Cyolo: A secure connectivity solution that enables organizations to stay agile, secure and productive - whatever the situation, wherever their users are located

In the digital world we live in, the ability to work from anywhere has become essential to keep the business running. Furthermore, the ongoing pandemic has increased the complexity involved in IT security for remote workers using corporate devices and BYOD. When employees connect to work applications, they are prone to expose the organization to vulnerabilities. The revamped operational style of the companies has also drastically changed the traditional workday and cybersecurity efforts of companies. Globally, there are various firms delivering excellent security solutions to safeguard the companies from threats, but Cyolo stands out from the rest. Cyolo is changing the way people connect to work, making it more flexible and secure while supporting any existing environment. It is the only company in the world providing Zero Trust Access for IT & OT.

The company’s super simple solution enables on-site and remote users to connect rapidly and securely to their working environments - in any network or in the cloud. Cyolo offers real zero trust by ensuring that sensitive data stays with the customer at all times. The company provides one unified platform for secure access, with multi-factor authentication, single-sign-on, and direct integration with any existing environment. It takes just 10 minutes to set up and is fully adaptive, supporting any application and protocol.

In conversation with Almog Apirion, CEO of Cyolo

Q. What are some of the significant challenges you faced in initial years? How did you overcome them?

Building and preserving a winning team is probably the biggest challenge for any company. We strongly emphasize hiring top talent with the right culture fit and we’re working to keep our employees inspired, challenged, and motivated in a positive environment. We also knew that we needed to bring the biggest value first to help clients mitigate their biggest risks and keep the business running while developing initial versions of our product. We prioritized this by listening to the customer’s needs and analyzing trends coming from the attackers. We came out of stealth mode just as COVID broke out, and the percentage of people working remotely jumped from 30% to nearly 100% overnight. Many organizations had gaps in their security that were previously mitigated by physical security controls (such as employee ID cards, CCTV, etc.) that simply couldn’t be used in a post COVID world, and VPNs and other remote access technologies were unable to meet the new load in a timely manner. Often, organizations were forced to choose between security and productivity. Therefore, we had to focus on developing a solution that provided both.

Q. Specialized services come with an expensive price tag. How do you maintain your affordability and profitability?

Our offering provides our customers with an alternative platform that can replace a lot of their existing controls. On top of that, the implementation of our solution requires minimal resources from us, our partners, and our customers. Also, our compute resources utilization is minimal. For example, our cloud bill is much lower than our competitors because we built our technology in a way to ensure maximum efficiency.

Q. What are the important factors that you address while designing and developing a security solution?

Before founding Cyolo, I was the CISO of a global organization. I learned that it's useless if the end-user doesn’t adopt a security solution. Therefore, we knew that it was important to provide a solution that improves productivity, has a great user experience, and enables our end users to spend more time working than trying to work. We also wanted to provide something that is adaptive to our customer’s existing environment and gives them value from the very first hour. Therefore, we designed an easy-to-deploy, manage, and scale solution.

We know that maintenance costs are often the bulk of the budget for CISOs and IT teams, so our solution also offers a substantially lower overhead of deploying, managing and scaling the product than other tools on the market. Perhaps most importantly, we wanted to give the very highest level of security. Our ZTNA solution is the most secure solution in the world. My co-founders come from penetration testing and security research; they can literally bring the attacker to the table. We wanted to ensure that Cyolo could never be used as a door to any of our customers. That’s why we built our architecture differently, to ensure that sensitive data is never kept in our cloud and is fully controlled by the customer.

Q. Do you provide industry specific solutions based on the clients’ requirement? If yes kindly explain in brief.

We’re constantly learning from our customers, and striving to provide better security, user experience, and operational agility. We have developed a solution to connect organizational users to IT and OT computer systems, and tailored the product to meet their specific needs. For example: we enable them to take care of their ongoing operations and protect their data while ensuring compliance through capabilities like session recording, real-time supervised access etc. As we also sell to service providers like SASE and MSSPs, the solution also needs to have the capability of being integrated to other security controls easily, efficiently, and rapidly.

Q. In the digital world we live in, firms face a dynamic environment marked by industry consolidation, new competitors, technical innovation and uncertainties. How do you cope with the adversaries?

We never stop analyzing what our customers need and how we can make their life easier by providing them with unique capabilities. Our architecture can support every network topology, online or offline, for almost any organization in the world. In addition, as there’s a trend among companies to go towards a managed service, we developed a fully adaptive tool built for service providers as well as our full ZTNA solution for corporates.

Q. Do you have any new services ready to be launched?

Yes, we are constantly launching new services and features. Some notable features that are going to be released include Cyolo’s cognitive engine, which will act as a brain on top of our connectivity platform, enabling dynamic policies based on risk and helping customers to improve their connectivity policies with prescriptive analytics, secure web gateway, and more.

Q. What does the future hold for your company and its customers? Are exciting things on the way?

Absolutely! We have big plans in store. Our ultimate vision is to connect everything based on identities, not just users to applications and resources, but also between application resources and compute resources based on identities. We aim to offer a full-stack zero trust solution that connects every entity in cyberspace easily and securely, according to verifiable identities, security policies, and real-time risk.

About the leader behind the success of Cyolo in his own words

Before I was a CISO in the corporate world, I was the commander of the Cyber unit of the Israel navy, which I built from scratch. Coming from the field, I understood the need for a practical solution that gives organizations the flexibility to ensure security without changing their existing environment. My two co-founders and I saw how complex providing secure connectivity can be and we wanted to make it easier and more secure for users. In addition to that, we wanted to create a truly secure solution. Risks and attacks that global organizations are facing continue to rise and we’re committed to protecting corporates against cyberattacks with a secure, user-friendly and adaptive solution.

“Our mission from the first day was clear: to create one unified platform that enables users to access all the organization’s applications, servers, desktops and files, securely and with ease”