Building a Cyber Security Company from Israel: Aki Eldar, CEO of Secure Islands (Part 2)

Aki Eldar: I and my brother founded Secure Islands. We did that because we figured out that there is a huge problem in the security industry. The problem was that people are talking about securing data, but they’re not actually doing it. They are securing the infrastructure, the exits, and the devices. But they are not securing the data itself. We thought that something needs to change here because it’s an endless game trying to fight against different threats and bad guys. It would be like a dog chasing its own tail. It will continue forever, but it will never succeed.

Instead of trying to defend threats, why not protect what is really important, which is the data itself. We are talking about unstructured data because this is the biggest problem. The reason that it is the biggest problem is as soon as a file or email is created, it’s already exposed internally and externally to thousands of different thread vectors. At the same time, organizations are no longer located in one place. They are located in a lot of places. Their data is spread all over – internally, externally, cloud, and mobile. This is a distributed environment. It is impossible to protect data by protecting the perimeter because the perimeter is not there anymore. We are talking about borderless enterprises.

At the same time, enterprises lose control of their applications and infrastructure because they’re using the cloud. We said, “Let’s protect the data itself and let’s do it from the moment that the data is created.” Once you know how to do it efficiently in a way that it’s not interfering with the business process and doesn’t require any integration to the existing IT infrastructure, you have the best thing in the world, which is a paradigm shift. This is something significant. It’s not another point solution. It’s a totally new way to protect sensitive information.

Sramana Mitra: You said you started this with your brother and both of you observed this as a problem. What is your brother’s background?

Aki Eldar: We complement each other. His background is in software.

Sramana Mitra: He’s an engineer?

Aki Eldar: Yes, he’s a software engineer. He started in the military and served as a Software Engineer. He headed different development groups for ten years and then moved to the civil industry. He worked as VP Engineering at Britannica Knowledge Systems. Then, he moved to Check Point. He was Head of Development Group over there.

Sramana Mitra: He had engineering as well as security background in his past. He saw it from the inside of the security industry basically.

Aki Eldar: Yes. At the same time, part of the thing that I dealt with was security. In my previous roles, I was responsible for implementing worldwide security implementations in different organizations.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Building a Cyber Security Company from Israel: Aki Eldar, CEO of Secure Islands
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