While
the cloud has allowed companies to create new applications and services fast,
traditional firewalls and agents for security slow things down. And a simple
mistake in not implementing a security update can lead to disastrous breaches
like the ones Wyze, Equifax and CapitalOne suffered that can cost hundreds of
millions of dollars. Data layer security startup Cyral emerged from stealth today announcing $15 million in funding. VMblog spoke to CTO and co-founder Srini Vadlamani about why companies need new security
protections at the data layer.
VMblog: What is new about securing a company's data in a cloud native world?
Srini Vadlamani: Traditional security solutions are simply
not designed for this new computing environment. They're getting overwhelmed.
Companies struggle to just keep track of sensitive data on premises and in
public clouds, not to mention keep it secure. And everything is moving so much
faster, from business requirements to computing workloads. According to IDC,
the world's data will grow from about 29 zettabytes (ZB) in 2018 to 175 ZB by
2025. Security needed to be reimagined from the data layer up. That's what we
built with Cyral.
VMblog: Describe the new cloud native environments Cyral aims to protect?
Vadlamani: With the widespread adoption of
microservices and containers we are in the middle of a shift to a new computing
paradigm - cloud native. New lightweight services are written from the ground
up, communicating with each other using remote procedure calls (RPC). Instead
of the traditional on-prem databases, these services now use cloud-based data
repositories, which includes SQL and NoSQL databases, pipelines and data
warehouses, all accessed as data endpoints. Very often the repositories
themselves are 3rd party SaaS services and their consumers don't have the
ability to control them directly.
We have created a new data layer security
solution for this new computing environment.
VMblog: How
does it work?
Vadlamani: Cyral intercepts requests to data
endpoints with no impact to latency or throughput. We continuously examine,
normalize, and analyze all request structures for sensitive data access, then
automatically generate policies to baseline normal behavior.
These derived policies can then be manually
augmented by the user. Cyral alerts on suspicious activity and can block known
threats and disallowed accesses.
Cyral integrates directly into existing CI/CD
pipelines, fitting nicely into the DevOps framework. The service is also
entirely driven by REST APIs so, while we do provide a UI, we can also plug
direclty into existing tools and dashboards.
This is a boon for developers. They get critical
visibility and functionality without introducing heavy-duty latency or doubling
down on "UI fatigue" . This frees them
to focus on the core products and applications they need to be building. We
make developers more productive while at the same time businesses can move
faster and be better protected.
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