Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Anand Adya, CEO of Greenlight Technologies (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I don’t agree with this. We have done Cyber Security Thought Leadership stories where companies have come here and talked about risk assessment of the enterprise. I have to say I don’t agree with your comment that there is no one else playing in that space. That tells me that you haven’t done your competitive analysis sufficiently and thoroughly.

Anand Adya: Our focus is not on third-party management, patch management, or risk assessment solutions. Let’s take SAP. What’s the possibility that somebody has dropped a malware on your laptop or device? Then there’s the ERP transactions. Either those transactions are initiated by you as an individual or initiated by the rogue entities through the malware. You don’t know that, but you need to, at least, find or surface those anomalies. Our IT solutions to capture those transactions is what makes us unique.

Sramana Mitra: Let me see if I’ve got what you’re trying to say. Your focus is on risk as it pertains to application security and especially malware penetration into the application world. Is that correct?

Anand Adya: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: So that’s the differentiation.

Anand Adya: Absolutely.

Sramana Mitra: If you double-click on that from a trends point of view, what are the key trends of applications being infected by malware in the enterprises right now? What are the key takeaways from what’s happening in the world right now?

Anand Adya: It not only depends on the company but also on the industry. Just based on our recent customer transactions, if you’re talking to a manufacturing company, they have a different scenario around security risk, which is people essentially taking control of their manufacturing processes. Those processes are system agnostic. They may go across standard third-party, off-the-shelf, or custom systems.

Our ability to integrate any anomaly from those systems and surface it in the context of those risks is what makes us valuable to companies. I can go to financial services or banking. There you’re talking about products and services. The ability for customers to do online trading, online banking, or just having a simple transaction processing that have different types of risks linked to their web presence.

They see us in a different light using the same technology that we have. The risk is based upon industry and definitely based upon the company size. The core thing remains the same. How do you link all the vulnerabilities at the application level and then surface it in the context of security?

Sramana Mitra: Switching gears a bit, what do you see as emerging trends and open problems in this area in general?

Anand Adya: I can only tell you what I see today based on all the conversations that we’re having. I would be the first to admit that we don’t have all the solutions that the world needs in the space. We’re learning, literally, by the hour. I think convergence of users, applications, devices, and network from a security perspective is a big trend.

What I mean by that is, now risks go beyond companies. It goes to company’s customers. All of this is control to some central entity. The risk of security break is not just limited to companies’ internal infrastructure but potentially, extended to companies’ customers and what they use it for. Then we have the profile of these risks and ability to match the analytics to show these vulnerabilities. To prevent it as opposed to detect is where I see the investments going on and people thinking about it.

We certainly want to be a leader in this market since we have a good platform and good channel network to leverage, but we also have a a lot of work to do in the research and development. We’d love to get the brutally honest critic of our business because it allows us to reshape our vision and solutions.

Sramana Mitra: That is what is going to help you find customers. At the end of the day, if you cannot explain exactly where you fit and what exactly the problem you are solving, you will not be able to close customers. Good luck!

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Anand Adya, CEO of Greenlight Technologies
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