What if container security didn’t just detect problems—but stopped them before they ever happened? In this episode, Edera’s Emily Long and Kaylin Trychon share how they’re flipping the traditional container model by building from the hardware up to deliver true security by design.
In this pre-event Brand Story On Location conversation recorded live from RSAC Conference 2025, Emily Long, Co-Founder and CEO of Edera, and Kaylin Trychon, Head of Communications, introduce a new approach to container security—one that doesn’t just patch problems, but prevents them entirely.
Edera, just over a year old, is focused on reimagining how containers are built and run by taking a hardware-up approach rather than layering security on from the top down. Their system eliminates lateral movement and living-off-the-land attacks from the outset by operating below the kernel, resulting in simplified, proactive protection across cloud and on-premises environments.
What’s notable is not just the technology, but the philosophy behind it. As Emily explains, organizations have grown accustomed to the limitations of containerization and the technical debt that comes with it. Edera challenges this assumption by revisiting foundational virtualization principles, drawing inspiration from technologies like Xen hypervisors, and applying them in modern ways to support today’s use cases, including AI and GPU-driven environments.
Kaylin adds that this design-first approach means security isn’t bolted on later—it’s embedded from the start. And yet, it’s done without disruption. Teams don’t need to scrap what they have or undertake complex rebuilds. The system works with existing environments to reduce complexity and ease compliance burdens like FedRAMP.
For those grappling with infrastructure pain points—whether you’re in product security, DevOps, or infrastructure—this conversation is worth a listen. Edera’s vision is bold, but their delivery is practical. And yes, you’ll find them roaming the show floor in bold pink—“mobile booth,” zero fluff.
Listen to the episode to hear what it really means to be “secure by design” in the age of AI and container sprawl.
Learn more about Edera: https://itspm.ag/edera-434868
Note: This story contains promotional content. Learn more.
Guests:
Emily Long, Founder and CEO, Edera | https://www.linkedin.com/in/emily-long-7a194b4/
Kaylin Trychon, Head of Communications, Edera | https://www.linkedin.com/in/kaylintrychon/
Resources
Learn more and catch more stories from Edera: https://www.itspmagazine.com/directory/edera
Learn more and catch more stories from RSA Conference 2025 coverage: https://www.itspmagazine.com/rsac25
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Keywords:
emily long, kaylin trychon, sean martin, marco ciappelli, containers, virtualization, cloud, infrastructure, security, fedramp, brand story, brand marketing, marketing podcast, brand story podcast
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Rethinking Container Security from the Kernel Up | A Brand Story with Emily Long and Kaylin Trychon from Edera | An RSAC Conference 2025 Pre-Event Conversation
Please note that this transcript was created using AI technology and may contain inaccuracies or deviations from the original audio file. The transcript is provided for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a substitute for the original recording, as errors may exist. At this time, we provide it “as it is,” and we hope it can be helpful for our audience.
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Kaylin Trychon: [00:00:00] We're live. We're live. Well, I hope we're live streaming. Great. Don't anything, don't say anything.
Sean Martin: Don't
Marco Ciappelli: say anything at all. Anything you don't wanna say.
Emily Long: Can I get the blooper reel? We do not
Marco Ciappelli: edit.
Emily Long: It's, there's just like, yeah. It's wrong.
But just, just pretend unfiltered. Just
Marco Ciappelli: pretend you are live and here we are. Live World Conference 2025. It's the
Sean Martin: start. The door is. Or just opening. Just opening. People are running downstairs to get socks and all kinds of weird stuff. Right? Get socks in the socks. Socks seem like the the cool thing. Socks are the thing.
Marco Ciappelli: Evening right here. Doing what?
Sean Martin: Then we're talking to our good friends from Madera. That's right. Emily and Kay.
Kaylin Trychon: Honored to be the first people you're talking to on such a momentous day. Yeah. And
Marco Ciappelli: you know, Kaylen said, you, you will not miss me. You will not miss me. Pink. You did. Bring the pink, pink. And we, we go
Emily Long: for subtlety.
It's really, maybe
Marco Ciappelli: [00:01:00] later you explain a little bit the why of all of this, but uh mm-hmm. So this is a pre-event. Conversation even if he's already at the event, because we couldn't come at before. So we're taking 10 minutes now, maybe more. We'll see. To welcome you to Thank you. The ITSP magazine, family.
Thank you for sponsoring. Yes. And uh, tell us who you are, what you do, and uh, what are you doing here at a conference. Oh,
Emily Long: amazing. Yes, we are Adera. Mm-hmm. Um, we. Founded the company about over, a little over a year ago. Okay. So yeah, we just celebrated our one year birthday. Yeah. In April. Um, so yeah, we are a security solution, um, where we provide isolation for containers.
Um, but we really reimagine how containers are run and built. And so we do it from below the kernel, so from like hardware up instead of software down. So a lot of people in security are used to having agents tell them what's wrong after [00:02:00] the fact. Our solution is proactive and that we actually. Stop attacks from happening in the first place, living off the land attacks, lateral movement.
Our technology eliminates that upfront and it's really easy to use across any cloud provider, OnPrem. And so we really are meeting people where they are trying to get multi-cloud environments and everything secure from the start.
Marco Ciappelli: I'm sure Shauna has a lot of questions about that. I,
Sean Martin: I do have a lot of questions.
We'll, we will get into that when we have our, uh, yes. Our, our proper conversation, uh, this week. Uh, we'll sit down and. And we'll dig into some of the technology use cases and all that stuff. I mean, talk about a tech person who's a tech. Yes. This is it. Yes, this is it. This is it. It's really cool. It's, it's really cool.
So I'm excited to have that chat, but, um, I wanna hear from ca. Mm-hmm. You, you love it.
Kaylin Trychon: I do love it here. And my love. I mean, love hate the Moscone Center, you know, holds a lot of fond memories for me working with both of you. Um. Meeting up with a [00:03:00] lot of friends, a lot of folks I've worked with throughout my career.
So there's, you know, the love part, which is still the community, still the connections. The hate part is just, you know, 40,000 people in San Francisco, you know, but everybody with their restaurant
Sean Martin: reservations lines at bars. Yes, yes. All, all that stuff.
Kaylin Trychon: It is overwhelming. Yes. It's hard to fit in all the fun things you want to do in San Francisco.
Um, but,
Sean Martin: but you get to be here this year. With a cool team.
Kaylin Trychon: Super cool team.
Sean Martin: Yeah.
Kaylin Trychon: So excited. Um, this is my favorite part of being at RSA at a smaller, more nimble company. We do not have to have a big booth where we're stuck in Moscone talking to people over in Oregon, we get to be mobile agile. So look for the, yeah.
You know, the subtlety appropriate F word lock T-shirts and ask us about adera.
Marco Ciappelli: And if you're looking for the booth, Amber, this is the booth? Yes,
Emily Long: yes. Mobile booth. We, we are a mobile [00:04:00] booth, but we are everywhere. So you will find us. So some
Marco Ciappelli: people wanna find you LinkedIn, how do they get in touch with you?
Yes,
Emily Long: LinkedIn would be great. Um, you can also pop on our website, adera.dev, and there's a contact us page and we'd be getting pinged. So if you do wanna find us while we're here, um, that's easy as well.
Marco Ciappelli: Or you can jump on ITSP magazine where they are on the brand directory and then. Find them there. Yeah, exactly.
So that's good. Mm-hmm. So what kind of conversation, what kind of conversation are you expecting to have here when you present your product? New company? Mm-hmm. New concept.
Emily Long: Yes. Well, what kind of
Marco Ciappelli: questions?
Emily Long: Yeah. The typical questions we get, which I will expect again here, is um, how is this possible? So I think that there is a misconception that we are stuck with the.
Kind of technical debt of, uh, computing over time, particularly with containers, which we are in fact not. And so a lot of the time we end up talking about why this technology exists today, how [00:05:00] we were able to develop it using kind of historical context of modern technology and blending it together. And so usually it's, we call it the 15 minutes of skepticism and then followed by the, oh my gosh, this is the coolest thing ever.
Okay. And so I, I expect it to be very similar here as we've gotten, um, over the last.
Sean Martin: I was chatting with a good friend, John s, he's a cso, uh, insurance company, and he, he was quoting JP Morgan Chase open letter. Mm-hmm. I dunno if you saw that
Emily Long: We did technical
Sean Martin: death.
Emily Long: Mm-hmm.
Sean Martin: And at some point, if you're not thinking about it, you, you reach a point where you can't dig yourself out, basically.
Mm-hmm. What you're saying. And so you have to think about it, start to take action. Mm-hmm. To prepare for the inevitable or avoid it. Yep. For the first place. So, um, it's a great, great conversation to have. So I expect you'll, you'll have that a lot of people are thinking about it. Mm-hmm. So I guess that's another question.
Are companies thinking about that and thinking about how they can [00:06:00] leverage it there at,
Emily Long: yeah.
Sean Martin: You said there's skepticism, but are they even thinking about it before they're skeptical?
Emily Long: Yes. Well, I think that what they're trying to do is solve it in a more complex and frustrating way. So the problem is there, they're looking to solve it.
Um, and we really simplify that. There's some o, there's some open source tools and some others who've kind of come out, but there's limitations to everything there. It's like, I need bare metal access. It's more expensive. I'm, you know, I'm emulating a kernel and therefore, you know, my performance is terrible.
And the way that we are doing isolation and security, it doesn't involve any of that complexity. So I would say maybe a year and a half ago, we would've been a little early to the party. People didn't really know that containers aren't real and that they don't contain. Just a bunch of processes hanging out.
Now they do. And it's becoming way more scary with GPUs. So the time is really now, and we certainly don't wanna make the same mistakes we did early on in the container world with GPUs and ai. And so we're really trying to advocate for this, [00:07:00] you know, better computing, more isolation, ease of use early in the AI journey versus later.
So we're kind of pushing it through. Is that
Marco Ciappelli: the technology that now allows this or has been more in Eureka? A moment where you're like, well, maybe we're thinking in the wrong way.
Emily Long: I would say both. Um, we leverage a technology that's about 20 years old Zen as our inspiration, which is a hypervisor that was used for VMs back in the day.
And it predates a lot of other things that we've done, like, um, meeting virtualization extensions or like KVM and those types of things that have reg, you know, limitations. So we use para virtualization. We'll, we'll dive into all this stuff later. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's really, again, we, we have a, I think, unique disposition to really understand computer history at, at adera and being able to blend it and say, don't throw everything out like the baby with the bathwater phrase, let's take what worked and embed it, and then also look at kind of innovative approaches.
So we really have both, which is let's use the primitives that allow things to not have to be rebuilt from the full start. But [00:08:00] a lot of our, our product is, is new and emerging and modern.
Kaylin Trychon: I think one of the unique things that we will hear here at RSA this week is a lot about secure by design. And when I think about adera and what we're building, it truly is secure by design.
It is as low in the software stack as you can get, almost touching the harbor. Like if you are building with our foundation, you are going to be secure by design. And so I think the, the conversations we're gonna have here are really gonna illuminate that for folks and say, and, and we're doing it in a really simple way.
We're not saying, okay. Come over, start over. Oh, it's gonna take you six months to a year. You're gonna have to hire all these people to like implement our product. It's like, we can use what you have today and we can make it better. So over time you can reduce that technical debt. You can get rid of the tools that you don't need to have.
And so I think there's a, you know, that aha moment Emily was talking about and how that leads to, um, a better, more secure future for folks.
Sean Martin: I have so many questions. I'm gonna save them.
Marco Ciappelli: You're gonna [00:09:00] save them. I have a question. How much luck do you need? Well, we obviously have a very strong opinion about that.
This much.
Sean Martin: It's an AMP zero. Yes.
Emily Long: We can go in when we chat about why this is so important to us, they are our slogan. But people
Sean Martin: should look for you and have that conversation directly. Mm-hmm. Yes.
Kaylin Trychon: Yes. Mm-hmm. And I have cool stickers and maybe some other fun as why you're fun team. I have to say. I got to see
Sean Martin: the crew in New York.
Yes. Come together. And, uh, not just smart, cool people.
Marco Ciappelli: Yes. Not
Sean Martin: just you are, the team is super smart, I can tell you that. Yeah. And, uh, like I said, it's, it's like a technologist stream tech.
Emily Long: Yeah.
Sean Martin: So, I'm excited to have our chat, uh, deeper dive into what you do and use cases for that. Maybe just the final word, who, I'm sure you want to talk to anybody and everybody, but are there.
Specific teams, uh, that you want to speak to? [00:10:00] Developers, delivery people, ops, who, who is it maybe a message to them to,
Emily Long: to, to come find us, to connect it to? Yeah. I would say a little bit of all of them. Right. Um, but, uh, product security folks are fabulous to talk to. Anybody who's dealing with the pain of FedRAMP or any other compliance standards, sometimes at security teams, sometimes when it's containers, it's actually infrastructure teams, right.
We're seeing that a lot more now. Um, so a lot of people who are really dealing with the, the pains of complex infrastructure, which can sometimes be security and sometimes it's infrastructure. So depending on what, what your setup is both. Very cool.
Marco Ciappelli: Yeah. So it's not about luck if you haven't figured it out, it's not maybe a little bit of luck to find you guys around.
Emily Long: I don't know about
Marco Ciappelli: that. It's beat. That's true. So, you know,
Kaylin Trychon: I'll be in some shade of Right. Uh, throughout
Marco Ciappelli: the week. You, you're definitely gonna stand out and, uh. For everybody else. Stay tuned. We, we will go deeper. I think actually gonna be Sean, that goes deeper into this conversation. [00:11:00]
Sean Martin: I'm ready to, ready for that chat?
Yeah. Can't wait. I'm
Marco Ciappelli: happy to let give you my time to, to go even to heal the floor. One last question. You never let me ask. Absolutely. This is your moment. You can have fun. Look at that. Alright, stay tuned. We'll have so many more conversations coming to
Sean Martin: you. It magazine do com slash RSAC 25. You can find all of us there.
And, uh, we'll see everybody on the show floor. Sounds great. Sounds. See you soon. Yeah,
Kaylin Trychon: there.