Aviva Zacks
Aviva Zacks of Safety Detective had the pleasure of interviewing Eldad Chai, Co-Founder and CEO of Satori Cyber. She asked him about how his company stays ahead of the competition and he told her that it’s all about the customer.
Safety Detective: What motivated you and Yoav Cohen—your co-founder & CTO—to start Satori Cyber?
Eldad Chai: Two things motivated us: One is that we saw how data was becoming more strategic and more important for companies these days. Companies look to provide more value to their customers and in order to do that they are relying on advanced data analytics, like machine learning and AI, and investing a lot in their data infrastructure. So, data is very important for companies when they think about their strategy and their vision for the next decade.
The second thing is that it became very complex to deal with data with all the restrictions you have around privacy, security, and compliance. We’ve been watching closely how privacy, security, and compliance has evolved over the past 10 years and the hurdles and complexities they impose on managing a data infrastructure.
That made us realize two things: That there are a lot of companies that are held back from executing on their data strategies just because it’s hard to manage all the complexities around it, and that maybe there’s a better way to deal with it.
SD: What does your company do to keep data safe?
EC: Satori simplifies security, privacy, and compliance for companies by decoupling the controls around data access and data usage from their architecture. It’s a universal data access service that monitors, classifies, and controls access to data in any data store in the company’s cloud.
SD: What does your company do to stay ahead of the competition?
EC: We’re an early-stage startup, and I think one day we will have to think more about the competition, but ultimately, we believe that the strategy for gaining a competitive advantage is to be that company that is best in understanding the customer. It all boils down to the type of customers that we want to serve and what matters for them, which, for us, is the guiding light.
We are building off more than 12 years of joint experience in cybersecurity working with the cybersecurity challenges of medium to large enterprises, we have an amazing advisory board—security, privacy, data leaders from the largest brands in the US, and we stay very close to our customers. So, our experience, our advisory board, and the customers themselves are a guiding star for what is important to us and what isn’t. If we stick with them and execute well, we’re going to lead the market.
SD: What do you think are the worst cyberthreats today?
EC: The problem of data security isn’t solved and it won’t be solved for a while, because if you think about the investment in cybersecurity, the risk, the threats, and how you mitigate them, it all boils down to whether an adversary can get hold of your data or not. That data could be a database, files on your laptop, or employee data. When we’re talking about the commercial space, it’s all about data, and the reality is that it’s harder to keep the data safe, so it’s easier to put in endpoint protection and a firewall. It’s very hard to protect your data itself because it’s everywhere.
I think that it’s not that data security is more important now than before. It’s always been the one thing that you want to protect. Satori is taking advantage of the fact that data is moving to the cloud which makes it possible to build agile architectures with strong automation to tackle the data security problem in a new way.
SD: How do you think that COVID-19 is going to change cybersecurity for the future?
EC: Definitely the whole work from home environment puts a lot of focus on what actions employees are taking and what data they are taking out. If in the past, you were expecting people to work from a relatively safe environment and you could assume that if they’re taking data out, then they are in a safe environment. When people work from home that is different, and the perimeter that you might have had around your employees has dissolved.
The second thing is that companies that are successful in the new environment are usually those that have invested in moving to the cloud. Companies in the cloud see less of a slowdown. They adopted more easily to this environment. So, I think more and more data and applications are going to move to the cloud. Companies that might have never considered moving to the cloud will do just that, and that means that cybersecurity needs to evolve as well. The solutions that would fit the on-prem environment are not going to fit in the cloud. You’re going to see both growth and acceleration in existing cybersecurity markets and new ones as data and applications move to the cloud.
