CloudSEK is an AI-based information risk management company headquartered in Singapore, with an office in Bengaluru for the Indian market. The company is a brainchild of Rahul Sasi, who established CloudSEK in 2015, and started actively selling it’s X-Vigil Platform only around middle of 2017. “ The initial days were tough. Cyber security maturity was low and no one wanted another line item to budget for. CloudSEK is extremely thankful to the early customers who believed in the product and signed on as the charter clients. I took charge as CEO in July 2018,” says Sourabh Issar, CEO, CloudSEK, who was inspired by Sasi’s visionary technology, and joined to help achieve the vision for an impregnable, revolutionary cyber solution.
According to Issar, 2018 has been a watershed year for CloudSEK, and with high profile breaches happening all over India and South East Asia, the demand for X-Vigil went up rapidly. “With 10+ clients using the X-Vigil platform across India and South East Asia, including three of the top five Indian private banks, CloudSEK is well poised to rapidly expand its footprint in the Cybersecurity space,” he adds.
X-Vigil platform
CloudSEK’s X-Vigil platform is an AI driven Unified Risk Management platform delivered to customers in a SaaS based model. It offers unique digital risk management capabilities to its customers. The unique features of the CloudSEK platform are:
- Machine based: Machine learning based automation allows it to process large amounts of data, very quickly and cost effectively.
- SAAS: Clients pay as they use, allowing users to scale up and down as required without worrying about restrictive lock in.
- No internal data access: System doesn’t need any access to customer systems/ data. So no regulatory hurdles and no lengthy IT/ risk approval cycles.
- Flash Deploy: Less than a couple of days to go live.
Reminding that the whole world of financial services, ecommerce and fintech today is based on one premise, trust, Issar states, “That trust, is the biggest asset of any firm leveraging the internet for any kind of business, financial, commercial, customer support, branding, etc. And trust, is today most at risk from actors with malicious intent. This risk, called digital risk, is what CloudSEK helps reduce for its clients.” It helps clients get answer to questions like : Are bad actors spying on their confidential data? Is their brand image at risk from fake sites? How can they prevent costly breaches in their infrastructure? What are hackers discussing about the company?
Issar gives an insight into the business problem CloudSEK is solving, and how they are doing it differently. Indicating that the one thing that CISOs hate more than attackers, are warnings that are late, vague or false positive, he remarks that solving this problem is what CloudSEK had in mind when the Unified Risk Platform was built. “Most cyber security organisations today, are trying to address the issue with teams of humans, either internal or sourced from service providers. CloudSEK has changed this by aggressively deploying AI and machine learning to completely revolutionise this space,” he adds.
Artificial intelligence is at the heart of the CloudSEK’s platform. All along the threat value chain, it is AI based machine learning algorithms that power it. “For example, by deploying AI in its data collection module, the bots and crawlers can constantly collect data from 1000+ sources including internet sources, underground/discussion forums, deep web/ dark web exfiltrated data, internet exposed applications etc. The entire process of interpreting/ parsing this data, classifying/ identifying, noise filtering and indexing are driven by machine learning. This allows us to determine the severity of a threat,” explains Issar, adding that the engine also drives correlation which allows CloudSEK to share specific threats with its client. These AI based machine learning algorithms, which took four years to build, can analyze ~9 Gigabytes of incremental data in seconds and give the users alerts that are specific, actionable and timely.
Focus areas
The company has three focus areas for the future :
- Improving and broadening X-Vigil. To grow it from being the best digital risk management platform for Asia to being the best in the world.
- Building new technologies to solve other cyber security needs of its clients.
- Expansion of CloudSEK into more geographies and verticals. Specifically, SE Asia, Middle East and Europe. A key part of this approach is the focus on building channel partnerships with service providers with global and regional footprints.
With the financial world moves online, the demand for cyber security will continue to explode over the next few years. Issar believes that with a vibrant startup environment and abundance of resources in these new technology areas of security, machine learning, AI, and so on, India is poised to contribute significantly to this next phase of the digital revolution.