Safety Detectives: Please share your company background, how you got started, and your mission.
Valtix: The Valtix journey started in 2002 when Co-founders and CTOs Vishal Jain and Vijay Chander, and Co-founder and Chief Architect, Praveen Patnala first met at Cisco-acquired Andiamo. With Vishal’s, Vijay’s, and Praveen’s wide variety of experience in networking, cloud, and security the idea of Valtix came into fruition. Now in 2021, our team has grown to include a strong leadership team that brings a plethora of experience from network and security leaders, including Douglas Murray, CEO of Valtix. Since the origin of Valtix, our mission has been to bring top-of-the-line, multi-cloud network security to protect workloads without virtual appliances or agents. Across every industry, organizations are turning towards a “cloud-first” approach to drive greater business agility and competitive business advantage. However, as organizations make this move, the number one challenge they face is how to achieve the benefits of the cloud, whilst maintaining resilience and security. This challenge is what Valtix hopes to solve for all organizations facing this problem.
SD: What is the main service your company offers?
Valtix: According to our recent survey of more than 200 IT leaders in the U.S., we found that while 95% of businesses are making multi-cloud a strategic priority in 2022, with security being top of mind (96%), only 54% feel highly confident that they have the tools or skills they need to execute. In fact, 76% of respondents believe it is “underinvested” at their respective companies when it comes to multi-cloud operations in general.
Many organizations have built their cloud security strategies after years of layering and adapting to the rapid adoption of cloud by the business. This often means they have a smorgasbord of security techniques and technologies deployed to the cloud. Multi-cloud makes this worse. In fact, 72% believe that they have a different cloud security strategy in every cloud. This is obviously unsustainable and leading organizations are starting with a blank sheet of paper to determine how to move forward.
With Valtix, organizations can deploy robust cloud security that is simple to manage. By linking continuous visibility to multi-cloud policy, Valtix delivers security that adapts to the speed of the cloud. Our company focuses on three key priorities to address enterprise cloud initiatives to produce its industry-leading network security solution. These are as follows:
- A Focus on Protecting App Workloads Without Agents or Virtual Appliances: Valtix takes care of the security infrastructure – you simply set policy.
- Agility: Delivers security that adapts to your apps.
- Predictability and Flexibility for IT Costs: Valtix uses a cloud consumption model – you only pay for what you use.
Most importantly, Valtix provides robust security that can be easily managed multi-cloud and adapts as cloud environments change.
SD: What is something unique that helps you stay ahead of your competition?
Valtix: There are multiple unique factors that come into play that help us stay ahead of our competition. First is that, for security teams, Valtix provides a cloud-native security model approach that ties together continuous visibility and control to discover new cloud assets and changes, associate tag-based business context (from cloud provider), and automatically applies the appropriate policy to ensure security compliance. Once configured, the net result is security infrastructure that just works and remains invisible to cloud teams responsible for their deployments.
Whereas others force a compromise between capability and simplicity, we make sure to offer robust security with a cloud-first simplicity, including advanced security for firewall, web application firewall (WAF), and IDS/IPS. We value the versatility of our platform, where we offer network security management in one console, through a single dynamic policy framework across accounts, vnets, and cloud providers, whereas others are cloud provider-specific. Flexibility, extensibility, and continuous visibility are important for organizations to have when it comes to security. Having a cloud security model that enables dynamic policy through continuous visibility of apps and infrastructure is critical for organizational insight. Thus, our innovative model and approach to cloud security are what truly helps us stay ahead of our competitors.
Valtix’s platform is a streamlined process and flow for end-users. The service we offer provides visibility for how and where they should secure and makes it simple enough for customers in that they only have to turn on a service and Valtix takes care of the rest including scripting, troubleshooting, and upgrades. The simplicity in the service alone is why many customers choose Valtix.
SD: What do you think are the worst cyberthreats today?
Valtix: While it would be easy to say the biggest threat is ransomware or botnots or cryto mining, none of these is indeed the biggest threat in the cloud. The biggest threat in the cloud is actually the mindset of bringing the datacenter to the cloud. According to a recent survey that we conducted, 89% of IT leaders see cloud security to be different than on premises. Yet, 75% of those who responded to the survey also see cloud as being an extension of the existing datacenter. These points run counter and often compete with each other in decisions around the cloud security technology stack. Organizations need to take a cloud-first mindset starting with visibility but then also build a robust set of layered defenses to protect their valuable workloads and data.