Introducing the Cavelo platform

by James Mignacca on March 10, 2021

Simplified data discovery and cybersecurity compliance

We all know the cybersecurity landscape is changing. Attacks are more pervasive, and attack techniques are more sophisticated. Fifteen years ago, hackers favored a short–game strategy, focusing on larger businesses that could yield quick and large financial returns. Over time, attackers started to take more of a long-game approach, targeting sensitive personal information that they could either sell on the dark web or use to access larger targets. Billions of consumer and personal details have been leaked and exploited as a result.

As a business, cloud adoption, exponential data growth driven by digital transformation and remote workforces mean that company and customer data lives everywhere. Security used to focus on protecting what lives within the proverbial castle walls. It was the ‘traditional’ perimeter that relied on firewalls, A/V solutions and SIEM (Security Information and Event Monitoring) for primary defense. That perimeter doesn’t exist anymore and today security focuses more on real-time threat detection and identity protection across applications, users, machines and endpoints. No perimeter is the new perimeter; digital identities and the sensitive data associated with them are the asset.

Nowadays the average business network has hundreds of thousands, or even millions of digital identities, all with sensitive data attached to them. Tracking and managing all of that data is hard and a lack of visibility to what data lives on your network, where it lives and how it’s used is increasing your level of cyber risk, driving regulatory pressure and data privacy requirements.

Data privacy is priority

For years, global, regional and industry regulators have focused on creating cybersecurity compliance frameworks and requirements to protect network data and hold businesses accountable for their role as data custodians. Ever-increasing data compliance risk and vulnerabilities are pushing regulatory reporting requirements and today non-compliance and failed audits can cost companies upwards of millions of dollars – and their reputations.

Consider that in Canada, Bill C-11 proposes fines of $10 million dollars or 3% of global revenue while a failed Global Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) audit could result in $10 million euros or 2% of revenue. Just one failed audit could be business ending. As it turns out, improper data identification and classification is the leading cause of audit failure.

How can the average business protect data they don’t know about?

Cybersecurity used to be looked at as a ‘big company’ problem, but just as small and medium sized businesses are held to the same security standards as their larger peers, they need to align to the same data privacy requirements, too. Unlike their larger peers, smaller businesses don’t have large teams and an enterprise-sized budget to access the tools and technology they need to get ahead of the problem. They’re drowning in data with no way to manage it and no bandwidth to drive an internal solution.

We can relate.

As security engineers, data protection and security experts, we’ve spent our careers working with customers on security solutions that focus on threat mitigation and data protection. We’ve seen the evolution of IT architecture and watched as the zero-trust model moved from theory to practice. With ever-increasing data sources and distributed IT companies have struggled with data discovery and the ability to classify, track, manage and report on sensitive data.

As we talked to IT, security leaders and even CFOs we realized that the challenge of data discovery isn’t just a security issue – it’s a business issue. Without the ability to quantify, qualify and measure your business’s risk, you can’t properly defend it.

Introducing the Cavelo platform

We set out on a mission to make data discovery, classification and tracking simpler. We wanted to give companies a head start on regulatory compliance and a leg up on threat mitigation. The Cavelo platform is a SaaS-based, data compliance risk management solution that installs as an endpoint agent. Powered by machine learning, the platform’s engine can ingest limitless volumes of data from multiple sources and hosts, scaling over time as the business adds more data to the network.

The platform was built on and uses the NIST framework for baseline discovery, classification and reporting specifications and can be customized to align to a limitless number of other regulatory and industry-specific frameworks. Regardless of what type of product or service you provide, you’ll have your regulatory bases covered.

The platform can be used independently by IT managers or compliance professionals, or by security analysts at MSSPs as part of threat monitoring and reporting toolsets. We believe every company should be able to access critical technology and capabilities that support cybersecurity and compliance, which is why we offer right-sized pricing and a right-sized solution that fits your business’s specific requirements. We even offer a free version of the Cavelo platform for smaller businesses with up to 100 hosts for discovery and up to 10 hosts for reporting and policy.

Cybersecurity is a team sport and working as a collective goes beyond achieving our own individual business objectives – it supports the industry at large. Whether you’re struggling with your business’s compliance requirements or vetting your risk management and security tech stack, we’re here to help. Give us a call and give the product a try (for free) – we’d love to hear what you think about it!