Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Elisity CEO James Winebrenner (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Your primary insight is that you had the technical background, but you spent time building up sales and business model experience before you took the leap into entrepreneurship.

James Winebrenner: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: How did you arrive at the build-up into this segmentation? This is a theme that has been coming through for the last decade.

James Winebrenner: Yes. We got this very bright line that has been drawn with COVID. Everybody went home and was working remotely. That drove transformation for a lot of enterprises and organizations in terms of the security for their users. We’ve seen a big shift away from traditional VPNs towards zero trust technologies for remote work. First of all, there were a number of use cases where we were still dealing with on-premise networks. Think about pharmaceutical manufacturing, which couldn’t slow down through COVID.

Sramana Mitra: Hospitals and all kinds of things that had to operate in person.

James Winebrenner: Not surprisingly, a lot of our early customers are in those segments. As people started coming back into offices, they are now far more aware of having managed devices running alongside unmanaged devices. The way we built and protected these networks in the past using firewalls just no longer works. It’s a problem everywhere. That has been driving the adoption of our technology.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s do use cases. Take different segments and use cases.

James Winebrenner: We’ll talk about healthcare. In clinical environments, it’s incredible to see the breadth of things that are running on these networks. There are the traditional corporate-managed assets like laptops and PCs that are relatively easier to secure.

Then you have medical devices like infusion pumps and MRI machines. In some cases, these are running legacy versions of OS. They’re hard to patch. We can’t run an agent. Believe it or not, there’re all sorts of IoT-type devices like game systems that are running in these hospitals.

We have a customer in the UK that we just went live with in March. They found a couple of PlayStations running that patients had brought in. They need to be able to understand the landscape and quickly map those devices back into a micro-segmented policy that allows them to communicate only where they need to. Ransomware is an enormous challenge. The idea that I can just move freely just doesn’t work.

Those clinical use cases are prevalent for us. Similarly in manufacturing where the operational technology networks were physically air-gapped from the IT network. Those air gaps are going away. There’s a significant need to get information out of those environments and data into the cloud for regulatory issues and yield optimizations.

That connectivity that exists between those environments and the cloud edge requires a tighter control. I can’t go to a process controller and install another EDR. We have to identify what those assets are and help customers build the least privilege access policy.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Elisity CEO James Winebrenner
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