Safety Detectives: Please share your company background, how you got started, and your mission.
Horangi: Horangi was founded in 2016 by Paul Hadjy and Lee Sult, both ex-Palantir Technologies engineers and veterans in cybersecurity.
Today, Horangi is a cybersecurity company that is:
- accredited by the Infocomm Media Development Authority of Singapore (IMDA),
- one of the first APAC companies to obtain the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Security Competency
- named 2021 AWS Independent Software Vendor (ISV) Partner of the Year (ASEAN)
- named a Partner for the Cyber Security Agency of Singapore’s new SG Cyber Safe Partnership Program
CEO and Co-Founder Paul Hadjy was Head of Information Security at Grab when he noticed that there weren’t many cloud security vendors in Asia. Most were based in the U.S. or Israel.
Seeing that clear gap in Asia, Paul and Lee seized the opportunity to start Horangi with Singapore as the company’s headquarters.
Horangi’s mission is to be the best Cyber Security company in Asia.
The company aims to achieve this by providing a well-known, trusted, best-in-class services team combined with top-notch cloud-security products that allow our customers to innovate without fear.
SD: What is the main service your company offers?
Horangi: Warden has been our flagship product since its launch in 2019.
Warden is a cloud-native Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) tool that is recognized by Gartner, and Horangi was also most recently listed as a sample vendor for Cloud Infrastructure Entitlements Management (CIEM) tools in Gartner’s Emerging Technologies and Trends Impact Radar: Security published October 12, 2021.
Available as a SaaS on the Amazon Marketplace, Warden offers users:
- a thorough view of their cloud assets
- real-time threat detection
- automated and continuous scans of vulnerabilities
- identity and authentication management
- quick vulnerability remediation
- seamless DevSecOps integration, and
- built-in compliance automation that’s recognized by Gartner.
Besides Amazon Web Services (AWS), Warden also supports many of the most popular cloud platforms such as Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, Huawei Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud.
Horangi complements Warden with cybersecurity consulting, strategic management (CISO-as-a-Service), and a range of CREST-accredited strategic and offensive cybersecurity services helmed by a CyberOps team composed of veteran, multi-disciplinary cybersecurity consultants adept in areas as diverse as Anti Money Laundering, Cyber Crime Investigation, and Incident Response.
SD: What is something unique that helps you stay ahead of your competition?
Horangi: From the outset, we help people realize that there’s no one-size-fits-all solution in cybersecurity.
More often than not, organizations and businesses wrongly believe that you can just deploy as many protective mechanisms as possible and your network and cloud will be secure.
That’s not how cybersecurity works.
Cybersecurity may be a new field, but the principles for it are centuries old. The approach to cybersecurity is therefore not just a technical problem, but one where a holistic approach is required.
As in warfare, you need to first survey the landscape, send out reconnaissance units to suss out the enemy, take account of the available manpower, weapons, and amount of ammunition you have, assess the risks, and identify your key assets before designing a defensive system that works with your limited resources.
That is why we take time to educate our clients and gain a comprehensive understanding of our client’s business, their constraints, and challenges before we propose any cybersecurity solution.
We then craft a cybersecurity posture that best fits their business needs while protecting their most valuable assets.
Horangi also remains deeply committed to the Asian region and is dedicated to helping governments, organizations, and companies in Asia succeed while staying resilient against increasing cyberthreats.
SD: What do you think are the worst cyberthreats today?
Horangi: Data breaches continue to be a major threat next to an increasing number of ransomware incidents. These threats will persist and grow as long as we see a shortage of qualified cybersecurity personnel—not enough people are trained quickly enough to deal with present and future threats.
That’s why we believe automation, such as using a CSPM tool like Warden, is so important and integral to achieving and maintaining a good cybersecurity posture.
Threat actors are also becoming more sophisticated and now have easy and cheap access to tools. Today, we are beginning to see threat actors using Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) and other emerging nefarious services modeled on SaaS platforms to launch their attacks.
Moving forward, we believe that essential service providers, federal, and state entities will increasingly be targets, especially for ransomware. The introduction and adoption of 5G technologies in the near future will present significant challenges too, with more data, services, and attack surfaces coming on board.