Roy Dagan, CEO and & Co-founder of SecuriThings talks about IoT Cybersecurity and how organizations can deploy tech to secure, manage, and analyze IoT environments
1. Tell us about your role at SecuriThings.
I’m the CEO and co-Founder of SecuriThings, the first solution that enables organizations to securely manage IoT devices at scale in a consolidated and cost-efficient manner. Our mission is to help IoTOps teams at major organizations handle all the operational and cyber challenges that come with managing fleets of IoT devices through our best-in-class technology.
2. Can you tell us about your journey into this market?
We actually started with an initial focus on IoT cybersecurity and realized the challenges our customers were facing were much bigger. The operational challenges were—and continue to be— a huge part of the pain. So we decided to expand the offering to include compliance and operational capabilities. Thanks to the cybersecurity foundation we had already built, it was pretty easy for us to build out the platform to cater to the operational needs. We then coined the term IoTOps which we see as a rising practice encompassing all the operational teams that are accountable for the deployment, availability and security of IoT devices.
Today we have dozens of customers across a wide range of industries including government/law enforcement, airports, healthcare, tech, financial institutions and more that rely on us to fully automate the security and management of their IoT devices. At the end of the day, our customers just love the fact that it helps them solve both their cybersecurity and operational challenges in one platform. We just raised a $14M round of funding and our growth is on a fast track.
3. What are the major challenges companies face with managing and securing IoT devices?
For just about any large organization, managing a stack of IoT devices is a major challenge. These devices—sometimes numbering in the thousands to as many as tens of thousands—are scattered throughout an organization. Mission-critical devices such as cameras, access control systems, building management systems and more, often run on various networks with no unified way to manage them all. What complicates the situation even more is these devices are often from different vendors—with different models and many firmware versions—and also need to work with third-party systems. This places tremendous pressure on operations teams who are responsible for ensuring that each individual device is running properly, securely and updated with the latest firmware/software.
4. ML / AI / automation has impacted virtually every industry. How is it specifically impacting IoT?
With the complexity and scalability of IoT deployments, AI is an indispensable component for any relevant system.For us, automation is a critical part of our solution as it helps organizations manage these large-scale deployments. It automates a set of operations for each device to ensure its availability and security in terms of password rotation, firmware upgrade, device restart, and more. At the same time, we use ML capabilities to automatically identify issues and notify relevant teams so they can take remediating actions.
5. Your product is comprehensive. You automate the management and security of hundreds of devices across any given enterprise. Can you tell us about your full capabilities?
Our flagship solution, SecuriThings Horizon, deploys advanced analytics to collect and normalize data from multiple IoT environments—i.e., management systems, edge devices, infrastructure / components. Once the data is identified, the solution applies advanced AI capabilities to create a unique profile for each system entity. From there, any deviations are analyzed to predict failures, pinpoint issues, identify cyber threats and recommend possible solutions. The system is deployed with knowledge, so it can provide value right ”out of the box” on the very first day. The system also automates tedious tasks like firmware upgrades, password rotations, device restarts and more.
6. How would a company use your technology?
Customers use Horizon to identify and investigate device issues (which are typically blindspots), as or before they actually occur. As I mentioned above, the platform then automates many operational tasks that are currently performed manually—time-intensive tasks that often result in high maintenance costs.
The system then also enables integrating with multiple third-party systems used by organizations, whether these are cyber or operational / service systems.
In terms of providing both security and operations efficiencies, no other solution currently available has the level of technology built into our solution. It’s a complicated problem. You need to solve all kinds of use cases—i.e., types of devices, versions, use cases. It’s tough to do it right. Companies can use our technology to address everything.
7. What breakthroughs in the IoT space are you most looking forward to from a technology perspective?
Previously, IoT was thought of like something out of science fiction in many industries. There were impressive technologies out there, but all had limited deployments and were extremely expensive. We have confidence in a new generation of IoT technologies that provide business value to organizations like cost reductions by helping them overcome operational challenges like reducing on-site maintenance.
I’m also really excited about the introduction of 5G, with more and more connected devices requiring holistic support. What remains to be seen is how fully organizations will embrace these new connectivity technologies.
8. Are there any upcoming product upgrades that you’re excited about?
Yes! We are in the process of adding additional investigation capabilities with pretty neat visualization of alerts and data. At the same time we are adding support for many more types of devices, as well as out of the box integrations with third-party systems.
9. What advice would you give to new entrants, especially IoTOps professionals?
I’d stress the importance of being flexible. Here’s an example. Back when we first framed the IoTops category, we understood how broad the category was and the fact that operators must focus on the operational and cybersecurity aspects of their devices simultaneously. We learned that our technology—along with our company as a whole and our team members as individuals—needed to be flexible in order to solve our customers’ most critical pain points.
By maintaining this flexibility, we can provide value to customers and more effectively address any challenges they face across operational matters to security issues, compliance, limited resources, and overhead costs.
For more such updates and perspectives around Digital Innovation, IoT, Data Infrastructure, AI & Cybsercurity, go to AI-Techpark.com.
Roy Dagan
CEO and Co-founder, SecuriThings
Dagan is CEO and & Co-founder of SecuriThings. He started the company after many years of building cyber security, risk management and intelligence systems. Prior to SecuriThings, Roy held multiple roles leading product management teams in a range of companies including RSA, The Security Division of EMC and NICE Systems.
