Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Leo Taddeo, Chief Security Officer, Cryptzone (Part 1)

This discussion starts with perimeter security, and expands into a broader study of CISO priorities.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Cryptzone.

Leo Taddeo: I’m the Chief Security Officer of Cryptzone. Cryptzone is a technology company providing security software to small and large enterprises and a number of organisations in between from financials to manufacturers. We provide security software in the form of an enterprise gateway called AppGate and two other data loss prevention products: Security Sheriff and Compliance Sheriff.

I’m the Chief Security Officer which means I handle our internal security. I also pay very close attention to the needs of the security market. That means talking to CISOs everyday about what they’re seeing and what tools they’re using. We have a broad spectrum of customers and customer needs but we are primarily, in the business of securing users to network resources and making sure that users are accessing only the resources that they are entitled to. We do that through AppGate. That’s our company in a nutshell.

Sramana Mitra: The cyber security space is extremely crowded. What I’d like you to do next is help us position what you do in the competitive landscape. What does the picture look like? Who are the competitors? Where, specifically, are you positioned and how do you differentiate?

Leo Taddeo: Great question. We are in a unique segment of the market. We are in, what we and others in the cloud security alliance call, the software-defined parameter. We are creating flexible and dynamic security policy controls that define where our users can go, what the user can see, and what the user can access. You are absolutely right. It’s a very competitive landscape but the software-defined perimeter is still evolving. It’s maturing.

It’s still in the early phase of adoption in the security thinking of large enterprises. Where we are right now is in the process of, not only developing our technology and perfecting it for cloud applications, but in educating and raising awareness to our approach. I spend a lot of time talking to CISOs about the traditional tools that are available and some evolving tools including ours.

We feel that we are on the cusp of a shift in thinking from traditional perimeter defence tactics and solutions a to a more fine-grained approach of creating perimeters around the users and the resource in what we call a segment of one. The competition is fierce. Every vendor thinks that their way is the best. Many of us try to map threats and past attacks to the approach that our company offers. We feel that we offer great value in protecting the interior and preventing the adversary from navigating within our networks once they enter the network.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Leo Taddeo, Chief Security Officer, Cryptzone
1 2 3 4 5