Aviva Zacks
Aviva Zacks of Safety Detective had the wonderful opportunity to interview Raphael Vallazza, Endian’s CEO. She asked him about his company’s Unified Threat Management product.
Safety Detective: Tell me about Endian.
Raphael Vallazza: Endian started in 2003 as a group of Linux and open-source enthusiasts passionate about networking and security. In 2004, we decided to develop a solution for unified threat management, featuring firewalling, VPN, and content filtering, because we saw a huge need for that by our customers. We tried to unify the passion we had for Linux and open-source and put it into a product and a solution for the market. Since then we have always aimed to offer easy-to-use solutions that can be downloaded by our community and we reached millions of downloads: that’s a great part of our solution. Besides the community solution, we also offer an enterprise product, for small and medium-sized businesses—the unified threat management platform.
SD: What’s the most important product that Endian customers use?
RV: The most important product line right now is Unified Threat Management (UTM) as it’s the one that we sell the most. In the long run, the IoT platform with the Switchboard and the 4i gateways will have the highest potential. We are trying to unify our strategy into a single technology, called Secure Digital Platform, which enables centralized management of gateways and users, provides secure remote access, and supports monitoring, analytics, and edge computing. We’re now in the process of integrating it into an IoT global strategy in order to cover the small-medium sized businesses as well as the industrial market. And they will all use the Switchboard as the centralized management tool.
SD: Besides people at home, what verticals use your services?
RV: The community edition is mainly for small home offices and home use. The UTM product is ideal for small and medium-sized businesses that need constant upgrades, commercial support, and a system that they can plug and forget. We have 99 percent customer satisfaction, which is very, very high. It shows that the whole user experience in the field, the easy way the small-medium business world manages their products is key for us. The third focus market for us is the industrial world, which we serve with solutions for critical infrastructures like healthcare, machine builders like heavy machinery, and the smart factory.
SD: What are the worst cybersecurity threats today?
RV: Ransomware is a big issue: on one side, if you look at the news, especially in the industrial world, hackers have leveraged ransomware to heavily attack the maritime industry, large vessels, and ships. In Italy, one of the largest manufacturers of sunglasses in the world was hacked and ransomware encrypted all their files causing a major production stop and dramatic impact on the sales cycle.
Another serious threat today is identity theft: cybercriminals are able to generate fake invoices and get them paid; once again, this can have a huge economic impact on the company.
This is why it’s very important to have advanced solutions with anti-malware and zero-day protection to fight against those threats.
SD: How do you think the COVID-19 pandemic will change cybersecurity for the future?
RV: COVID-19 is changing not just cybersecurity but our whole lives and the way we live. Cybersecurity is being affected because people are now working more from home, and digitalization is therefore becoming even more important: where you have connected things and people, you have security issues.
I believe cybersecurity is not just an option, it has to be the standard if we all want to move to global digitalization. COVID-19 pandemic can be a boost towards it because, from very small to large companies, they all understand that if they don’t adopt smart and secure business strategies, they might end up disappearing.
