Transcript
Good day, everyone. Thank you for tuning in to the Security Sandbox for February. My name is Sandeep. I'm our field CTO here at Nozomi Networks. We have a fantastic guest on the show for you today. We have the co-founder of Nozomi Networks, as well as our chief product officer, Andrea Carcano. Welcome to the show, Andrea. Thank you so much, Sandeep. Hello, everyone. It's been a pleasure for me being here with you discussing a lot of interesting things today. Perfect. So, Andrea, we've got a lot to talk about. You know, starting with looking back at last year, we had a very strong 2024. We had a lot of new products released into the market, tremendous amount of growth. And 2025 is starting off just the same. As we are all aware, the latest Gartner report has come out talking about cyber protection systems, cyber physical systems. And as a leader in that quadrant, what do you think that means for the space overall for OT cybersecurity platforms to have been given their own magic quadrant? I think this is great, Sandeep. If you think about the journey, you've been in this space also for many, many years, right? We started from a place where the question about is cybersecurity needed for the cyber physical system space? It was a question and not always, actually, in the majority of the case, 10 years ago, was receiving the answer that was, no, I think we are secure. There is no security issue. So it's been a journey. It's been a journey that took a lot of education. There was a lot of experimenting, evolution from the technology perspective. But now being here, I think is great, one, because we'll basically certify the fact that every company, they need to treat this one as an important topic and every company need to invest in this vertical, in this specific cybersecurity part. So that would be very, very good. And also will drive, in general, the cybersecurity posture of all the critical infrastructures all over the world. So I think it's great. Wonderful. Wonderful. Agreed. Now, as our founder, you've been around and seen this evolve for nearly 13 years now. How have you seen the market as well as customers requirements change and mature over the last few years? Yeah. I mean, it's, as we were sharing before, it's been a journey, right? It's been a journey that, where customer, you know, start to be aware of potential risks. There was evolution about how, you know, CPS system, we're talking with the rest of the organization in the network. So it's been a journey over time where customer acquire the expertise, you know, they acquired more knowledge. So all of that, you know, all of that took us in a place where we are today, where basically, you know, there is knowledge on one side, there is budget that has been driven because of this motion, right? You know, if you look about, you know, five years ago, having budget for some company in order to invest in this specific space was not easy because there was not understanding at the executive level and so on, right? So knowledge increasing, you know, more, better understanding about the space and understanding about, you know, every executive in the company that is not an expert about how much this is important is basically some of the good outcome that this recognition is bringing into the space. Fantastic. And yeah, that aligns with the messaging that we're seeing from the field. And hearing from our customers as well. I'm going to ask you to put on your chief product officer hat now for a minute. So based on that growth, what does this mean for Nozomi in terms of continued innovation? Yeah, it's, this is something that will continue to drive our innovation stream, right? We know very well, you know, our passion, our DNA is innovating in behalf of our customers. So we have that, we feel that as a mission. We did that from day one. So I think this recognition is simply continue to drive that motion that is, you know, work close with the customer, not just to sell them a technology, but sit down with them, be partner, you know, with our customer, listening what they need, listening how they're using the product and continues that evolution stream. And also, if you look at the technology space in general, for Nozomi, but outside from Nozomi, you know, we started from a place where at the beginning, the main focus was, you know, finding visibility, trying to understand what was the landscape. And then, you know, over time through innovation, we added one piece after the other. And I think, you know, we're just halfway through that journey. If you want to look about what has been done on the IT space, and what is being done on the CPS space right now, there is a lot of things that, you know, we have the chance to do. Obviously, we never have to forget that there is requirements that are different from a classical IT system, and that is embedded in what we know, that is embedded in our expertise. But there is a lot of stuff that we can do. So I think for Nozomi, this is simply another recognition and an additional motivation to continue to do what we did from day one. Absolutely agreed. Absolutely agreed, Andrea. On a more personal level, how does it feel knowing that Gartner has recognized and validated all of your hard work and everyone in the company since 2013? That's a huge accomplishment and congratulations on that. Thank you. Thank you, Sandeep. And be ready, because I want to revert back to the question with you, because you're one of the person that you've been in this industry from the very beginning, right, when, you know, the OT cybersecurity space, the CPS cybersecurity space was still, you know, not a mainstream. So I want also to understand how do you feel? Let me start to answer to that question. And let me say, it's been great, right? Seeing something that was an idea and seeing this idea growing, you know, with passion and seeing now Gartner recognizing, you know, the space with the Magic Quadrant and recognizing Nozomi, one of the leaders in the Magic Quadrant, it's been great, right? It feels awesome. And actually validate, you know, a little bit, a lot of the energy and the work that we put in this adventure. Let's remember that when we started, when I started, I remember there was some conversation with potential customer that they were like, cybersecurity on my plant? Oh, no, I never had an issue on my plant. It's working 24 by 7, you know, cyber is not a problem for me, right? You know, a lot of those, you know, there was a lot of those conversations happening at the very beginning. And now seeing that there is a much bigger community, we're working all together, you know, customer, partners, you know, technologies, vendor, you know, in order to try to increase the level of cybersecurity inside a CPS space is great. And what I can say, it feels awesome. Now I'm curious, well, how do you feel also? Because, you know, you've been in this space from the very beginning, I remember you when one of the first person, you know, start to educate in the market about the importance of cybersecurity. And now you see that your bet on being in this space for many, many years and invest all your expertise now has been recognized, how do you feel? I think to take your words, it does feel awesome to have poured so much energy into something. And, and truthfully, there are times when it's been an uphill battle. And as amazing as a customer base that we have, we protect something like 12,000 networks today. We've got some of the world's largest airlines, airports, oil companies, refineries, manufacturing organizations, utilities. And these are considered early adopters. So I find it equally validating to know that all the effort that we've put into this is finally starting to come to fruition. And it's fantastic that we are finally recognized as a leader. It's a great feeling. Yeah, no, I totally agree with you. I totally agree with you. And it is great seeing where we are right now and seeing, you know, a lot of the energy that is being added by many people in the industry. I think it's a big achievement for everyone. Agreed. And, you know, you mentioned something that's really important to myself personally, as well as I know it to you, and that's community. We are a community and we are taking this journey together. Some people are ahead of the curve. Some people are trying to catch up. But I think it's an exciting time to be in this space. The best is clearly yet to come. And I don't even think we've hit that market adoption saturation rate yet that even makes a difference. These are single digit percentage customers that need us, that actually have us already. So I'm getting prepared for a very exciting journey in the years to come. You know, and it ties in with exactly what Gartner says about us. You know, Gartner, when people click on the link and read the report, you'll see that Gartner lists our strengths as product, innovation and geographic strategy. So taking that back to you as our founder, one of our founders and our chief product officer, how does that align with your roadmap looking forward? Yeah, no, thank you. Thank you for the question, Sandeep. First of all, I want to before jumping into the question and answering, I want to add a comment on what you said about about the community piece, because that is always something that I've always cared about. And for me, it's very important. I absolutely agree with you when you say that it's an exciting time, you know, to be in this space right now. It's an exciting time if you're building technology. It's an exciting time if you're a customer. Because if you think about the community that is being built right around the space, there will be a lot of people that I understand very well the problem inside their organization, but they struggle sometimes to make sure that their executive, who is not an expert on cybersecurity, they will understand exactly what they were trying to share with them. And the fact that now we're here, it will make the life of a lot of people in the community, a lot of customers, it will make their life easier in order to try to make sure they will get the right attention, the right budget to do exactly what they had in mind to do for the space. So that is great for the community. And now going back to what Gartner said, as you well said in the report, Gartner named in particular our product as a first, our innovation capability and also, you know, our geographic strategy that we put in place. So, you know, I think what it means for us, as I said at the beginning, it means that we're doing exactly the right things. The reason why we want, we are the leader. The reason why so many customers like working with us is because of our capability to innovate on behalf of them. Obviously, we have a very clear, you know, strategy in front of us and that we want to achieve. But also we have the humility to keep listening, you know, who is using the product on the day by day. Now, say that it's I can't wait to now move forward and be at the end of 2025 and see what our customer will think about some of the things that we're doing at the moment. And it will bring life to the market in 2025 because we say we are just halfway through to that journey. And in our investment in the product, in the technology, in the innovation, it's continued to flow and we'll bring more of that innovation to help our customer at the end, you know, to do more with less. Right. You know, that's one of the goals. We're not looking to bring innovation into the product to give the customer another dashboard to, you know, to spend time with. We're trying to help them to spend less time to be tactical and spend more time to be strategic. So and a lot of the innovation that is coming into the product, it goes exactly in that direction. Fantastic, I love that, Andrea, and I'm lucky enough to have been involved in some of that feedback loop. There's a number of opportunities we get where in the field we come up with a request for a feature or something that just really makes sense that we haven't thought of before. And I've seen the process take place. And within anywhere from days to a week, you've got some sort of dev code that we can work to try on. So for me in the field, I appreciate the fact that you can react quickly to real time requests to make product changes and little things like that. That's why every release notes I look at and we've got 10, 15, 20 new things added. And I know these are all bubbling up from what people are asking for in the field. So thank you very much for that. You know, and if we look back at the last 12 to 18 months, we've had a lot of product releases that have enhanced the family and the platform. We had Arc Embedded, right, which was huge for us. Mandiant Threat Intelligence Expansion Pack, huge for us considering a lot of the IoT environments we tend to get in and we're seeing a lot more mixed devices instead of pure play OT. Guardian Air, which I'm really excited about. We've got some incredibly interesting use cases and customers that are using it today. Another industry first. We've got things like Vantage IQ, which I always tell people is like having your own SOC analyst in the cloud. Is there anything in terms of innovations or something exciting that you can tease us with that we can expect for 2025 and beyond? So it's a it's a it's something that it's, you know, it's a question that is exactly my passion, right, and first of all, it's been great to see all the innovation, as you mentioned, that we bring on, you know, on the market in 2024, you know, capability, as you mentioned, capability to monitor the wireless, you know, having the security on board on a PLC directly for the first time ever in the in the history, you know, giving the customer the chance to benchmarking, you know, their risk level compared to other peers in the industry and understanding exactly where they are. I mean, I'm very excited about what we did, especially because I see how much the customer are appreciated what what we bring into the market. But now looking at 2025, one thing that I can share is the fact that, you know, we shared we are halfway through that journey of innovation and innovating on behalf of our customer. A lot of the things that we're going to do for 2025 goes in that direction to help our customer to be less tactical and be more strategic. We've been in this space for so many years. Right. And you see how much time, you know, a lot of especially especially start spending to connect the dots instead of thinking about how to be strategic. You know, I work also myself for four years in a SOC and I know how much time you spend working in a SOC and connecting the dots and how little time you have to try to be very strategic. And I think, you know, not only the opportunity that Nozomi has, but I think in general, the cybersecurity world is keep investing to actually give our time to our customer the possibility to spend more time and be strategic instead of spending a lot of time to connecting the dots. And I think, you know, the main innovation that we're going to bring on 2025 is related to that piece. And the second part that I want to mention, just to tease a little bit, the capability of our customer to react when they see that something is not going in the direction where they want. Interesting. OK, thank you for sharing that. And, you know, that's something that's always been important to our customer base is that operational efficiency. We know our average customer is getting less money to support more tools and applications and environment with less people. So it's important for us to help people, you know, work smarter, not necessarily work harder. For you and your other half, Moreno Carullo, the other founder of the organization, we hear the word artificial intelligence a lot. It's a big buzzword there. It is. What can you tell our viewers, Andrea, that a message from you and Moreno regarding how we use artificial intelligence and why are we different than every other single company out there that's using AI? Yeah, it's a great question, Sandeep, because, as you mentioned, by knowing AI very well and in this case, I'm saying that more because this is an expertise that Moreno has, right? My PhD was focused in cybersecurity, but Moreno did a PhD focused on AI and machine learning. So it's bread and butter. So we involve AI capabilities from the very beginning at the base of our solution and not using AI as a base word as is being used nowadays in a way that is not always properly, you know, representing the value that AI can do. But one thing that I can share, Sandeep, that I really believe in it is that the evolution of AI and the reason why AI right now is so prominent or is so important is that it's not due to the fact that it was an invention behind the AI algorithm, that it was completely different from the past. Obviously, there is evolution from that perspective. But at the end of the day, the mathematics behind what is the AI is pretty much the same as it was 10 years ago, right? There is evolution on the way that we train models and so on. But I think there is two main things that happen that they bring us where we are right now. The first one is, you know, CPU capability. So the capability to process a huge amount of data. And the other one is data availability. So now looking at the CPS space, why do I think, you know, as an examining because, you know, this is what we're trying to do. We're very well positioned to help our customer really using AI to empower what they're doing is because one now, you know, CPU capability, you know, memory and CPU power is now available. And I don't have to explain why, you know, going up into the cloud and also, you know, the continuous evolution is actually making the CPU power available, you know, in a much easier way at a lower cost. And this is there. But the second things, all the work, all the innovation that we bring into the market, everything that we did from day one was going into the direction that we need to have more data in order to have more context and more context. We let the AI to really, you know, provide valuable information and valuable insights to the customer. And that's where we are right now. I think introducing ARC, you know, the capability to get the data from the PLC, monitor the wireless and everything that we had, you know, also in the past is getting context to Nozomi that is helping our AI to evolve to the next level that will be disruptive for the day by day operation for our customer. I think we can change the way that the cybersecurity is being done in this space thanks to the evolution that we're going to bring into the market around AI. Oh, I love that answer. Thank you, Andrea. I appreciate you sharing that information. What would you say to our viewers out there, from your perspective, why is our collaboration with Mandiant on the threat intelligence front important to our average customer? Yeah, so it's that part, you know, that collaboration that we're doing, you know, one more time goes in that direction to bring more context, you know, to the customer. And that's why also Gartner recognize inside the product our capability, you know, to innovate to go and go into that direction is exactly because we recognize that if you want to do a good job on cybersecurity, it's never be a one man effort. It's never been a one company effort. At the end of the day, the most secure software, every, you know, what has been reached as an excellent in terms of level of cybersecurity, it was always being driven by a community. So it was always being driven by, you know, looking at what all the different people are doing. So the vision that we have in Tunazam is not only believe that we are the only one and the information, we're the only company knowing the truth, but it's also partnering, getting data from the open source community and in this particular case, getting specific data about attribution of what's happening in terms of cybersecurity directly from Mandiant and integrate to make that intelligence consumable inside the solution. What does it means? It means that if you are a customer and, you know, Nozomi is telling you that you have, you know, one thousand vulnerability to fix, you already know that in the CPS space, you will have very, very low probability that you can fix all of those vulnerability vulnerabilities. So you need to prioritize and you need to decide what is more important for you and what is less important. And the collaboration that we created is actually helping the customer to decide, for example, to ask to themselves how many times those one thousand vulnerabilities that I have, unique vulnerabilities that I have, has been exploited in the last year. If you have a vulnerability that we never seen a malware using that vulnerability, it's never been exploited, you know, by design need to take lower priority than a vulnerability that has been exploited four times in the last three months, exactly in the same vertical where I'm working. So that's why I think that collaboration is important and go and, you know, it's stressing the community concept of getting information from different sources in order to help the customer to have the context to become strategic and decide what is important and what is less important. Oh, that's fantastic. I love the way you put that, Andrea, and you keep coming back to that context. It's all about context. We're we're at a point where customers, I feel, are having data overload. They're getting so much information from so many different systems that the challenge for them now becomes sifting through all the noise. We have a lot of our SOC teams complaining about alert fatigue. You know, it's just too much incoming information. So I think 2025 is really going to be about contextualizing all of this data and distilling it down. And that's why I love what you've done with the product, with our risk scoring. You know, not only are now we giving a risk score to assets, but you're allowing me as an asset owner to individualize that score. So if I have built a control around a particular vulnerability and I don't need to worry about it, or if I look it up in Mandiant and this has never been exploited in the wild, I can now adjust that scale to truly reflect what my risk looks like. So I think that's a great example of how you guys are taking what the industry is striving for and incorporating that into the product. Yeah, we're doing that, Sandeep, and part of that is because of, you know, of the job that we're continuing doing together. And in particular, you know, you and your team are doing by, you know, your title is said very well, right, Phil CTO. That's why, you know, we believe it's so important that we spend time, you know, close to our customer in order to get those feedbacks and making sure that we drive them exactly to where you say, right, helping them to prioritize, helping them to decide what is important and what is not. There is fatigue on the cybersecurity space about that information. And now let me say something a bit, you know, maybe for someone a bit controversial. You know, there was a time when we dreamed that a CM can be, you know, the solution of everything. But, you know, I think now it's being recognized by a good amount of the industry that this is not a silver bullet. This is not the way to solve it. So that's why continue to bring contest and bringing information that consumable for the customer remain one of the biggest opportunity that we have in front of us to elevate the game. Absolutely, absolutely. I know we're coming to the end of our half an hour, Andrea. So I wanted to hit you with one final thought, please. One thing that I've noticed in the field, and I'm sure you have as well, as time has evolved, we're seeing more and more CISOs being involved in these conversations and in these decisions. In your opinion, what's next for the market and how is this going to help benefit those CISOs out there that are maybe looking to start this journey? Yeah, so it's first of all, I agree with you, right, there is more CISO that are being deeply involved in discussion about projects around CPS. And this is a clear indicator about the fact that not only Gartner, but there is a recognition, you know, from every single perspective about, you know, the importance of doing something for the CPS, right? There is the recognition that that is where is the real value for the company and where it's important to invest the money. So that's one aspect. But the second aspect is that, you know, in general, so one of the good news, you know, for all the CISOs that are now getting closer to this is that I think the technology and the market is evolving in a way that also give them the possibility, at least what we're doing inside Exami, give the possibility to a CISO to open up for three minutes a day, you know, our main dashboard and getting some of the key metrics and KPIs about their organization that they need to know, right? They don't need to know a lot of details, but they need to know two, three, you know, KPIs in order to understand about how the company is going. And if they are talking with other executives inside a company, they can share, you know, the level of cybersecurity, the risk level that the company was able to achieve. So that's why we're seeing more CISOs and more CISOs that are embracing this journey are starting to introduce the solution. The good news for them is that we're going to help them actually to spread inside the company a little bit of the knowledge and educate the company about the risk level and where they are exactly from that perspective. So it would be easier for who is starting the journey now, and hopefully we're making the life easier for who's starting the journey many years before. Fantastic, fantastic, thank you, Andrea. Many congratulations to you. Congratulations on being named a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for CPS. Congratulations on all of our continued innovation and listening to what our customers are asking for. And I want to thank you very much for being a guest on the show today. And I hope you'll be back again. Thank you, Sandeep. It's always been always a pleasure talking with you and looking forward for the next invite. Thank you, Andrea. Thank you, everyone, for tuning in today. Have a great rest of your day. See you next month. Thank you, everyone.
