Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Assaf Rappaport, CEO of Adallom (Part 2)

Assaf Rappaport:  Let’s take an example. I’m accessing the application from my home from an unmanaged device. So end point security is not going to be relevant. I could be accessing it through a public network, Internet café, or my own private network. All your perimeters, firewall, IDS, and other good stuff that you invested in to protect your on-premise and network are no longer relevant.

These systems are not relevant, and you’re going directly to Salesforce. These unmanaged devices are accessing through a public network. Salesforce is the application and now you can deploy anything on top of Salesforce because it’s multi-tenanted where you have no control. If you think about the three pillars of security, they are not relevant in the SaaS world. They are not relevant in the cloud era. This is the problem.

This is what’s unique about our space. Even the simple attacks are actually end companies that Adallom works with. Let’s take Salesforce for example. Salesforce has the entire database. Today, organizations have no way to protect themselves. Think about a compromise where you’re downloading customer data, you have no control on the endpoint and on the network.

Sramana Mitra: Given that data is the problem, what is the architecture of your solution?

Assaf Rappaport: In order to protect something, you need to see what’s happening. This is the first line of defense. The way we’re providing visibility into all the activities no matter where it happens is we leverage three different centers. The first sensor is a proxy. All the proxy that goes to your SaaS application is redirected from the SaaS provider to the Adallom network that we have proxied in more than 60 locations around the world. All the traffic, no matter where it’s initiated, goes through an Adallom proxy to provide you the first layer of visibility.

The second center is the API center where we have proprietary API and public API to form the visibility. The third center, which is really interesting, is the identity and access management. Most of our organizations are using ADFS in order to do authentication. Adallom enriches all of the visibility and the data. These three sensors – proxy, API, and IAM – are providing the first layer, which is the visibility into your SaaS organization.

Sramana Mitra: Who’re the customers? Is Salesforce your customer?

Assaf Rappaport: The customer is the enterprise who is responsible for the data.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Assaf Rappaport, CEO of Adallom
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