Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Leo Taddeo, Chief Security Officer, Cryptzone (Part 2)

Leo Taddeo: Our approach is that it’s very difficult to protect user credentials, and so the philosophy behind the software-defined perimeter is not only to do a very robust authentication of the user through attributes on the machine and other verifiable attributes, but also to prevent that user from going beyond the resources that they have legitimate access to. That, in effect, prevents critical stages of every attack that we’ve seen in the last 10 years. The attacker needs to move from an unprotected part of the network into a more sensitive part of the network. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Felix Odigie, CEO of Inspired eLearning (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How do you go to market? Are people paying for different modules separately or do you have an all-you-can-eat kind of subscription model?

Felix Odigie: It’s a SaaS business model. We have different types of customers. We have enterprise customers, small business customers, and even have individual smaller  business customers who purchase their modules on our e-commerce platform. In other words, you can buy the product by the library where you have access to all of the products and you can deploy it to your employees, or you can just buy specific sets of courses depending on what you’re trying to enforce.

I did mention the other categories that we have like sexual harassment and HIPAA. Security awareness is our biggest because it’s quite prevalent but we have other compliance areas as well. We host the courses on our LMS which makes it easy to deploy to the customer and optimize the user experience. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Thycotic James Legg CEO and Jonathan Cogley (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: The value proposition is still password management?

Jonathan Cogley: It’s a password vault but it’s really to prevent external or insider threats.

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about what is the competitive landscape. This is a crowded space. What is the competitive landscape that you see around your product?

Jonathan Cogley: The space is getting crowded because there’s a bunch of people who are a little bit late to the party. Some of the big vendors are coming in. They’re trying to either acquire small startups that aren’t necessarily that successful and throw their weight behind it. One of the reasons we are able to succeed is due to the fact that we are a pure-play vendor. We don’t do anything else. CA is in the space too but they’ve entered recently. It’s much easier to beat them in deals because the customer can quickly see that this is not CA’s core focus whereas Thycotic has been doing this for 12 years. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Thycotic James Legg CEO and Jonathan Cogley (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was that product that was the beginning of your transition from services to a product company?

Jonathan Cogley: The product’s name is called Secret Server. The simplest way to think about it is, if you think as an individual, all the passwords that you have are so many. They’re difficult to manage. There are some that don’t directly matter to you. We call them non-human passwords. You even have a few examples as a consumer.

If you think about the WiFi router at home, it doesn’t really belong to you but you need to know it and you need to keep it secure. If you think about that router, you need to know the admin password if you want to go in and change the specific settings for your home network. You need to know those credentials. If you roll that out to the IT department in an enterprise, they have those passwords except they are thousands of them. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Thycotic CEO James Legg and Founder Jonathan Cogley (Part 1)

Password management is a nightmare. See how the industry is evolving.

Sramana Mitra: Can one of you give us a background of the company and also please introduce yoruselves?

James Legg: I’m the CEO. Just to give you a background, Jonathan built and founded Thycotic and then decided he wanted some assistance in taking the company from roughly $25 million to $100 million. We’re fairly sizeable. He and I teamed up a year ago. Now we’re growing at a tremendous pace. I brought in several members of my team. This company today is growing at roughly 100% and we’re EBITDA and cash flow positive. We’re extremely profitable.

Sramana Mitra: Where are you located? >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Anand Adya, CEO of Greenlight Technologies (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I don’t agree with this. We have done Cyber Security Thought Leadership stories where companies have come here and talked about risk assessment of the enterprise. I have to say I don’t agree with your comment that there is no one else playing in that space. That tells me that you haven’t done your competitive analysis sufficiently and thoroughly.

Anand Adya: Our focus is not on third-party management, patch management, or risk assessment solutions. Let’s take SAP. What’s the possibility that somebody has dropped a malware on your laptop or device? Then there’s the ERP transactions. Either those transactions are initiated by you as an individual or initiated by the rogue entities through the malware. You don’t know that, but you need to, at least, find or surface those anomalies. Our IT solutions to capture those transactions is what makes us unique.

Sramana Mitra: Let me see if I’ve got what you’re trying to say. Your focus is on risk as it pertains to application security and especially malware penetration into the application world. Is that correct? >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Anand Adya, CEO of Greenlight Technologies (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Can you take us through a use case of how you implement a cyber governance solution for your customers?

Anand Adya: Right from the get-go, we had to understand the landscape of the security market and where we fit in with the uniqueness and differentiation that we have built around our intellectual property. The notion of cyber security was all based around perimeter security—firewall, network, and even devices. There are examples of successful companies and solutions in that area.

Lots of companies have adopted those solutions already in the context of security just to prevent any threats or vulnerabilities. The challenge is how to translate all those investments in the government framework with a particular focus on risk. What I mean by that is, to amplify your question, if I’m running applications like billing systems, they are carrying 95% of my business transactions. Business is dependent on those systems. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Anand Adya, CEO of Greenlight Technologies (Part 1)

Cyber Security is fraught with all sorts of risks. We discuss application security here as it pertains to malware intrusion.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to you as well as to your company.

Anand Adya: It has been exciting times in the company. It’s especially a challenging time for the industry in general to adjust the security and regulation-related topics. I’m the Founder of Greenlight Technologies. I’ve been a technocrat for the past two decades having worked with esteemed organizations like Pricewaterhouse and Andersen Consulting and part of two successful startups before this.

I have always been in the tech space. Greenlight was started with the mission of helping companies automate risk compliance initiatives. We certainly have >>>