Despite Weak Economic Outlook, These Startups Are Bullish on 2023 Growth, Hiring
Leaders of early-stage companies see customers investing in technologies enabling transformation.
December 19, 2022
![Intuitive Cloud's Jay Modh Intuitive Cloud's Jay Modh](https://eu-images.contentstack.com/v3/assets/blt10e444bce2d36aa8/bltd85a469e90f13e18/65240c5ef2a4c555c739a89e/00JayModh-IntuitiveCloud.jpg?width=700&auto=webp&quality=80&disable=upscale)
Arcion migrates and replicates operational data from traditional databases such as Oracle and IBM’s DB2 to cloud data stores such as Databricks and Snowflake. President and CEO Gary Hagmueller explained that it allows organizations to feed transactional data in real time.
“The thing that is super hard about what we do and why there are very few people that do it is that doing it with 100% transactional integrity is super difficult,” he said. “You have to understand the structure of the data, you have to understand the order of the transactions that are going through, and a whole host of other things to make sure that you’re only delivering it once.”
A mitigating issue that line-of-business operators worry about are disruptions to their transaction systems, and the risk of attacks on those systems when running them in the cloud.
“You don’t want to have any security holes or the ability to run stuff on these production systems that could get hacked, or somehow be exploited or other things like that,” Hagmueller said.
Because Arcion’s system is agentless, “you don’t have those worries,” he added. Arcion has about 30 connectors to legacy databases and cloud data stores. Hagmueller said the company releases three or four connectors per quarter.
Nikhil Gupta started ArmorCode during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, just as organizations were looking to accelerate their migrations to cloud-native applications using microservices and from waterfall to agile development. The problem, Gupta noted, is that typical organizations have one application security engineer for every 100 developers.
“While the application development has transformed, application security is still very painful,” Gupta said. “AppSec engineers are overwhelmed because they are getting the information from Excel spreadsheets.”
ArmorCode created a platform that deduplicates data and performs correlations. In one instance, ArmorCode was able to determine that of 800 code repositories, only 40 were active. More importantly, it allows developers to search for code that might have vulnerable Log4j code.
“It’s a Google-like search; you can show findings containing Log4j or show findings containing Shell4j,” he said.
Understanding the supply chain of software is becoming a more critical issue on customers’ agendas. The way to accomplish that is by analyzing software bill of materials (SBOMs), which are used to analyze known vulnerabilities in software.
Analyzing SBOMs has become an even more important issue after last year’s discovery of the SolarWinds vulnerability. It presaged the Biden administration’s May 2021 executive order mandating that software publishers doing business with the federal government must publish their SBOMs.
“The federal government will now require software producers to publish what they say is analogous to the list of your ingredients to your technology,” said Nic LaBuz, Endor Labs’ VP of sales.
Endor Labs, which launched in October with $25 million in seed funding, has created what it calls a Dependency Lifecycle Management platform, designed to help developers to build open-source applications with fewer dependencies. The platform also identifies vulnerabilities by using indicators of risk to defend from software supply chain attacks.
One of the major problems that arises in multicloud environments is that each cloud provider has different methods for identifying permissions and roles. AWS supports 295 permissions, while Microsoft Azure allows 74 and Google Cloud is 55, said Garrett Bechler, senior director of worldwide sales engineering at Ermetic.
“They use different terminology for the same object,” Bechler said. “When you’re trying to actually secure these things using multiple clouds to actually use different services, you have to understand what all those things are, what the limitations are for each one of those objects.”
Ermetic, based in Tel Aviv, offers a SaaS-based “identity-first” cloud infrastructure security platform designed to provide multicloud protection in an easy-to-deploy SaaS solution. The platform manages identities, investigates permissions, configurations and relationships, according to Ermetic.
Safe Security provides a cyber risk quantification and management (CRQM) platform that uses APIs to ingest cyber telemetry from different threat detection offerings. It’s designed to create cyber risk assessments, which the company calls Safe Scores, said Safe Security CEO Saket Modi.
“We can go to a company and actually tell them the dollar value risk that they’re sitting on,” Modi said.
Those scores detail the financial impact of a potential breach and how to protect against an attack.
The Safe CRQM platform can ingest threat signals from 50 platforms including AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, ServiceNOW CMDB and CrowdStrike Falcon in less than 5 minutes, the company announced last month.
Safe Security provides a cyber risk quantification and management (CRQM) platform that uses APIs to ingest cyber telemetry from different threat detection offerings. It’s designed to create cyber risk assessments, which the company calls Safe Scores, said Safe Security CEO Saket Modi.
“We can go to a company and actually tell them the dollar value risk that they’re sitting on,” Modi said.
Those scores detail the financial impact of a potential breach and how to protect against an attack.
The Safe CRQM platform can ingest threat signals from 50 platforms including AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, ServiceNOW CMDB and CrowdStrike Falcon in less than 5 minutes, the company announced last month.
The dismal 2023 economic outlook is an opportunity for tech companies with solutions that will help customers combat those headwinds. Organizations can navigate next year’s anticipated weak economy by implementing AI and automation, and protecting themselves from cyber threats.
Such optimism was the prevailing view among attendees at last week’s Disruptive Innovators CIO Winter Forum in New York. While organizations will cut tech budgets in certain areas, overall IT spending next year will rise 5.1%, according to Gartner.
Jay Modh (pictured above), CEO of managed services provider Intuitive.Cloud, is among those that are bullish.
“Despite the macroeconomic situations that you are hearing about and people laying off thousands of workers, we’ve got the call for unlimited hiring,” Modh told attendees at the conference. “There are not enough people I can hire to deliver engagement and projects that we have, given the amount of customers are putting to us,” Modh said.
Besides Intuitive.Cloud, Modh is CEO of Intuitive Growth Ventures (IntuitiveVC), an investor in startups that it believes have disruptive technologies. IntuitiveVC focuses on companies developing advanced AI, cloud, cybersecurity and data integration capabilities.
Among those companies represented in the Intuitive portfolio is DevRev, the startup launched by Nutanix co-founder Dheeraj Pandey. Other IntuitiveVC portfolio companies presenting at the Disruptive Innovators conference were Arcion, ArmorCode, Endor Labs, Ermetic and Safe Security.
An overview of some the companies and their offerings appears in the slideshow above.
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