I am very happy that Microsoft will distribute DesktopStandard products to an even broader base of potential customers to help them manage their desktops and leverage their investments in Active Directory.”

The New
--------
Moyer has transitioned to a new role as CEO of BeyondTrust Corp. BeyondTrust was spun out of DesktopStandard to focus on enterprise security products. When I asked Moyer about BeyondTrust and why DesktopStandard’s PolicyMaker Application Security Product was not part of the Microsoft transaction he had the following to say,

“Simply put, we didn’t want to sell PolicyMaker Application Security. It was DesktopStandard’s fastest growing product. We recognized that the market for this product was just starting to take off. And we already had a successful and experienced team in place so this just made good sense.

PolicyMaker Application Security, which we have renamed to Privilege Manager, will form the backbone of BeyondTrust Corp. BeyondTrust is a new type of security company focused on helping customers to move beyond the need to place trust in users.

BeyondTrust’s flagship product, Privilege Manager, enables customers to implement the security best practice of Least Privilege. With it end-users can run all required applications and perform all required system tasks without administrative privileges. Currently, there is too much trust in IT security. Users must often be given admin privileges in order to do their jobs, forcing IT to ‘trust’ those users. The result is that these same users are often overrun by malware and can expose the network to serious threats through malicious activity.

BeyondTrust will continue to leverage Group Policy. Privilege Manager policy is applied by rule creation in the Group Policy Object Editor.”