Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Rao Papolu, CEO of Cavirin (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Can you go back and answer my question? Whom do you see in deals even if they’re point products? I understand your positioning. It’s more of an umbrella solution that tackles all of those configurations. What specifically are the competitors that you see?

Rao Papolu: When it comes to data center space, companies such as Rapid7 and Qualys. When it comes to cloud technology, Palo Alto Networks has an offering. We have in-depth knowledge about all these things together as a company. How can we do everything? The wealth of our knowledge comes from a Bell Labs technology called Network Ontology.

It’s a network team conflict management concept. It came from a data center and evolved to cloud. That way, we cover data center as well as cloud. I said earlier that the companies are silos. Certain companies will do cloud only. Certain companies will do data center. Certain companies will do only Docker containers.

Sramana Mitra: I can see how you’re positioning all this. The companies that you were referring to in the first category, you are saying that they do not have the coverage of the specific pieces like Azure and Google’s of the world. Are there gaps in their coverage?

Rao Papolu: Qualys has a history in the data center. Rapid7 started with vulnerability type of data center space. Market opportunities are great. The rules of the platform is data center whereas the latest companies, such as Evident.io that started five or six years ago, focus on one cloud. Evident focuses heavily on AWS.

We understand the vision and mission and how companies look at the cloud. It is not only one cloud. You have to have elastic cloud. You have data moving from one cloud to another cloud. Updating this information is very crucial for enterprise. We foresee what the enterprise is looking for. That was the reason we started. We give you continuous visibility and continuous support on three aspects – protection, monitoring, and response. These are the things that are crucial for enterprises. We are executing on that concept.

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to ask you a slightly different question. If you were the CISO and you have to make sense of all these different offerings from so many vendors, how would you make the decision? Buried into this question is how are CISOs making these decisions?

Rao Papolu: A CISO wants to protect his infrastructure all the time. You have to have continuous visibility in the entire infrastructure. They also have on-premise. For example, some companies will support cloud work instance. Some companies may not support the base operating systems. The key pain point is how do we really see continuously including the cloud instance level and data center level.

Who can support? What is the best way? Which product can support and ensure that if there is a problem, they can immediately fix the problem? That visibility is always sought for. In the past, there were critical assets in the data center. When it comes to cloud, you don’t know when a rogue mission pops up. Who can do dynamic operation visibility in the entire infrastructure? That is the pain point.

When I’m moving all of my assets to cloud, it is not only protecting but also protecting the devops side. Who can do these things? These are all the pain points for CISO. They are looking for somebody who can efficiently provide actionable intelligence about the stakeholder. We can provide the solution.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Rao Papolu, CEO of Cavirin
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