Aviva Zacks of Safety Detective had the chance to interview Itsik Musseri, Kindite’s VP Product. She found out why companies with high-security awareness need his company’s technology.
Safety Detective: How long have you been in cybersecurity and what do you love about it?
Itsik Musseri: Starting more than 20 years ago, in the Israeli Defense Forces, I was strongly engaged with IT infrastructure, specifically IT security, which is now called cybersecurity. I love that it is dynamically changing and adapting to changes in infrastructure and business and our way of life. It is able to provide protection that both vendors and customers need as well as allowing business processes to continue as normally or smoothly as possible.
SD: Can you tell me about Kindite’s technology?
IM: The Kindite solution allows customers to migrate their highly sensitive data to the public cloud while keeping it encrypted and protected at any given point in time, whether it is at rest, in transit, or being processed. We allow this while keeping the encryption keys on the on-premises environment at any given point in time—meaning, that encryption keys are separated from encrypted data. Thus, providing the highest level of protection.
This level of control over encryption keys is allowed without hurting the application and the business logic. We provide full application operability of the cloud-based application, working normally over encrypted data without decrypting it, and without hurting the application’s functionality, performance, or end-user experience.
SD: Who uses your technology?
IM: Our customers are large enterprises with two main characteristics. First of all, our customers have very high-security awareness and are very concerned about their data and for their end-users’ data. And the second is that our customers have very complicated environments. When you are creating a very complicated environment, whether it is on-premise or cloud, you need to be able to deploy and implement security or protection solutions that at least do not create additional complexity with the environment, let alone be able to reduce it.
So, our approach serves both of these goals: first and foremost, to be able to protect data at any given point in time but to be able to do so without presenting additional cost and overhead of deployment and maintenance.
SD: What do you think is the worst cyberthreat today?
IM: The main problem is the scale and complexity of the created environments in the public cloud. When I see my customers migrating to the public cloud, trying to rebuild or re-architect their on-premise environment in the cloud, they end up with very complicated architecture. The data itself is fragmented between different cloud regions and different on-premise regions, and it is fragmented between multi-cloud applications that need to operate on the same set of data. This level of complexity is very hard to monitor and protect. The fact that we don’t see many solutions that are able to provide end-to-end protection to the data while addressing these pains creates a situation in which data management and data protection is very hard to monitor. It becomes dangerous because if a mistake happens, it could result in a potential vulnerability that would end up being exploited by an external attacker or malicious insider which would consequently lead to a data breach and a potential leak. And we probably wouldn’t even be aware that we had a data breach happening in our environment.
SD: Many companies have been switching over to the cloud because of Covid-19. How is our vulnerability changing today where so many people are working remotely?
IM: You can see this as an increase in the threat of scale and complexity because in the COVID-19 era, organizations are trying to speed up their cloud migration processes. And when you try to speed things up, you end up doing things that are not completely finalized or not complete. You may create even more potential breaches than you might have had if you had done it without the pressure of migrating specific workloads to the cloud. Add that is due to the fact that many more people are working from home and need the ability to work in a cloud-based environment—whether it is SaaS, IaaS, or PaaS—the amount of data is dramatically increasing and these two factors are making the complexity and scale problem even worse.