(bright music) >> Welcome back everyone to the live Cube coverage here in Boston, Massachusetts for AWS re:Inforce 22, with a great guest here, Denise Hayman, CRO, Chief Revenue of Sonrai Security. Sonrai's a featured partner of Season Two, Episode Four of the upcoming AWS Startup Showcase, coming in late August, early September. Security themed startup focused event, check it out. awsstartups.com is the site. We're on Season Two. A lot of great startups, go check them out. Sonrai's in there, now for the second time. Denise, it's great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Ah, thanks for having me. >> So you've been around the industry for a while. You've seen the waves of innovation. We heard encrypt everything today on the keynote. We heard a lot of cloud native. They didn't say shift left but they said don't bolt on security after the fact, be in the CI/CD pipeline or the DevStream. All that's kind of top of line, Amazon's talking cloud native all the time. This is kind of what you guys are in the middle of. I've covered your company, you've been on theCUBE before. Your, not you, but your teammates have. You guys have a unique value proposition. Take a minute to explain for the folks that don't know, we'll dig into it, but what you guys are doing. Why you're winning. What's the value proposition. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, Sonrai is, I mean what we do is it's, we're a total cloud solution, right. Obviously, right, this is what everybody says. But what we're dealing with is really, our superpower has to do with the data and identity pieces within that framework. And we're tying together all the relationships across the cloud, right. And this is a unique thing because customers are really talking to us about being able to protect their sensitive data, protect their identities. And not just people identities but the non-people identity piece is the hardest thing for them to reign in. >> Yeah. >> So, that's really what we specialize in. >> And you guys doing good, and some good reports on good sales, and good meetings happening here. Here at the show, the big theme to me, and again, listening to the keynotes, you hear, you can see what's, wasn't talk about. >> Mm-hmm. >> Ransomware wasn't talked about much. They didn't talk about air-gapped. They mentioned ransomware I think once. You know normal stuff, teamwork, encryption everywhere. But identity was sprinkled in everywhere. >> Mm-hmm. >> And I think one of the, my favorite quotes was, I wrote it down, We've security in the development cycle CSD, they didn't say shift left. Don't bolt on any of that. Now, that's not new information. We know that don't bolt, >> Right. >> has been around for a while. He said, lessons learned, this is Stephen Schmidt, who's the CSO, top dog on security, who has access to what and why over permissive environments creates chaos. >> Absolutely. >> This is what you guys reign in. >> It is. >> Explain, explain that. >> Yeah, I mean, we just did a survey actually with AWS and Forrester around what are all the issues in this area that, that customers are concerned about and, and clouds in particular. One of the things that came out of it is like 95% of clouds are, what's called over privileged. Which means that there's access running amok, right. I mean, it, it is, is a crazy thing. And if you think about the, the whole value proposition of security it's to protect sensitive data, right. So if, if it's permissive out there and then sensitive data isn't being protected, I mean that, that's where we really reign it in. >> You know, it's interesting. I zoom out, I just put my historian hat on going back to the early days of my career in late eighties, early nineties. There's always, when you have these inflection points, there's always these problems that are actually opportunities. And DevOps, infrastructure as code was all about APS, all about the developer. And now open source is booming, open source is the software industry. Open source is it in the world. >> Right. >> That's now the software industry. Cloud scale has hit and now you have the Devs completely in charge. Now, what suffers now is the Ops and the Sec, Second Ops. Now Ops, DevOps. Now, DevSecOps is where all the action is. >> Yep. >> So the, the, the next thing to do is build an abstraction layer. That's what everyone's trying to do, build tools and platforms. And so that's where the action is here. This is kind of where the innovation's happening because the networks aren't the, aren't in charge anymore either. So, you now have this new migration up to higher level services and opportunities to take the complexity away. >> Mm-hmm. >> Because what's happened is customers are getting complexity. >> That's right. >> They're getting it shoved in their face, 'cause they want to do good with DevOps, scale up. But by default their success is also their challenge. >> Right. >> 'Cause of complexity. >> That's exactly right. >> This is, you agree with that. >> I do totally agree with that. >> If you, you believe that, then what's next. What happens next? >> You know, what I hear from customers has to do with two specific areas is they're really trying to understand control frameworks, right. And be able to take these scenarios and build them into something that they, where they can understand where the gaps are, right. And then on top of that building in automation. So, the automation is a, is a theme that we're hearing from everybody. Like how, how do they take and do things like, you know it's what we've been hearing for years, right. How do we automatically remediate? How do we automatically prioritize? How do we, how do we build that in so that they're not having to hire people alongside that, but can use software for that. >> The automation has become key. You got to find it first. >> Yes. >> You guys are also part of the DevCycle too. >> Yep. >> Explain that piece. So, I'm a developer, I'm an organization. You guys are on the front end. You're not bolt-on, right? >> We can do either. We prefer it when customers are willing to use us, right. At the very front end, right. Because anything that's built in the beginning doesn't have the extra cycles that you have to go through after the fact, right. So, if you can build security right in from the beginning and have the ownership where it needs to be, then you're not having to, to deal with it afterwards. >> Okay, so how do you guys, I'm putting my customer hat on for a second. A little hard, hard question, hard problem. I got active directory on Azure. I got, IM over here with AWS. I wanted them to look the same. Now, my on-premises, >> Ah. >> Is been booming, now I got cloud operations, >> Right. >> So, DevOps has moved to my premise and edge. So, what do I do? Do I throw everything out, do a redo. How do you, how do you guys talk about, talk to customers that have that chance, 'cause a lot of them are old school. >> Right. >> ID. >> And, and I think there's a, I mean there's an important distinction here which is there's the active directory identities right, that customers are used to. But then there's this whole other area of non-people identities, which is compute power and privileges and everything that gets going when you get you know, machines working together. And we're finding that it's about five-to-one in terms of how many identities are non-human identities versus human identity. >> Wow. >> So, so you actually have to look at, >> So, programmable access, basically. >> Yeah. Yes, absolutely. Right. >> Wow. >> And privileges and roles that are, you know accessed via different ways, right. Because that's how it's assigned, right. And people aren't really paying that close attention to it. So, from that scenario, like the AD thing of, of course that's important, right. To be able to, to take that and lift it into your cloud but it's actually even bigger to look at the bigger picture with the non-human identities, right. >> What about the CISOs out there that you talk to. You're in the front lines, >> Yep. >> talking to customers and you see what's coming on the roadmap. >> Yep. >> So, you kind of get the best of both worlds. See what they, what's coming out of engineering. What's the biggest problem CISOs are facing now? Is it the sprawl of the problems, the hacker space? Is it not enough talent? What, I mean, I see the fear, what are, what are they facing? How do you, how do you see that, and then what's your conversations like? >> Yeah. I mean the, the answer to that is unfortunately yes, right. They're dealing with all of those things. And, and here we are at the intersection of, you know, this huge complex thing around cloud that's happening. There's already a gap in terms of resources nevermind skills that are different skills than they used to have. So, I hear that a lot. The, the bigger thing I think I hear is they're trying to take the most advantage out of their current team. So, they're again, worried about how to operationalize things. So, if we bring this on, is it going to mean more headcount. Is it going to be, you know things that we have to invest in differently. And I was actually just with a CISO this morning, and the whole team was, was talking about the fact that bringing us on means they have, they can do it with less resource. >> Mm-hmm. >> Like this is a a resource help for them in this particular area. So, that that was their value proposition for us, which I loved. >> Let's talk about Adrian Cockcroft who retired from AWS. He was at Netflix before. He was a big DevOps guy. He talks about how agility's been great because from a sales perspective the old model was, he called it the, the big Indian wedding. You had to get everyone together, do a POC, you know, long sales cycles for big tech investments, proprietary. Now, open sources like speed dating. You can know what's good quickly and and try things quicker. How is that, how is that impacting your sales motions. Your customer engagements. Are they fast? Are they, are they test-tried before they buy? What's the engagement model that you, you see happening that the customers like the best. >> Yeah, hey, you know, because of the fact that we're kind of dealing with this serious part of the problem, right. With the identities and, and dealing with data aspects of it it's not as fast as I would like it to be, right. >> Yeah, it's pretty important, actually. >> They still need to get in and understand it. And then it's different if you're AWS environment versus other environments, right. We have to normalize all of that and bring it together. And it's such a new space, >> Yeah. >> that they all want to see it first. >> Yeah. >> Right, so. >> And, and the consequences are pretty big. >> They're huge. >> Yeah. >> Right, so the, I mean, the scenario here is we're still doing, in some cases we'll do workshops instead of a POV or a POC. 90% of the time though we're still doing a POV. >> Yeah, you got to. >> Right. So, they can see what it is. >> They got to get their hands on it. >> Yep. >> This is one of those things they got to see in action. What is the best-of-breed? If you had to say best-of-breed in identity looks like blank. How would you describe that from a customer's perspective? What do they need the most? Is it robustness? What's some of the things that you guys see as differentiators for having a best-of-breed solution like you guys have. >> A best-of-breed solution. I mean, for, for us, >> Or a relevant solution for that matter, for the solution. >> Yeah. I mean, for us, this, again, this identity issue it, for us, it's depth and it's continuous monitoring, right. Because the issue in the cloud is that there are new privileges that come out every single day, like to the tune of like 35,000 a year. So, even if at this exact moment, it's fine. It's not going to be in another moment, right. So, having that continuous monitoring in there, and, and it solves this issue that we hear from a lot of customers also around lateral movement, right. Because like a piece of compute can be on and off, >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> within a few seconds, right. So, you can't use any of the old traditional things anymore. So to me, it's the continuous monitoring I think that's important. >> I think that, and the lateral movement piece, >> Yep. >> that you guys have is what I hear the most of the biggest fears. >> Mm-hmm. >> Someone gets in here and can move around, >> That's right. >> and that's dangerous. >> Mm-hmm. And, and no traditional tools will see it. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Right. There's nothing in there unless you're instrumented down to that level, >> Yeah. >> which is what we do. You're not going to see it. >> I mean, when someone has a firewall, a perimeter based system, yeah, I'm in the castle, I'm moving around, but that's not the case here. This is built for full observability, >> That's right. >> Yet there's so many vulnerabilities. >> It's all open. Mm-hmm, yeah. And, and our view too, is, I mean you bring up vulnerabilities, right. It, it is, you know, a little bit of the darling, right. People start there. >> Yep. >> And, and our belief in our view is that, okay, that's nice. But, and you do have to do that. You have to be able to see everything right, >> Yep. >> to be able to operationalize it. But if you're not dealing with the sensitive data pieces right, and the identities and stuff that's at the core of what you're trying to do >> Yeah. >> then you're not going to solve the problem. >> Yeah. Denise, I want to ask you. Because you make what was it, five-to-one was the machine to humans. I think that's actually might be low, on the low end. If you could imagine. If you believe that's true. >> Yep. >> I believe that's true by the way If microservices continues to be the, be the wave. >> Oh, it'll just get bigger. >> Which it will. It's going to much bigger. >> Yeah. >> Turning on and off, so, the lateral movement opportunities are going to be greater. >> Yep. >> That's going to be a bigger factor. Okay, so how do I protect myself. Now, 'cause developer productivity is also important. >> Mm-hmm. >> 'Cause, I've heard horror stories like, >> Yep. >> Yeah, my Devs are cranking away. Uh-oh, something's out there. We don't know about it. Everyone has to stop, have a meeting. They get pulled off their task. It's kind of not agile. >> Right. Right. >> I mean, >> Yeah. And, and, in that vein, right. We have built the product around what we call swim lanes. So, the whole idea is we're prioritizing based on actual impact and context. So, if it's a sandbox, it probably doesn't matter as much as if it's like operational code that's out there where customers are accessing it, right. Or it's accessing sensitive data. So, we look at it from a swim lane perspective. When we try to get whoever needs to solve it back to the person that is responsible for it. So we can, we can set it up that way. >> Yeah. I think that, that's key insight into operationalizing this. >> Yep. >> And remediation is key. >> Yes. >> How, how much, how important is the timing of that. When you talk to your customer, I mean, timing is obviously going to be longer, but like seeing it's one thing, knowing what to do is another. >> Yep. >> Do you guys provide that? Is that some of the insights you guys provide? >> We do, it's almost like, you know, us. The, and again, there's context that's involved there, right? >> Yeah. >> So, some remediation from a priority perspective doesn't have to be immediate. And some of it is hair on fire, right. So, we provide actually, >> Yeah. >> a recommendation per each of those situations. And, and in some cases we can auto remediate, right. >> Yeah. >> If, it depends on what the customer's comfortable with, right. But, when I talk to customers about what is their favorite part of what we do it is the auto remediation. >> You know, one of the things on the keynotes, not to, not to go off tangent, one second here but, Kurt who runs platforms at AWS, >> Mm-hmm. >> went on his little baby project that he loves was this automated, automatic reasoning feature. >> Mm-hmm. >> Which essentially is advanced machine learning. >> Right. >> That can connect the dots. >> Yep. >> Not just predict stuff but like actually say this doesn't belong here. >> Right. >> That's advanced computer science. That's heavy duty coolness. >> Mm-hmm. >> So, operationalizing that way, the way you're saying it I'm imagining there's some future stuff coming around the corner. Can you share how you guys are working with AWS specifically? Is it with Amazon? You guys have your own secret sauce for the folks watching. 'Cause this remediation should, it only gets harder. You got to, you have to be smarter on your end, >> Yep. >> with your engineers. What's coming next. >> Oh gosh, I don't know how much of what's coming next I can share with you, except for tighter and tighter integrations with AWS, right. I've been at three meetings already today where we're talking about different AWS services and how we can be more tightly integrated and what's things we want out of their APIs to be able to further enhance what we can offer to our customers. So, there's a lot of those discussions happening right now. >> What, what are some of those conversations like? Without revealing. >> I mean, they have to do with, >> Maybe confidential privilege. >> privileged information. I don't mean like privileged information. >> Yep. I mean like privileges, right, >> Right. >> that are out there. >> Like what you can access, and what you can't. >> What you can, yes. And who and what can access it and what can't. And passing that information on to us, right. To be able to further remediate it for an AWS customer. That's, that's one. You know, things like other AWS services like CloudTrail and you know some of the other scenarios that they're talking about. Like we're, you know, we're getting deeper and deeper and deeper with the AWS services. >> Yeah, it's almost as if Amazon over the past two years in particular has been really tightly integrating as a strategy to enable their partners like you guys >> Mm-hmm. >> to be successful. Not trying to land grab. Is that true? Do you get that vibe? >> I definitely get that vibe, right. Yesterday, we spent all day in a partnership meeting where they were, you know talking about rolling out new services. I mean, they, they are in it to win it with their ecosystem. Not on, not just themselves. >> All right, Denise it's great to have you on theCUBE here as part of re:Inforce. I'll give you the last minute or so to give a plug for the company. You guys hiring? What are you guys looking for? Potential customers that are watching? Why should they buy you? Why are you winning? Give a, give the pitch. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, so yes we are hiring. We're always hiring. I think, right, in this startup world. We're growing and we're looking for talent, probably in every area right now. I know I'm looking for talent on the sales side. And, and again, the, I think the important thing about us is the, the fullness of our solution but the superpower that we have, like I said before around the identity and the data pieces and this is becoming more and more the reality for customers that they're understanding that that is the most important thing to do. And I mean, if they're that, Gartner says it, Forrester says it, like we are one of the, one of the best choices for that. >> Yeah. And you guys have been doing good. We've been following you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> And congratulations on your success. And we'll see you at the AWS Startup Showcase in late August. Check out Sonrai Systems at AWS Startup Showcase late August. Here at theCUBE live in Boston getting all the coverage. From the keynotes, to the experts, to the ecosystem, here on theCUBE, I'm John Furrier your host. Thanks for watching. (bright music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to today's session of theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Startup Showcase, The Next Big Thing in AI, Security, & Life Sciences, and in this segment, we feature Sonrai security, of course for the security track I'm your host, Dave Vellante, and today we're joined by Sandy Bird, who's the co-founder and chief technology officer of Sonrai, and Avi Boru, who's the director of cloud engineering at World Fuel Services, and in this discussion, we're going to talk about 22 to two data centers, how World Fuel Services and Sonrai Security actually made it happen securely. Folks, welcome to theCUBE, come on in. >> Thank you. >> So we hear consistent themes from chief information security officers, that many if not most enterprises they struggle today with cloud security, there's confusion with various tools and depressing lack of available talent to attack this problem. So Sandy, I want to start with you, we always love to ask co-founders, why did you start your company? Take us back to that decision. >> Yeah, I think looking at Sonrai Security was interesting in that, it was a time to start over, it was a time to build a native in the cloud, as opposed to having a data center, and be able to use, you know, a vendor of infrastructure, be able to use the latest and greatest technology and really change the way people secure their workloads, what was interesting, you know, when we started the company, I believe that the world was in a more mature space probably in cloud than they were at the time when we were starting it, in that we were really focused around, if we could understand all of the rights and entitlements to data, we could understand data movement, we'd had hope in protecting the data and arriving in cloud, we realized that the maturity of the companies building in cloud, we're not quite there yet, they were really struggling with, you know, the identities models in the cloud, how to actually secure, you know, workloads, server less functions that are ephemeral these types of things, and even just sometimes basic governance problems, and the technology we had built was great at understanding all of the ways that data could be accessed, and we were able to expand that into all the resources of the cloud and it's an exciting space to be in, and it's also, I truly believe we'll be able to actually make cloud environments more secure than what we were doing in enterprise, because again for the first time ever you have full inventory, you have the ability to make controls that apply to the entire infrastructure, it's really an exciting time. >> I mean, I've said many times I feel like security is a do over and the fact that you're coming at it as a data problem and bringing in the cloud that intersection, I think is actually quite exciting. So Avi let's bring you into the conversation, you know, obviously we've seen cloud exploding it's continuing to be a staple of digital business transformations and acceleration especially around identity, so what's your point of view on cloud security, what's different and how does your company approach it? >> Sure, thank you for having me Dave, and just to give you a bit of World Fuel Services, World Fuel Services is a public company, and it's based out of Miami, and we are ranked 91 in the fortune 500 list, so we are spread all across the globe, and as part of our transformation to distress our business, we took over a big challenge to migrate all our global infrastructure from 22 data centers to AWS, that was a massive challenge for us, and we are downright now to 20 data centers, we only have two more to go, and we did this in the last two years, and that was really good for us, but as we've been doing this migration, there was also a strong need for us to build a strong security foundation, because going into the cloud as much as capabilities it gives us to innovate, it also gives us a lot of challenges to deal with from security standpoint, and as part of building the security foundation, we had to tackle some key challenges, one was how do we build our cloud security operating model and how do we up skill our people, the talent that you've been binding it out, and how do we make security a way of working in this new world, and more than choosing a solution we needed a really strong security partner who can help us guide in this journey, help us build the foundations and take us further and mature us in this, and that's where it was really interesting for us to partner with Sonrai, who helped us along the way, develop a foundation and now helping us mature our security platform. >> Avi, what were the technology underpinnings, that enticed you to work with Sonrai? >> Sonrai has lot of unique capabilities but I'll take it out on two key points, right? One, Sonrai has a cloud security posture management which is different from other platforms that are out there because they give you capability for a lot of out of the box frameworks and controls, but in addition to that, every organization has need to build unique specific frameworks, specific controls, they give you that capability, which is massive for enterprises, and the second key thing is, if you look at AWS, it has more than 200 services and every service has its unique capability but one key component they use across all the services, is Identity and Access Management, IAM and Sonrai has a unique perspective of using IAM to track risks and identify the interactions between user and machine identities which was really exciting and new for us, and we felt that was a really good foundation and stepping point to use Sonrai. >> All right, Sandy, we definitely saw the need for a better identity explode, in conjunction with the cloud migrations during the pandemic, it was sort of building and building and then it was accelerated, maybe talk a little bit about how you approach this, and specifically talk about your identity analytics and the graph solution that you guys talk about. >> Yeah, I've been a fan of graph solutions for many years, one of the great benefits in this particular space with identity is that, the cloud models for identity are fairly complex and quite different between AWS, Azure and GCP, however, the way that entitlements work, some identity is granted in entitlement, and that entitlement gives them access to do something, sometimes that's something is to assume another identity, and then do something on that identities behalf, and when you're actually trying to secure these clouds this jumping of identities, which happens a lot in the AWS model, or inheritance which happens a lot in the Azure model where you're given access at one level of the tree and you automatically gain access to things below that if you have that entitlement, those models inside of graph allow us to understand exactly how any given identity when we talk about identity we always think of people, but it's not, of course as you said, sometimes it's a machine, sometimes it's a cloud service, it could be many different things, how does every single one of those identities get access to that given resource? And it's not always as clear as, okay, well, here are the direct identities that can access this resource, it may only be able to be accessed with a single key, but who has access to the key, and what has access to the key, and what's the policy on that key, and if that's set too widely can other maybe nefarious actors get access to that key, and by using the graph, we can tie that whole model together to understand the entire list, of what gets access, I think that's actually what surprises a lot of the identity governance and data governance teams that are not in cloud, you know, when enterprise was very intentional, you configured the database to use the identity provider and the rules that you wanted it to use, and that's all that ever got access to that database. In cloud, there are a lot of configuration knobs and things and depending on how you turn them, you could open up a lot of identities to get access to whatever that resource is, often it's data, but it could be a network, it could be many things. So, the graph allows us to tie all that together, the second part of it is, it really allows us to see, we call them effective permissions, what the effective permission of that identity is, the clouds have done this phenomenal thing in using identities as a control mechanism just like in firewall, like an identity firewall, where they can take permissions away from things based on sets of conditions, so one of the great ways, let's say you didn't want to have any data stored deployed without encryption, you could write a policy at the top of your cloud, that says, anytime a data stores is deployed, if encryption is not there, deny that function. And so what happens is, is you can create this very protective environment using identity controls, but the problem is when you actually go to evaluate your cloud for risk, you may find a scenario where an identity has access as an example, to do something like create an internet gateway, or create a public endpoint, but there's this policy somewhere else, that's taking that away, and you don't want thousands of alerts because of that, you want to actually understand the model and say, look if we understand that this policy is mitigating your risk, then don't show the alert in the first place. And it really helps by putting it in a graph, because we can actually see all of these interconnections, we can see how they're interrelated, and determine the exact effective permissions of any identity and what risks that may have. >> So Avi, I mean, Sandy is really getting to the heart of sort of operationalizing you security in the cloud, and we looked at the compelling aspect of the cloud, and one of them anyway is scale, but people tell us to really take advantage of the cloud, they have to evolve that operating model maybe completely change the operating model, to really take advantage of scale, so my question is how do you operationalize your security practices, what should people think about, in terms of the time it takes to build in automations and bots for things like continuous compliance what can you share in terms of best practice? >> So traditional ways of operating if you look at it is, you identify a security risk, and a ticket is created and teams starts mitigating them. But with so many cloud services and with many solutions, the team start building in the cloud, it becomes too much of an overhead for teams to mitigate all these security risks that keep coming into the backlog, so as we partner with Sonrai in building a foundation, the way we tried to approach it is differently, we said why don't we build this using automatic recommendations, if we know what are the security risks, that we should not be creating in our environment and be noncompliant, how can we mitigate them? And with Sonrai and AWS API capabilities, it's not that hard for us to be a lot of intimidation buds because I didn't find risks, 'cause they have been taken care by Sonrai, the only aspect we need to take care is, how do we mitigate that? So that's the part we chose in building, cloud security operating model, is modeling more than an automated imitations, but as part building that there is always, where everything cannot be remediated automatically, and for these kinds of scenarios, we built a workflow where it still gets funneled to teams, so they can prioritize in their backlog, but other key thing that we did as part of operationalizing is, teams need to use Sonrai as their way of working, teams need to know what and why they should be using Sonrai. So we conduct a lot of training and onboarding and working sessions for teams, so they understand how we use Sonrai, how to consume the data coming out of Sonrai, so they can proactively start acting on how to stay compliant, but yeah, it's been an amazing experience building our foundation though. >> Sandy, I wonder if we can come back to, talking about comparisons with the traditional prevailing security models, I mean, we entering this API economy, as I said before, cloud is a staple of digital business, but you know people have been doing on-prem security for decades, you know, data loss prevention is an entire sub-industry, so what's different about doing it in the cloud, how should we think about that, in terms of whether you know, what responsibilities we have, the technology, what's your perspective on that? >> There's at least five questions in there Dave, so we'll. >> Pick your favorite. >> Yeah, you know, to feed off of what Avi was talking about, you know, he said many times, you know, teams need to solve these issues, teams need to see the issues they're creating, and it's interesting as we move to cloud, we decentralize some of these security functions, and that's actually an important part of the Sonrai solution and how you build a cloud security operating model, there's a set of findings, we'll call them, maybe there are security findings, maybe they're informational findings, that are a fairly low risk, and should be dealt with by the individual teams themselves, but that same team, you know, maybe isn't the person that can sign off on the risk if it's high enough, and if it's not then it needs to be escalated to the next level up to have that risk signed off on. A lot of times in large enterprise for workloads, that was done using unfortunately, you know tickets and systems and, you know, humans actually, you know, filling out some form of a checklist, saying, yes I met this, no I didn't, and we can automate huge numbers of those tests, including distributing them to the teams for the teams to solve themselves, and if they do their job right, there's not even the need for the central security body necessarily to know about the issues because they got solved, but when they don't get solved, that's when rather, you know, escalation to Boston automation or escalating to a centralized team starts to make sense, you kind of said a lot about DLP there as you were doing in cloud and just data security in general, and I do think, you know, cloud has given us this interesting opportunity, that's really upset data security in the old way on its head, you know, we used to do data security by putting agents on systems, or sometimes it was a proxy in front of it but either way that doesn't work well in cloud, when you're consuming platform as a service, you know, Amazon is not going to let you put an agent on their database that they're provisioning for you, and, you know, if you put in your own proxy in front of it you probably just messed up the elastic scalability that was built into the whole thing to begin with. So we needed a different way to look at this, however, we also took away a couple of things, in cloud the application teams themselves generally use fit for purpose data stores, they use the data store that's the best for the workload they're doing, our own workload has many data stores under the covers, it's not one data store, and so because of that, this kind of, you know, the old world of there being a data security team or you know, database optimization team, that you know optimize the database workloads, actually gets distributed as well all back to those teams, and so, we've gained kind of this, you know, fit for purpose smaller sets of data stores that are being used all over, and on top of that, the cloud vendors in many cases have done great things to enable monitoring, you know, part of the reason we were putting agents on database servers, is because the Oracle admin said I can't turn logging on, I don't have a big enough system to do it, it's going to crash the system, well in cloud parts of that go away, you can scale the systems up, you can enable loggings, now you can get that rich data that you wanted when you were an enterprise, and so, you know Sonrai is really kind of taken that model and said, look we can give you the visibility around data movement, we can give you the visibility around all of the entitlements to that data, we can understand, is your data at risk? And then we can profile all that for anomalies, and say, you know, it's kind of odd that the workload that normally connects into this through this automated fashion is now using its access key from a different location, that doesn't make any sense, why is that happening? And so you get kind of strong anomaly detection as well as the governance. So, you know, data security and cloud, if we kind of fast forward a few years, will look very different than it does today, I still believe some of the teams are not quite there yet in cloud, you know, they're still struggling with some of these identity problems we talked about, they still struggle some of them with CSBM problems, and so we have to solve those first obviously before we get to the true data security. But it's interesting that cloud has enabled us with such rich tooling and APIs to actually do it better than what we've done on enterprise. >> A lot of really powerful concepts in there, thank you Sandy. I mean, this notion of decentralizing security functions reminds me when Vogels describes this hyper decentralized distributed system that Amazon is building, and it is clearly a theme, you know, maybe it's bromide, but people talk about shifting left, designing security in, and it's important, not just bolting it on as an afterthought, and so, maybe this next question sort of really relates to the theme of this event, which is all about scale, here's the question Sandy, thinking about your contribution to the future of cloud, obviously you start a company, you want to grow that company, you want to serve customers and grow your revenues et cetera. But what's your defining contribution to the future of cloud scale? >> Look, we want to enable companies to scale faster, we want them to be able to put more workloads in cloud using, you know, the right set of security controls to keep those workloads safe, I know we can actually do this in a way where, you know, we talk about defense in depth for years, right? And usually in enterprise that meant many levels of networks before you got access, now we need to do defense in depth in terms of, you know, actually variety of controls, we can't throw the network control away, it still has to be there, we need an identity control, and it will be the primary control for what we do in cloud, we need a data lock, you know, rather that's through an encryption key policy or whatever it is, so we have multiple different layers of defense in depth, we can use in cloud today, and so it will be a much more secure environment than it was in the future, but we have to, again, so my contribution is hopefully I can help everybody get to that level, because right now we still see way too many breaches with very simple configuration problems that ended up exposing data unintentionally, and that's worrisome. >> You know, it's funny, a lot of people maybe can't relate to that defense in depth, I mean, obviously security people can, but we as individuals who now rely so much on our mobile phones, and things like SMS, and then you start to build in, non SMS, you know, base two factor authentication and you start to build your own personal layers, it's sort of a microcosm of the complexity that you have to think about in the enterprise, but in having tools to automate is critical, and expertise obviously, so let's wrap. Avi give us your final thoughts and key takeaways on building a world-class cloud security. >> I guess the key take of this would be, you know, to choose the right partner, it's not just the solution, another key takeaway is automate your way, because with security in the cloud is different than traditionally how do you do it, and the only fastest way to move is automate yourself away out of it and rely on talent, rely on a lot of young talent that's coming in and all the tools like Sonrai AWS are making it easier to operate in the cloud, so bring up the young talent and up skill the talent and leverage on these tools to be more secure on the cloud. >> Yeah, use automation to solve the big problem of, you know, that talent gap, there is not enough of it out there, and the adversaries they're well-equipped and quite capable. Okay Sandy, please give us your last word. >> Look again, I think a cloud is going to get us to a point where we are more secure than we were on enterprise, we have all of the right tools and controls to do it, we can decentralize the security and make it better, again, I think if anything just to encourage people to really look at a cloud security governance model, right? You can't do this ad hoc, trying to whack-a-mole small issues as they come up, you build it in as an operating model, you automate it and you deal with the exceptions. >> Yeah, I mean, you're very optimistic and I think is for good reason, I just remembered listening to Steven Schmidt a couple of years ago at reinforce, basically saying, look, we feel pretty optimistic about solving this problem, whereas, I have to say every year I look back in the enterprise and on-prem and I know it's getting worse, and so, keep up the good work gents, I really appreciate the time on theCUBE today, thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> And thank you for watching theCUBE presentation of the AWS Startup Showcase, The Next Big Thing in AI, Security & Life Sciences. I'm Dave Vellante. (upbeat music)

>>Welcome to this cube conversation. I'm john Kerry host of the cube here in Palo alto California. We got a hot startup doing new things differently. The new way the cloud native way brendon, Hannigan, Ceo of sun rays securities. They deliver an awesome new solutions platform on all clouds to change the game and how security is done Brendan. Thanks for joining me on this cube conversation. >>Really nice to talk to you today, john >>you know, I loved showcasing companies that are, that are thinking about their entire optimizing their efforts to bring in the new, the new way to do things. And we certainly with the pandemic we've seen and everyone's validating this general global consensus that cloud scale and devops and def sec apps is generating a new kind of modern applications and this is just clearly has been known for a while inside the industry, but now it's mainstream. You guys are building a company around this notion of security. So let's get into it. What do you guys do is get right to it? What's the product? >>Well, firstly to get going And before getting into the specifics of product, john just I like to frame it, which is the ways in which I started out as a software engineer. You know, a long, long time ago built a company based on classic, traditional ways of developing software. The way we develop software has just changed dramatically change from stem to stern. We've gone from monolithic applications to microservices. We've gone from 18 month development cycles to two weeks from business units and I. T. Controlling it to devoPS teams. And then the amazing this is the incredible thing from a security perspective is we used to call up people in traditional networks and data centers to reconfigure the firewall so I could put my application of data center. But now I represented in code infrastructure is code that basically represents the infrastructure I have shows up in of course the cloud. The reason why I'd like to explain this story is we talk about cloud security and the complexities of cloud security. That's just where it all comes together. The reality is everything has changed around it. And we have a simple belief if everything has changed in terms of how it is, you build technology, value, deploy it and operators, we have to change how it is reduced security and it has to be also from stem to stern. So that's what basically that's why we started this business. Our mission is simple. We want to reinvent how it is. People secure new technology in these new environments and we do it by building a service that sits on top of companies usage of cloud amazon as your google cloud. And we help find risks automatically, eliminate them, Make sure they never come back and then deliver incredible new ways of continuously monitor activity to prevent cyber security incidents from happening in the first place. >>So this reinvention is a big, big trend. We've talked about this on the cube, you know, with many guests, even Pat Gelsinger's now the ceo of intel. When was that VM ware told us that you need to do over it in security, got to redo it all, not just incremental improvement. You know, fundamental revolutionary change was you're basically getting out here. So the question is top to bottom reinvention totally get that. How do you do it? Okay, Do you change the airplane engine out of 30,000 ft? It's hard people, it's easier said than done. What are the elements to reinvent security >>in this? We have we have a magical opportunity here because of cloud. So what happens is into traditional data centers and the traditional enterprise networks, There's, there's kind of Control points that are traditionally, which we understand and security John, right. And it's built up over 2030, 50 years. Right. And there's certain ways around which we rotate our security controls and you're familiar with them, right? Firewalls, Endpoint, antivirus security, information, security, event management system. Think of all those things, those control points are not relevant in the cloud. It's not, it's, they're interesting. V p c s and narrow grooves are kind of interesting in the cloud. Totally insufficient. So there's a necessity to reinvent and there's new control points and I will then tell you why it leads with an incredible better result. The new control points of the cloud, we believe and strenuously push when we speak to our customers, our identities. And it's not about Brandon and john, it's nearly always about non people identities, serverless functions, pieces of compute containers, all of these things have rights to like people. The second control point our data. Where is it? We used to have a data center. It's in the word, it says it data center, but in this instance I may have 20 devops teams. Each one of them is using RDS. One of them is using elastic cash. One of them is using a different thing. So data is the second one. The third one is applications. Why is this so important? The service providers have done a great job with core infrastructure. They give us two mechanisms to set up these environments. We need to help our customers organize and reinvent our security around these three pillars. The reason why it's so important, I love what you said is God, we've got to start from scratch. You get to start from scratch and when you do it, you actually can deliver a level of granularity and control and security that is unimaginable in the traditional enterprise network and data center. >>It's like golf, you got an extra Mulligan off the T if you hit it out of bounds and security, you get a do over. This is this is an opportunity. I love that concept because this is I mean it's not many times you get this clean sheet of paper or the opportunity to to pivot or reinvent or refresh re platform re factor whatever word you use. This is a time >>once in our life this transition, we know digital transformation is transforming industries, every industry is feeling it. We can see and understand the significance of the inventions like like AWS, it's an amazing invention, the power of it and what it delivers to us. The opportunity which is a must take opportunity is reinventing security from top to bottom. And by the way if you don't do it, if you just do this kind of half I have asked you end up with a mess on your hands if you do it properly, you end up in a better place than you would have been a traditional enterprise network and data center. >>The old expression you gotta burn the boats to get people motivated to kind of get it done right with the cloud. Let me ask you questions. Identity security and the data secure. Love that perspective because Identity the first thing in terms in my head when you said that was I thought about the identity of the individual their I. D. You know and you could actually get down to the firmware of a phone or you know to fact multifactor authentication. I get that access authentication. You're talking more in terms of other naming spaces and naming systems like specifically around services and applications identity, not just users. Right? >>Can you expand more on that? We we we we understand this as many people now understand this at a superficial level, but they haven't truly understand stood what's under the hood of what's happening inside cloud when you have reinvented applications, microservices, applications, auto scaling applications, it's all cloud is about incredible innovation happening across teams. What happens in the cloud is you have developers, administrators creating workloads. Those work clothes have huge numbers of compute functions which could be a container, a compute instance, a serverless function. They're gaining access to resources, other compute resources, cues and data to give you a sense of scale job you could have a company. It's not unusual. 80,000 pieces of compute 20,000 active at a particular point in time. We've got companies and then they assume these roles which give them access and rights to do things on these cloud services. It's not unusual to have 10,000 rolls in a cloud environment across multiple different accounts. Now, you see the identities, these pieces of compute have rights to do things. That's good because I can restrict what they do. It can be bad because if I don't have a handle on it, it's a mess. By the way, when you talk about this scale, human beings can't process this much information must be able to understand the risks, configure and automate remediation of these risks. The cloud providers give us the tools to build these flexible workloads. They're incredibly flexible. The dark side of it is in experience and basically inefficient deployment of those tools can lead to a whole host of risks that, quite frankly a lot of customers don't fully appreciate yet. >>And then people call that day to operation. But I love this idea of identity, the thousands and thousands of services out there because with microservices and you're seeing coming out of the cloud native world is these these new kinds of services could be stood up and torn down very quickly. So, you know, the observe ability trend is a great indicator in my opinion of this whole, you know, manic focus on data. So, you know, because you need machines to know, you don't know if something could be terminated and and stood up not even knowing about it, it could be errors. How do you log it? Right. So this is just an example. What's your thoughts on that? What's your reaction? Is that right? >>Ephemeral nature is the beauty of cloud. Right. Because, you know, there's problems that even now when we build our, we have a cloud native application ourselves and when we have a problem sometimes, of course we can go in and spin up 400 servers to go solve a problem and spin them back down half an hour later. We couldn't do that before a cloud. We can actually have developers doing this incredible rapid work with serverless functions to go and interrogate data to go out of data. Like to go and do analytics. It's wonderful. But what you said is their ephemeral. Now, just think about an environment. 20,000 pieces of compute 10,000 active, lots of 20 different teams across a 50 amazon accounts. Somebody comes in and basically during a period of time compromises. It compromises something and gets access to data, but it's a federal, it just comes and goes, we have to know that we have to know what's possible. We have to know if it's happened and then we have to basically greatly minimize the possibility of that happened. My promise because I'm security people are always trying to scare everybody which is valid. However, my promise the power of this cloud has created complexity opportunities but actually it also gives us the solution because using analytics machine learning in our case graphing technologies, we can actually find these things and give micro control two workloads so that actually we can see these things and automatically eliminate these risks and that was impossible >>in the the automation is programmable. You can actually set policies around automation. Pretty cool. I gotta ask you about get to the technical and want to understand the graphics and the platform more. But I want to ask you the question on the reinvention. If I follow your your playbook Yes. What's the end results? Can you take me through the all in bet the redo what happens? Can you just take me through the day in the life of an outcome? What's it look like and walk me through that? >>So firstly what the outcome I want to give our clients is they have these complex cloud environment spreading across, you know, any, even a moderate sized enterprise. What I basically want to be able to give our clients and when we have delivered for our clients is they basically managed to break that cloud from being this amorphous thing into specific work clothes. Each and every one of those workloads have specific controls in place that understand how that workload should operate in this environment across staging development and production. And actually we're able to essentially locked down what it is these workloads can do from an identity perspective, a data access perspective, a platform rights perspective and then monitor anything that changes. That's one thing. So the complexity were actually able to push away the complexity leveraged up lower to give that level of granularity at very deep levels. Identity, data platform. The second thing, actually, and this is john again, what's possible will clown? It doesn't it can't be all security teams, its security needs, It could be audit teams, its developers. So we have customers who have onboard tens and tens and tens of teams onto our platform. Why do we do that when we're finding issues and finding things that need to be resolved for directing it directly to the development teams? So we're saying developer to get into production, you're going to have to fix your identity set up in this environment. It's too risky, but it doesn't have to go to the security team. The security team will only hear about it if the developer doesn't fix it. >>Got it. So they're proactive, >>we're involving the teams responsible for creation and resolution of issues. The security and cloud teams are setting up the ground rules for a workload to operate in this environment and now we've got a level of granularity across workloads, whether they're in production or not. That basically is wonderful. That's the that's the ultimate endgame. >>What's the uh status of the vision and product on execution uh where your customers at now? Um how do you feel about it? Where is it going? Can you share a little bit about the roadmap and kind of where the product is? Uh It's a huge vision, it sounds easy to do, but it's not >>it's not actually and, you know, underlying it also, we actually, we've production service, we have wonderful, very large customers who are deployed and operational on our platform. You know, an example of one of them would be world fuel services, fortunate 93 company were the center of their kind of new security environment and operating model for everything they're doing and cloud. It's a beautiful story job. They've gone from in, in, you know, a few years ago. They 22 to the centers today to to yeah, it's unbelievable. And now all that future real estate were the center of that cloud security operating model. What does it mean? A 50 ft plus different teams on boarded onto the platform, following the rules of the road. If they don't follow the rules where all the exceptions are coming in and we're doing a continuous monitoring process underneath it. What is it that we've done? That's interesting. We actually have this incredible, unique way of collecting information from the cloud so that we can gather it in a very uh continuous way. So we're constantly seeing what's happening in addition to interrogating A PS and clouds are actually monitoring logs so we can see all the actions, what you just said. By the way, something comes and goes, we see it. The second thing which we do is we gather the information. We build a graph. This was actually, this was hard because it's not just as simple as sticking things in a graph with all of it to be. But what is the graph doing? The graph is basically understanding the intricacies of all the identity and access management models. I can see everything that can do anything to any other resource in the cloud, right? There is a surplus functioning container or a VM And we boil it down to very simple things. So underneath it's complex. We represented grass with boiling two simple things. Then we run analytics across the graph too, find and eliminate plaque from risk, find and eliminate identity risk. Get customers to the privilege enforced separation of duties, find data that you may not know is there that has incredible amounts of things capable of accessing it and help our customers lockdown that access. And then finally had we getting it into an operational automation kind of pipeline so that basically on an ongoing operational perspective it's efficient. So we're actually doing this for customers. We've got some very large financial institution customers. We've got, you know, large customers like World Fuel Services. And now actually our mission this year is to actually help simplify a lot of what we're describing so that, you know, you know, other companies and maybe companies not as sophisticated as a big financial institution or World Fuel Services is able to just very quickly get the value out of a solution. Like, >>you know, when you have these new technologies, new way of doing things, it's exciting at the same time, you have to kind of vector into an environment where the customer is ready to be operationalized. So, um, I got to ask you about how um teams are forming. I've I've been having a lot of conversation with VPs of engineering, large enterprises and and also big companies and hyper scale as well. And they're all talking about how, because of what you're doing and the kind of the general philosophy that you're you guys have is changing how teams are organized. You have a platform engineer now who can work on a platform and then flex and go work with other say feature engineers. And so it used to be just to do your features, You got your platform guys, you got your networking people. Okay, now you don't have to talk to the networking people because you can abstract away the network. You now have more composite, more compose herbal applications with all the observe ability. And now you can actually build that foundational platform. Redeploy the platform engineers with the other teams. So you seem like and then you got sRS embedded into teams and so you kind of got this new engineering formation going on, new kind of ways to organize the new modern era is here, it's on on this, this how people organize their teams. >>Actually is. There's no, there's no entire recipe at because you go to different customers and customers are basically experimenting with different ways to organize their teams. There's no question. But actually, I think one thing that's changed in the last 18 months is companies realizing we definitely need to change how it is. We've organized our team. I'm going to give you a simple example. Again in the old world, they would have network teams and network security teams you call up, Let me re configure the firewall. That doesn't work. It's just, it's just so broken. It can't work in clarity, can't be calling on people to re configure a firewall. That's an example. Another example which companies are realizing the latest identity. They will go through an approval process and they go through a governance and certification process. Well, these, these teams in the class, they want to get to work out in into, they need to get it in a month in an hour, in an hour. They can take a month and a manual approval processes sort of realizing that you need a skill set antiseptic ground rules and then the teams should be allowed to innovate within the ground rules. That's what the platform teams need to do. And so what we see emerging, which I think is a really best practice, is cloud centers of excellence. They're responsible for what I would call the shared infrastructure of the enterprise. The 250 Amazon accounts for 50 is your subscriptions, whatever it is that is king. Then the devoPS teams are using this shared infrastructure. The question is, how do you interface, how do you help coordinate between these different responsibilities from a security and governance and risk perspective? And that's actually what a big part of what our product is, helping teams coordinate their activities. That's a big part of what our product is, >>love. The first principles, they're sitting those ground rules. I mean there's been a chef and a cook, you know, you know, working with the environment and putting the new ingredients together and then getting that operational. It's a huge opportunity. Great stuff. Brandon. I gotta ask you the final question. Well I got you here, Sunrise Securities, the name Sunray. Where'd that come from? What does it mean? >>It actually means it's a Gaelic word and it means data and it's just so central to you know, what are people trying to steal? Like we can talk about security we're going to face. But at the end of the day they're trying to do damage. You're trying to get access to data. That's the most valuable thing we're trying to protect. So that's why we put it in our name. >>Digital transformation, everything's data now, everything's data, content, data Securities, data, data is everything >>it is. and I did >>great stuff. Brendan. Thank you for sharing the story here on the cube conversation, Brennan Hannigan's ceo of suddenly secure. Thanks for joining me. >>Thank you very much, john, it was a great pleasure. >>Okay. It's the cube from Palo alto California remote. Still. Thanks for watching.