Akshat Jain Co-founder and CTO, Cyware in an exclusive interview with Times Tech Buzz talk about their journey in building Cyware, their leadership in the cyber landscape. The gentleman also underlines Cyware’s deep focus on building next-gen collective defense solutions powered by virtual cyber fusion, security orchestration and automated response (SOAR), and threat intelligence automation. Edited Excerpts Below.
TimesTech: What is Cyware’s business about? What was your vision behind starting Cyware?
Akshat: Anuj Goel and I founded Cyware with a vision of building a self-responding collective defense network that drives cross-sectoral collaboration at industry scale through next-generation virtual cyber fusion centers. From our vast experience in leading large teams in the technology and security domains for global corporations, we recognised the shortcomings of the siloed, reactive, and manually-driven security processes employed by organizations in the past. The lack of security collaboration further adds to these challenges as technology infrastructure keeps expanding at a breakneck pace. We set out to help organizations overcome these challenges and transform the security landscape by creating a unified virtual cyber fusion center that forms the core of a self-responding collective defense ecosystem. Cyware has built scalable solutions to help organisations adopt a threat-intel and security automation-driven approach for proactively curbing cyber threats. Together, Cyware’s suite of solutions helps organisations leverage the power of security automation and orchestration, virtual cyber fusion, threat intelligence sharing, and situational awareness, in order to align their people, processes, and technology towards the shared security priorities of all their stakeholders.
TimesTech: Can you comment on the current challenges in the cybersecurity space?
Akshat: The cyber landscape today faces a dual challenge. On one hand, the threat actors in cyberspace are continually expanding their footprint through an underground economy and coming up with new tactics and techniques to bypass existing defenses. On the other hand, cybersecurity teams within organisations are facing a rising tide of threat alerts every day as their technology infrastructure becomes ever more distributed, adding to the number of critical assets requiring protection. Conventional security operations are not designed to deal with today’s rapidly evolving threat landscape. The lack of threat intel-driven processes leads to a lacklustre and delayed detection and response to potential threats, leading to a greater negative impact on the organisation. Similarly, the existence of many manual, cumbersome processes for security analysts can chew up valuable time and resources while responding to an incident. Adding to the security woes, different cybersecurity functions often operate in a disjointed manner, lacking information exchange, interoperability, and collaboration in threat management. This leads to the creation of information and process silos that hamper the overall productivity of security operations centres (SOCs). Lastly, not every organisation can employ the same kind of people, processes, and technologies to defend its infrastructure. Therefore, organisations across all sectors and geographies need security solutions that can help them collectively act to bridge the gaps in their defenses and counter threats in real-time so as to avoid fighting the battle against threat actors on their own.
TimesTech: Can you elaborate on strengthening cybersecurity infrastructure and how Cyware is enabling businesses to tackle ransomware attacks?
Akshat: To address the aforementioned challenges, Cyware has focused on building next-gen collective defense solutions powered by virtual cyber fusion, security orchestration and automated response (SOAR), and threat intelligence automation. Cyware is helping organisations tackle ransomware attacks, spear-phishing, supply chain attacks, and many other threats by enabling them to adopt a threat-intel-driven, automated, and collaborative approach to threat management. Instead of reacting to a threat after it has manifested into a full-blown security incident, Cyware equips organisations with the capabilities needed to proactively identify and analyse all potential threats, including ransomware threats, through real-time threat intelligence ingestion, analysis, and operationalisation. Consequently, Cyware’s solutions help security teams deliver a rapid and effective response to all reported threats through the combination of human and machine capabilities. In addition to that, Cyware is helping organisations across different industry sectors build their collective defense networks through information sharing and collaboration among all stakeholders in their ecosystem.
TimesTech: Can you elaborate on Cyware’s solutions? How is it impacting in making businesses secure?
Akshat: Cyware has emerged as a trailblazer in the security industry with the industry’s first Virtual Cyber Fusion Center (vCFC) platform that enables organisations to transform their security operations into a streamlined and integrated operational unit. It connects various security functions under a single roof to maximize threat visibility, enhance threat response capabilities, and simplify governance.
The vCFC combines the capabilities of Security Orchestration and Automated Response (SOAR) with Threat Intelligence. SOAR enables security teams to drive security actions through machine capabilities while requiring minimal or no human intervention. On the other hand, threat intelligence acts as an enabler for security teams by helping them analyse critical threats, improve their detection mechanisms, and provide a proactive response to threats at an early stage. A vCFC empowers an organization to leverage these key technologies through a single platform to simplify security operations.
Using Cyware’s SOAR solutions, organizations can build automated cross-functional workflows to orchestrate security actions across cloud-based, on-premise, or hybrid infrastructure. This makes a diverse set of tools and technologies interoperable, enabling security teams to drastically reduce the time spent on manual, repetitive tasks so as to focus on wiping out threats from their networks and systems.
To make cyber defense proactive, Cyware’s threat intelligence automation solutions help organisations decode adversary behavior through threat intel ingestion from multiple external sources, such as threat intel providers, regulatory agencies, CERTs, ISACs, and open-source intelligence sources (OSINT). Moreover, Cyware’s solution also ingests threat data from internal sources, such as the telemetry from SIEM, firewalls, intrusion detection/prevention systems (IDS/IPS), and other security tools deployed in an organization’s network. This provides security teams with the right knowledge to shape their cybersecurity strategy and processes for all known and emerging threats.
To complete the collective defense puzzle, Cyware also provides solutions that help organizations improve their situational awareness through automated strategic and tactical threat information sharing. This helps bring together various stakeholders in the fight against cyber adversaries.
TimesTech: Please share details on Cyware’s achievements and what does it mean for your clients?
Akshat: Cyware is building state-of-the-art security solutions for organisations of all sizes and across industries, ranging from Fortune 2000s to government agencies, national CERTs, regulatory agencies, mid-market organisations, and more. Through their sectoral sharing communities, more than 10,000 organisations across financial services, healthcare, automotive, space, and other critical industries rely on Cyware’s threat intelligence sharing solutions to exchange threat information, and collaborate, coordinate, and execute collective security actions. Cyware also became the first provider to launch a suite of threat intelligence solutions designed for organisations of all sizes and needs.
Cyware’s world-class team of product thinkers, security experts, and technology wizards grew by 2x in 2021, adding to its momentum in product innovation and customer success. As a testament to its customer-first philosophy, Cyware has achieved a 100% net-dollar retention rate in 2021 across its rapidly growing installed base worldwide. A number of leading analyst organisations, including Gartner, Forrester, IDC, and Aite-Novarica, have also recognized Cyware in 2021 for its innovation in the SOAR and threat intelligence space.
TimesTech: What are your growth strategies in India for 2022?
Akshat: Cyware will continue to focus on its growing customer base in India by delivering innovative solutions that help organisations across both the public and private sectors to strengthen their cybersecurity postures and become resilient in the face of growing cyber risks. To enable this, Cyware continues to invest in its large development and research centres in India, which witnessed a year-on-year doubling in team size. From hiring at the college campus level to attracting experienced talent in mid and senior-level positions, Cyware has built an all-star team in India. Moreover, through the collective defense impact of our solutions, we have gained traction among many different verticals worldwide. We will also continue to build our brand equity through valuable customer-centric cybersecurity solutions.
TimesTech: How are you bridging the skills gap present in the cybersecurity space?
Akshat: Skills in the cybersecurity domain are needed more than ever today as we attempt to help organisations bolster their cybersecurity postures. Cyware Academy is an initiative to address the skills gap through both live and on-demand training for Cyware’s advanced threat intel platform, SOAR solutions, and more. This platform is enabling all Cyware employees, partners, and customers to step up their skills through carefully crafted self-paced, online, training programs and certification courses. As Cyware continues to deliver leading threat information-sharing solutions to more than 20 sectoral Information Sharing and Analysis Centers (ISACs), our training programs provide our partners, customers, and employees with valuable hands-on experience on our security tools that are being widely used by more than 10,000 organizations.
