At Cybertech Tel Aviv 2022, I participated in a panel discussion with two fellow Israeli cybersecurity entrepreneurs, Lior Yaari - CEO and Co-founder of Grip Security, and Liat Hayun - CEO and Co-founder of Eureka Security, where we each discussed our unique approaches to addressing urgent security challenges arising from the decentralization of the workplace.
I brought up the role that democratization of IT plays in the shift from IT-controlled, centralized legacy networks to a distributed environment of SaaS applications. These applications are now typically adopted by individuals and business units without IT security review or authorization. They are then often integrated with your sanctioned business-critical apps. A third-party app with a security vulnerability or overly broad permissions that allow for the lateral movement of threats can quickly lead to a massive breach of your business-critical apps and data.
Valence’s mission, then, is to empower security teams to gain centralized visibility and control over an organization’s entire mesh of business applications, regardless of the decentralized work environment, and to be able to map, monitor, and mitigate all third party connections with access and high privileges.
In her comments, Liat Hayun described how decentralization of the workplace turned data into a commodity that is used in almost every business process. As these processes are moved to the cloud, there is a need to secure data stores without obstructing innovation.
Lior Yaari emphasized how extensive SaaS adoption has caused security teams to lose control over the organizational SaaS portfolio, as users have become empowered to onboard new applications with a one-click process. Visibility and control over their apps must be achieved, without impeding business processes.
