“Security systems fail. When it fails, what do you do?”
This critical question from Spire Connect’s Pankaj Sharma set the stage at Gitex 2025 for a conversation with Francois Driessen, the “Human Ambassador” of ADAMnetworks. His core message is blunt: in cybersecurity, even real-time is not fast enough. By the time a threat is detected, the damage is already done.
ADAMnetworks is challenging this reactive model with a new philosophy: Zero Trust Connectivity.
Instead of playing a “cat and mouse game” trying to detect threats, their solution goes back to the internet’s foundation. As Driessen explains, they “enforce DNS as a root of trust,” operating on a “default deny all” principle.
The technology is described by a simple analogy: ADAMnetworks essentially “presses a button that shuts down the whole internet” and then builds a unique, private version for you, based only on connections it explicitly allows.
This agentless approach works at the network level, allowing it to protect devices that can’t run traditional security, like IoT and industrial technology. The system neutralizes threats before they can execute, offering a truly proactive posture.
As Driessen puts it, this is the solution for “anyone that cannot afford to have a breach.” Instead of just detecting what went wrong, you see what could have gone wrong but was never allowed to connect in the first place.
Watch full interview here:
Spire Connect Interview Transcript
Pankaj Sharma: Security systems fail. When it fails, what do you do? And we say, “Well, just do it right now.” What are the kind of customers who should be interested in evaluating Adam Networks for the next year?
Francois Driessen: Anyone that cannot afford to have a breach.
Pankaj Sharma: Everybody in the world talks about zero trust. You guys came up with a term called zero trust connectivity.
Francois Driessen: We’ve actually went back to the very foundation of how the internet works and found a way to enforce DNS as a root of trust.
Pankaj Sharma: Adam Networks presses a button that shuts down the whole internet. It builds a unique version of the internet for you based on what connections it allows and disallows. This particular way of looking at zero trust through connectivity is something new to me. Real time solution is not fast enough. You need to be faster than real time.
[Music]
Pankaj Sharma: Hello and welcome to Spire Connect powered by Spired Solutions. It’s not very common that I meet somebody and when I struggle to pronounce their name and then I realize his designation is even more crazier. His name is Francois. He represents Adam Networks and his designation, just pay attention, his designation is he’s the Human Ambassador at Adam Networks.
Francois Driessen: Hi, my name is Francois. I am the COO and CMO of Adam Networks, human ambassador, and you are watching Spire Connects.
Pankaj Sharma: What’s this role Human Ambassador about?
Francois Driessen: You know, to us, it’s really important that what we stand for in the company is more important than your position. So, even though officially I’m Operations and Marketing Officer, that doesn’t mean much if our technology doesn’t end up serving people. Yeah, so to us, if you can have the world’s greatest technology or some new invention, what’s the point if it doesn’t actively change someone’s life or make their life better? So, that’s why Human Ambassador is my official driving title.
Pankaj Sharma: That’s such a unique title and I genuinely loved the human connection with technology and I think the reason we have Spire Connect today is because we wanted to add innovation and conversations on a single platform, and I believe Adam Network stands for the same.
Francois Driessen: Yes. Yeah. Absolutely. You know, at the core, Adam Networks is founded—it started because we had to protect our own families. And out of that, as the technology grew and we were solving problems to prevent circumvention, we realized that this piece of technology that we’re sitting is also an incredible solution for security and privacy and then of course, productivity. So, at the core, Adam Networks exists not to make tons of money, not to be a tech company. We exist because we’re there to protect people and so yeah, that sits at the core of everything that we do.
Pankaj Sharma: How did you guys name the company Adam Networks? What’s the story around that?
Francois Driessen: I actually love it when people ask us that. I don’t know if you’re familiar of the story of the Garden of Eden.
Pankaj Sharma: Okay. The Adam and Eve story.
Francois Driessen: Exactly. Exactly. That’s where it comes from. And that originally Eden was a perfect place, and then, you know, man messed up by believing Satan’s lie and whatnot, and then it turns into a lot of cursing and bad stuff that came from that. And that’s the same story, that’s the story of the internet as well. It was originally this whole idea that everything’s perfect to be connected, but then it corrupted really, really quickly. And so the whole idea of Adam is that it’s the restoration of that internet. That’s sort of where that comes from.
Pankaj Sharma: So, did David give an apple to you?
Francois Driessen: No, David did not give an apple to me.
Pankaj Sharma: For our audience, David is the CEO of the company.
Francois Driessen: Yes, he is the CEO of the company. Yeah.
Pankaj Sharma: Everybody in the world talks about zero trust but doesn’t know what to do with this zero trust. You guys came up with a term called zero trust connectivity. What’s the story behind this word?
Francois Driessen: I think the big issue here is that we’re applying zero trust really at the very core of how the internet works. So instead of having complicated systems that are completely identity-focused all the time, and then if that identity becomes compromised then the whole security stack falls apart, we’ve actually went back to the very foundation of how the internet works and basically found a way to enforce DNS as a root of trust. And so by doing it this way, you can actually apply zero trust on every connection but at a network level. So it’s out of band. You don’t need to install an endpoint agent, which means that IoT, medical IoT, industrial IoT, operation technology that can’t receive an endpoint agent, that problem is now solved because you don’t have to modify the endpoint to be secure. We can protect it regardless of what type of device it is.
Pankaj Sharma: So, and how do you license this solution?
Francois Driessen: So the solution is licensed really on two principles. It’s per node… just so you understand the way that it works, it’s a DNS caching resolver—a zero trust resolver—that is flexible and portable. So it lives on-prem or in the cloud and can be forced onto a device with VPN or using an access point network. But the node itself, it’s a muscle and brain configuration. Muscle meaning the on-prem resolver, and then the brain is the controller that is cloud-based. So now you have distributed implementation for resilience and for performance, but you also have centralized control. And so every node, every muscle node, is basically licensed per node but then also the number of endpoints that you want to put behind it. So it’s a combination of those two that determines what your licensing price and costs are.
Pankaj Sharma: Amazing. So it’s a very unique way of looking at how the BQS would be formed with Adam Networks. I have a different question now. This is the first time you are here at Gitex.
Francois Driessen: It’s our first Gitex. Yes.
Pankaj Sharma: How do you feel about Gitex?
Francois Driessen: So what do I enjoy about Gitex is that the whole world is more of a level playing field. And it’s more based on your technology’s performance and ability than it is what part of the world you’re coming from.
Pankaj Sharma: Amazing. A lot of people when they talk of agent or non-agent-based solutions, they believe it is only for the mid-enterprise or the theme segments. So is it a myth or a fact that Adam Networks is only for the mid-market people?
Francois Driessen: The interesting thing with this technology is that it is applicable to any device that connects to the internet that you don’t want to be turned into a zombie to attack your back or get destroyed. The technology is built in such a way that it is truly scalable and so there is not a limitation on the technology itself. The flexibility exists literally to take this to SMB if you wanted to or large enterprise if you wanted to. It’s more the implementation than it is the technology itself.
Pankaj Sharma: So what are the kind of customers who should be interested in evaluating Adam Networks for the next year?
Francois Driessen: Yeah, you know the short answer there is anyone that cannot afford to have a breach. If you’re sitting with personal identifiable information of your customers, the consequence of a breach… you’re running critical infrastructure, or mission critical operations, those are the types of guys that are interested in what we have. And so that would range from anything from Fintech, first responders, manufacturing, critical infrastructure, and really anyone that realizes that the price of a breach is too high, that the idea of recovering from that breach is not worth going through that pain.
Pankaj Sharma: Now when we’re looking at technology, there is a lot of technologies which are getting impacted by the rise of AI. Is it going to impact your business in an adverse way?
Francois Driessen: Oh, actually the interesting thing is that zero trust connectivity is an essential ingredient for protecting AI because what is your model actually connecting to? You have to protect your AI the same way that you’d have to protect any other asset, right? And so zero trust connectivity plays a big role in protecting LLMs. It also plays a big role in being able to control what connections from your company is going to sanction approved or disapproved LLM, right?
But I think more importantly where it plays a role is that the whole industry is moving all of their compute and their innovation into the detection phase. If you look at the cybersecurity framework, putting all of that effort onto the detection phase and overloading that with AI and with compute and complexity, that’s siloed. Now if you look at the attackers, where are they applying AI? Well, they’re putting it in the malware creation, they’re putting it in detection evasion. So you’re basically building an adversarial network between the attackers and the defenders, and the defenders’ AI is making the attackers stronger. It’s the same cat and mouse game that the industry has seen in the past.
And so what we do is to say, “Well, hold on. What if we apply our AI in a different part of that? What if the first thing that you do is to neutralize without needing to detect before the attack can execute?” And out of that, then you identify, respond, recover, right? And so to us, it’s about where you’re applying that AI. And the beautiful thing is you’re sitting with a $7,000$ to $1$ compute reduction because we’re only implementing our compute on what is good and verified, not on everything else that lives out there that you didn’t ask for, that’s yet unknown and that is unverified. So I think that’s sort of like a more of a long-winded answer on the AI scene. So in the end, it’s not about using AI, it’s about using AI correctly.
Pankaj Sharma: So when you go and meet so many customers, what are the common problems across regions which you are hearing about?
Francois Driessen: Well, the common problem is that security stacks are failing. And so it’s funny when you go to a security conference… the incident responders in the room all snigger and they go like, “Yeah, when all of this stuff fails and hits the fan, we come in and solve the problem.” Right? The whole thing about Adam Networks is this technology could actually be used in incident response. But whatever posture you take on by the time that you’re breached, Adam Network Technologies allows you to take on that posture before you get breached. So the same medicine that solves the problem when the problem actually hits can be applied now and it’s flexible enough that it won’t disrupt your operations. And so I think that is the common problem is that security systems fail. When it fails, what do you do? And we say, “Well, just do it right now. Assume that you’re already breached and just get yourself in that true proactive security posture.”
Pankaj Sharma: If you had to explain what Adam Networks does to a 10-year-old child, how would you do that?
Francois Driessen: If I were to explain Adam Networks or zero trust connectivity to a 10-year-old, I would say Adam Networks presses a button that shuts down the whole internet and then as your device is asking to go to good places, it builds a unique version of the internet for you based on what connections it allows and disallows.
Pankaj Sharma: Wow, this is so simple and so very well explained.
Francois Driessen: Well, any invention that is going to change the world has to be simple and it has to be elegant. The industry abandoned default deny all 10 years ago because it was not practical and they moved on from there. We went back to first principles and got it to work because the idea of just allowing all connections and then cleaning up the mess that happens after the fact just doesn’t make sense to us. So if you were to organize a party and you just let anyone come through the door, but you know that these five guys are bad, you let these five bad guys that are not in the door. But what about the guys that are there that are bad for the first time? Well, that doesn’t make sense. So rather put five guys on a list that you actually want to have at the party and they’re the only people that get to come to the party, right? That’s the whole principle of default deny all but you got to do it in such a way that it’s practical that every one of your friends that you want to be there is actually there. That’s the catch and that’s what we achieved with zero trust connectivity through Adam Networks.
Pankaj Sharma: Amazing. I’ve been in the network security domain for the last 12 years… but this particular way of looking at zero trust through connectivity is something new to me and I believe this should bring a fresh perspective to a lot of people who are planning for their budgets for the next year.
Francois Driessen: So if anyone asks me what the philosophy is that we’re aligning with for 2026 and going forwards, I would say it’s this is to go back to the foundations that were not done properly. So the internet was designed to be resilient and to work. It was not designed with any security element in place. And so zero trust connectivity brings a security element to the IP protocol that was never part of the original design. And so yeah, that’s what we’re aligning with and we believe that anyone that is serious about succeeding in their whole security stack has to also give attention to the foundational elements of the internet connectivity.
Pankaj Sharma: So let’s say if I am a CIO and I give this pitch to my board and they approve my budgets for the next year. The first thing I need to do is I need to evaluate your product. How do I do that?
Francois Driessen: Well, talk to the talk to our partners at Spire. We can do a proof of concept at various levels. And I think it’s very, very important to see the technology actually at work. And so we can do foundational proof of concepts that proves it out philosophically very quickly by just spinning up virtual machines and so forth. But where you actually want to see this at work is inside your infrastructure and with that just talk to our partners at Spire and they’ll set you up.
Pankaj Sharma: So a lot of people who talk about zero trust or and are agentless are actually cloud-based solutions. Are you totally cloud-based or can you be on-prem as well?
Francois Driessen: Oh, that’s actually very unique about Adam One, about our technology, is that at the core it is a portable resolver. You can spin it up in the cloud or it can live on-prem. It can live in the data center for your access point network, for your cellular network as well. So it’s incredibly flexible. But as I mentioned that you have this muscle-brain configuration, you have an on-prem resolver. And sovereign data custody is one of the outcomes of this. For us, the idea that if you’re going to try and implement zero trust to have centralized data flow and shipping all of your data into someone else’s custody, that’s abdicating data custody and there it’s being decrypted in a central attack point with the hope of finding something and then blocking it if it is discovered. We just couldn’t do that ourselves with our own data… Letting that sit in a centralized decrypted state is creating a hyper-valuable target. And that is why Adam functions on a decentralized sovereign data custody approach. There’s no decryption taking place. We’re looking at source and destination only and your data remains under your custody.
Pankaj Sharma: So let’s say if I’m a retail customer and I’m present across 20 countries. As an administrator I need one console for me and as a CIO I need a single console which comes from every site. Is that possible with Adam Networks?
Francois Driessen: Oh, absolutely. Yes. So it’s multi-location, multi-tenant. So you can have as many Adam nodes as what you need and all have a centralized controller. So you have decentralized distribution, performance and resilience, but you have that centralized control. So you can, for orchestration and for visibility, having a single pane of glass. The other beautiful thing is you can feed all of this into your SOC or your SIEM. But the very big difference to understand about zero trust connectivity going to a SOC or a SIEM: You’re not looking at what has already gone wrong. You’re looking at what could have gone wrong but was never allowed to execute. Was never allowed to connect, never allowed to exfiltrate that data. It’s a huge force multiplier for security operation centers because you don’t have to jump into action to neutralize once it’s discovered. It was neutralized first and now it becomes discovered.
Pankaj Sharma: A lot of solutions as you mentioned in the NIST framework as well are around detection or remediation. But all of these things come a little later into the picture and you call yourself as a proactive solution. Why do you do that?
Francois Driessen: Well, actually, we don’t just call ourselves a proactive solution because a lot of people use that term… They think that if you’re really proactive with your stance towards security that you are now proactively secure. But the reality is that you can be as proactive as you want to be in preparing for that breach. But if your tools are reactive in nature, you have a reactive posture. It’s like more solutions saying I’m near real time. But even if you had real time, that’s not fast enough because the damage is already done. So real time solution is not fast enough. You need to be faster than real time. Well, how do you do that? Well, what you do is whatever you would have done by the time that you detect, just do that as your first step. Now detection evasion is not a problem. Now zero days that no one knows about, for let’s look at the SolarWinds case, that was 9 to 12 months… well 5 minutes is sometimes enough in order to exfiltrate data, right? So that to us is not an option. You got to go the other way to say no, there should be no dwell time and then if you do see that the bad guy was there, should already be neutralized.
Pankaj Sharma: So zero trust is like a Lego. Every year you get a new variation, but nobody knows how to make the perfect recipe. Right. So how do you move over this barrier of implementing zero trust in a better way on your network?
Francois Driessen: Yeah. I that’s that’s really true. You know, if you look, if you read all of the papers about zero trust, you just go to the end where provision is made to say, “Well, most people will get to a zero trust state of only part of their network, only part of their assets, right?” And I think the way to get there is to say, “Well, where can we actually implement this philosophy that doesn’t require you to have endpoint agents, alter the actual devices and so forth.” By allowing zero trust to be inserted at the very foundation of internet connectivity helps you to gain a lot more ground.
Keep in mind that you can have per device policies in zero trust connectivity through Adam One. You can have per device policy if you want to get that granular. And that means non-uniform attack surface within an actual network—that the version of this device is different of the internet is different than the version of the internet for another device. And so that gives you complete control for privacy, for content protection, for security and for productivity even as to what this device should be doing and where it should be going.
Pankaj Sharma: You’re coming into the region which is already very well versed with cybersecurity solutions. There are so many partners who are mature and now you need to find your own niche space among those partners to get their mind share. So what would you like to tell the upcoming partner ecosystem for Adam Networks?
Francois Driessen: Well to get part of that mind share—and you’re right that is the biggest issue. Our problem is not technological. Our problem is to have people understand one that this does exist and two that it’s actually working. So there’s a few things that I would say. First of all is we don’t have to displace current technologies. We can augment and then in time as you find out that maybe there’s other technologies that’s not relevant anymore then you can let go of them. And so we have smart roll out that’s very flexible and we have per device policies…
If you cannot afford to have a breach, talk to us. If the intellectual property or the classified information that you’re protecting cannot get into the hands of an adversary, talk to us. If you’re not okay with dwell time where bad guys get to make the first move, get to do stuff and then you try to recover from it, talk to us.
Pankaj Sharma: Francois, you have attended so many global symposiums like this. What is one myth about marketeers which you want to destroy right now?
Francois Driessen: Buzzwords. You know, it’s AI everything. It’s… and I mean it’s they because AI is here then zero trust is not really spoken about. But just because you put buzzwords onto all technologies doesn’t make it work better. It doesn’t give you that edge that you actually need. It doesn’t change the philosophy. And that’s really the core that the technology has to go. It’s not the marketing people’s fault. Their job is to sell something. So, they’re going to come up with new stuff. What I’m saying is if there’s new stuff to be done, it’ll be done by the technology people, right? So that you actually sit with something new. You sit with a solution that didn’t exist before.
Pankaj Sharma: On this note that we want to destroy the buzzwords and get down to the real work. We thank you so much for joining us for today’s session on Spire Connect. Spire Connect powered by Spire Solutions and thank you so much for joining us.
Francois Driessen: Okay.