Every Monday morning we fire five questions at a senior technology sector leader. Today we’re pleased to be joined by Nati Hazut, CEO of cloud security/identity and access management specialist Polyrize, which launched in 2019.
Nati – What’s the Biggest Challenge for your Clients?
Securing their cloud environments. The cloud application stack continues to grow exponentially and learning and securing each cloud service has become a herculean task for security teams. Another challenge is finding top talent in cyber security fit for the job.
Fact is employees are increasingly accessing, managing and using SaaS apps and IaaS/IDaaS services to facilitate business collaboration and communications without security oversight or controls over their users’ privileges, resource permissions, and cloud usage.
Many of these same employees who are performing risky activities in the cloud also have access to a large number of business critical resources. That access creates significant financial and reputational risk to the organisation.
That’s why we built Polyrize: to help security teams quickly identify the privileges and resource sharing permissions of those users most likely to cause substantial financial and reputational impact to their organization. This is particularly critical in the event of a compromised account or data breach.
Technology that Excites You Most?
Autonomous security; specifically the transition from manual human work to autonomous work in cybersecurity.
Bottom line is security teams need to move faster than the hackers. That means being able to autonomously find new security risks and weaknesses, proactively fix them, and then figure out how to move even faster in a threat landscape that is always changing.
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Greatest Success?
I believe we’ve created an entirely new category and the next chapter moving on from cloud access security broker (CASB). Many people believe that cloud security begins and ends with CASBs. We’ve taken that a step further, and now many other companies are trying to catch up with us in the market.
It wasn’t easy to convince VCs in the beginning. They didn’t get it. It wasn’t until we started creating POCs that they started seeing the light. Customers were a different matter altogether. Everyone we spoke to at the time agreed that a new approach was needed to secure applications and services in the cloud. Today, both investors and customers understand what we’re doing and the market is growing quickly as a result.
Worst Failure?
A few years ago, before we launched Polyrize, the biggest cyber security problem was ransomware. My business partner and I came up with a solution that we thought was unique and would put an end to this problem. We thought we were going to save the world from these attacks—and we were set on making it happen. But then when we took the concept to potential customers and the VC community — the response wasn’t great. It didn’t matter that what we created was “best in breed.”
We learned very quickly that we needed to develop something that was much broader, not just focused on solving one problem.
In Another Life, I’d Be…
If I take tech out of the equation, perhaps I’d be a music creator for films and TV — you know, the person who chooses the music and creates the soundtracks for movies and television shows.
Or maybe a pilot — which is a whole other way of interacting with the cloud!
