Preempt Blog

A well-known CISO customer was recently telling me about his experience with implementing new security solutions. His consistent feeling? Dread – the security alerts and things that can suddenly break in the beginning can be overwhelming. “Everything goes red,” he said, referring to the immediate influx of red alerts and false positives that seem to accompany each new security deployment.

With Silicon Valley continuing to lead the nation in VC funding (source: Bloomberg), expectations are clear: invest that funding and deliver, deliver, and deliver some more for your customers (and investors, employees, partners and stakeholders).

My partner Jay Leek and I have decades of experience as CISOs.  We’ve both literally spoken with hundreds of security companies and it’s easy to become jaded.  It's rare that we get truly excited about a new security technology. Preempt sparked that sense of excitement in both of us.  If we really prioritize based on risk we’ll find that many security priorities aren't about chasing "advanced APT ninjas." It is about focusing on the more mundane functions of vulnerability and access management.  

Preempt began with a basic premise: Effective security within an enterprise should combine threat detection and real time response within a single solution. As enterprises transition to the cloud and the perimeter disappears, identity is the new perimeter. If identity is the new perimeter, access management from a security standpoint can lead to effective threat prevention. That simple but powerful idea was the genesis of Preempt and has given us the opportunity to solve challenging security problems for our customers.

Cyber security is a complex animal that requires many disciplines and a diverse toolkit. Typically, resources are limited, and incident response and security staff are overloaded with noise, irrelevant alerts and incomplete static information.  With so many diverse systems its difficult to utilize them in a coordinated and timely way.

At the recent Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit, analysts presented their findings on the top technologies for information security and their implications for security organizations in 2018. At the event Neil MacDonald highlighted Top 10 Security Projects for Security and Risk Management Organizations. He continues by emphasizing that these are projects with real supporting technologies that CISOs should be exploring.

Preempt’s platform is “one of the most interesting and powerful to hit the infosec market in years,” writes Garrett Bekker, 451 Research’s Houston-based Principal Security Analyst, in a new report (released yesterday).

It’s a Silicon Valley* refrain: Risk is better than regret. But does that motto sell?

Late last year, we began conversations with the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College about their current security concerns. Like many organizations, a portion of their workloads are moving from on-premises to the cloud. One of the big concerns about moving to the cloud is how to secure infrastructure as companies currently do from within the defined perimeter of their internal network. They also needed to provide added security without heavily impacting the end user (students, faculty, and staff) experience. Because these are common concerns for many other organizations, I’d like to share how we helped this customer overcome these security concerns.

Last week I had the opportunity to speak with several CISOs about what they are doing to deal with cyberattacks, breaches and internal threats. A consistent theme I heard is that detection only solutions aren't enough. They need more practical approaches to rapidly respond to anomalous behavior and they need to reduce burden on analysts. Working smarter not harder. This is one of the great benefits of real-time threat prevention based on identity, behavior and risk. It can removes work from analyst via adaptive response and automated resolution of false positives. One customer recently told me that within just a couple months, automated response has helped them improve their efficiency by 30-40%. That’s a lot of time that can focused on more critical security tasks.