Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Assaf Rappaport, CEO of Adallom (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: The enterprise that is a customer of Salesforce, when it decides to access Salesforce.com, would access it through the Adallom network.

Assaf Rappaport: Exactly. Bank of America or EMC who are using Salesforce, or Box, or whatever software applications they’re using; it’s their data that we are protecting. Of course, we are collaborating with SaaS providers in order to provide value to their customers.

Sramana Mitra: What is the level of awareness about security holes in today’s enterprise?

Assaf Rappaport: From my perspective, they get it immediately. They are aware and they have a budget to solve it. 40% of their data is outside of their own premise and they invest 100% of their security resources on-premise. They are feeling bad about this gap. They’re saying, “I have no visibility. I have no control of the data that is out there.” They know that they are responsible. Both security and IT started with cloud phobia. They were against the revolution. Now that they understand the cloud is here to stay, they understand the responsibility to protect the data and to provide security.

Sramana Mitra: What percentage of the enterprise is in that category?

Assaf Rappaport: I find it very interesting that the larger the organization, the more awareness they have into this responsibility. Large enterprises have projects and budgets. Under their Chief Information Security Officer, you’ll see SaaS security officer and cloud security. Medium-sized businesses also have this awareness because there are many cases where they lose data. They say customer databases are being sold to their competitors. As a security company, I see that every day. They know that these lists come from Salesforce or from the cloud applications that they use. They want to protect this highly sensitive data that they use. The awareness is there.

Many companies are talking about ways to solve this huge gap in security. You see companies trying to VPN all the traffic towards their organization. It’s almost contradicting to the cloud because now you’re enforcing all your traffic to go through your organization. It might be a good solution security-wise but they’re not transparent to their users and they’re anti-cloud solutions. These solutions cannot work. They’re trying to deploy agents in any endpoint that will access your cloud. Any solution that puts security over usability cannot work because a cloud security should be in the cloud and should be under the cloud’s philosophy. This means transparency to the user and not harming any other features of cloud applications, but at the same time providing the best security. This is what Adallom was able to bring to the table, and what makes all the traction for us as a company.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Assaf Rappaport, CEO of Adallom
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