eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
Ryan Stolte, co-founder and CTO at Bay Dynamics, isn’t a newcomer to the security space. Stolte co-founded Bay Dynamics back in 2001 when the security market was very different, and over the last 14 years as the overall IT market has evolved, so too has Bay Dynamics.
On Nov. 3, Bay Dynamics announced its latest evolution, a partnership with Skyhigh Networks that will tie together the companies’ two technologies in a bid to help enterprises detect threats.
“The partnership focuses on offering Bay Dynamics and Skyhigh Networks’ mutual clients more value by pulling Web activity and policy data from Skyhigh’s Cloud Usage Analytics into the Risk Fabric platform,” Stolte told eWEEK. “We are adding data specifically related to how users are interacting with their cloud applications and enriching that data with behavioral analytics, so businesses know exactly who they need to pay attention to and why.”
Fundamentally, the Risk Fabric platform is about taking in data and helping to give organizations a full picture on the behavior of users and organizational security, Stolte said. Risk Fabric automatically brings data feeds together from multiple security controls, including SIEM (Security Information and Event Manager) DLP (data loss prevention), Web gateways and outside threat intelligence, then connects the relevant data points to build a profile and identify risks, he added.
From a visibility perspective, Risk Fabric enables an organization to view its risk indicators on a dashboard, which ranks risks based on priority.
“Risk Fabric provides a cyber-risk dashboard, which includes visibility, metrics and reporting specifically for executive management and risk officers so that they can effectively report back to the board about security risks and remediation efforts within their infrastructure,” Stolte said. “This includes uncovering risks pertaining to top insider and outsider threats, most vulnerable assets and any third-party vendors that are putting their company at risk of a breach.”
Risk Fabric offers customizable dashboards based on each user role, whether it’s the CIO, CISO, line of business leadership, team managers and others, so that users are only seeing data that’s relevant to them, he said.
In terms of determining risks, Stolte said that the Bay Dynamics platform helps characterize what is normal for a person’s activity on any given day. He emphasized that Bay Dynamics is trying to identify what real people and their activities look like to understand what normal behavior is and then, by extension, to help identify anomalous actions.
Going beyond just the dashboard visibility, Stolte noted that Risk Fabric isn’t just an alerting system; it also has an analytics-enabled response capability.
“Once the platform identifies common attributes across a multitude of events that either indicate a violation has occurred or an insider is putting their organization at risk, it delivers to responders a complete package of whom to take action on immediately, whom to keep an eye on, what they are doing that poses a risk, etc.,” Stolte said.
While many in the security industry today are out raising new funding, Bay Dynamics is not. To date, Bay Dynamics has raised $8 million in funding in a Series A round in 2014 that included the participation of Comcast Ventures. Stolte said that Bay Dynamics is not actively seeking new funding; however, because of the company’s rapid growth, it has options.
“We are always evaluating and having conversations,” Stolte said. “We saw a 100 percent increase in revenue and customer acquisition in UEBA [User and Entity Behavior Analytics] and the predictive analytics space in 2014 and have not lost one customer since launching Risk Fabric in 2013.”
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.