Hello Thyaga, welcome to our AiThority Interview Series. Walk us through your leadership journey in the IT and security industry.
Thanks for inviting me to this series. I'll start with a little about myself. I grew up in the bustling city of Calcutta (now Kolkata) in India. My early memories are those of growing up in a single room studio with a bathroom that was shared with another studio tenant. Early on, I learned the "shared" responsibility model and concept of trust-but-verify.
From an industry standpoint, 2016 was a pivotal year with several major cybersecurity hacks - a few that most would recognize - Yahoo (more than a billion user records exfiltrated), LinkedIn (100M user records breached) and the most egregious by any account, the Democratic Party that was breached by foreign state actors.
2016 was also a pivotal year in my career. I was leading the content management line of business for Oracle and helping customers move their content over to the Oracle Cloud. One of my major concerns during this time was protecting Oracle customers' sensitive data. As I researched solutions, I learned about CASB (Cloud Access Security Broker) solutions that seemed cutting edge, focused uniquely on cloud access and data protection. As fate would have it, my former manager had just joined Skyhigh Networks, a leading CASB startup. A phone call from him with an invitation to join this innovative group was all I needed to make the jump from an established, and some might say "cushy," career at Oracle to the fast-paced startup that was set to change the world of cybersecurity.
Within the past year, Skyhigh Security has unveiled several industry-leading innovations that set it apart in an increasingly competitive market.
Skyhigh AI: Skyhigh Security helps organizations leverage AI with a greater peace of mind while protecting their data, infrastructure, and applications from the risks associated with these applications. Our Skyhigh AI capabilities include, but are not limited to:
Advanced DLP Capabilities: Skyhigh Security has the most advanced data loss prevention capabilities on the market today. Skyhigh DLP helps organizations protect their sensitive and confidential data using multiple advanced content-matching techniques, including real time Exact Data Matching (EDM), Indexed Document Matching (IDM), Optical Character Recognition (OCR), and AI-ML Auto Classifiers. These techniques increase accuracy, efficiency, and compliance within a wide range of industries and contexts, enabling organizations to better detect sensitive data, enforce policies, and prevent data leakage. They also help tackle emerging threats such as ransomware, extortion, and insider threats.
Skyhigh Security also announced the first-to-market AI-driven DLP Assistant at the beginning of this year, as an advanced DLP capability within its Security Service Edge (SSE) portfolio. The AI-based Assistant can help simplify many complex tasks in DLP by generating complex regular expressions. This enables customers to create complex data classifications based on natural language expressions, increasing operational efficiencies and minimizing inaccuracies stemming from human error, such as false positives or false negatives.
Trellix Integrations: In August 2024, Skyhigh Security announced new cloud-to-cloud integrations with Trellix, the second half of the organizational split from McAfee Enterprise in 2022. This powerful integration connected Skyhigh Secure Web Gateway (SWG) for Cloud and Trellix Intelligent Virtual Execution (IVX) Cloud to strengthen enterprises' security posture. This offers organizations an additional layer of malware scanning, zero-day threat detection, and comprehensive data forensics for the cloud, helping them guard their sensitive data and protect employees.
With increasing public concern, strict compliance regulations, and cyber threats, organizations must integrate privacy into their processes and practices. These challenges include:
Enabling use of AI and ML in organizations has many benefits and the investments in AI-powered tools and services will continue to grow exponentially over the foreseeable future. This brings with it increased risks of data exfiltration and a variety of other business risks from intellectual property exposure, regulatory non-compliance, reputational damage, data breaches and much more.
Enterprise security vendors will need to not only leverage AI to enhance the performance and efficacy of their offering, they will also need to empower enterprises to leverage the benefits of AI while still maintaining their security posture.
As one of the innovations I mentioned previously, Skyhigh AI provides best in breed AI-powered SSE solutions to safeguard an organization's data, prevent threats, and ensure compliance, while enabling them to embrace AI and foster innovation securely and efficiently.
The key advantage to cloud-native security is scalability. Cloud-native security solutions can easily scale to meet the demands of growing data and applications, allowing organizations to adapt to changing needs without compromising security.
Another major benefit to cloud-native security is automation. Many cloud-native security tools incorporate automation for monitoring and response, which helps in quickly identifying and mitigating threats, reducing the risk of human error.
With cloud-native security, organizations can benefit from real-time analytics and machine learning to detect anomalies and threats as they occur, enhancing the ability to respond quickly.
Here are three things that many experts in the cybersecurity field may find exciting about the future of our industry:
There are several potential cybersecurity threats that companies should be aware of and prepare for:
It's worth noting that these threats are constantly evolving, and new ones can emerge at any time. Companies should have a comprehensive security program in place, and continuously review and improve it to minimize the risk of these and other types of threats. It's also important to keep informed of the latest trends and threat intelligence reports to stay ahead of the attackers.
Thank you, Thyaga, for sharing your insights with us.