Shining a brighter light on what’s dwelling in your network

by IronNet Co-CEO William Welch on June 8, 2022

I’m not going to lie. I like winning. To me, however, winning isn’t arbitrary or based on pure luck. Instead, it is the result of very hard work — often behind the scenes. It’s not the label or reward of winning that I find so fulfilling; it’s the symbolic validation that the efforts were worth the elbow grease and challenges along the way.

In my own life, for instance, I worked as soon as I was of the age to do so. My summers of landscape work paid off not just monetarily. Some folks along the way noticed my work ethic, encouraging and influencing me not only to go to college (the first in my family to do so) but also to aspire to a career that ultimately would transform several aspects of cybersecurity. I’m proud of these efforts, as I honestly believe that my former companies, Zscaler and Duo, paved the way for organizations and companies across sectors to accelerate their digital transformation securely.

As one who has straddled — almost evenly — the analog world (i.e., the age of albums and cassette tapes) and the digital world (i.e., the age of smartphones), I know that life as we know it has forever changed for the better. Convenience, connection, and the capability of becoming true global citizens. But we cannot reap these rewards without putting in place strong cybersecurity programs and tools. That is my latest mission: to transform cybersecurity yet again through Collective Defense.

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Needless to say, when Cyber Defense Magazine recognized IronNet this week with the 2022 Global Infosec Award in the category of Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) Detection, I felt a huge sense of victory. We all did at IronNet, as everyone has been working tirelessly to create the technology needed to stay ahead of the adversaries, including nation-state threat actors. I could not be more proud of our product team, led by our Chief Product Officer Don Closser; our Cyber Operations Center (CyOC) team who works around the clock to ensure our customers’ environments are safe from malicious APT activity; and our astute analytics gurus who have raised the bar on the industry category of threat detection through AI and machine learning.

Gary S. Miliefsky, Publisher of Cyber Defense Magazine, said,

“IronNet embodies three major features we judges look for in our winners: understanding tomorrow’s threats, today; providing a cost-effective solution; and innovating in unexpected ways that can help mitigate cyber risk and get one step ahead of the next breach.”

This recognition is the result of a simple formula: IronNet innovation meets IronNet grit.

Our differentiated goal is to deliver threat detection capabilities based on automatically correlated detections both within an individual enterprise network (to reduce alert volume and facilitate prioritization) and across Collective Defense communities so peers within a sector, supply chain, state, or government, can pool resources to defend against the same threats. This approach raises the security posture of all. As National Cyber Director Chris Inglis has said, “I think Collective Defense is the transformative moment for us if we mean to do something about this [problem in cyber] … If you are a transgressor in this space, you have to beat all of us to beat one of us.”

Let’s face it: growing any startup is not easy. Growing a cybersecurity startup is perhaps even harder. There are brilliant solutions out there. We know that. CrowdStrike for endpoint detection and response. Zscaler for cloud security. Splunk for SIEM technology. So how does IronNet stand out as the world-class company transforming cybersecurity through Collective Defense? It comes down to the people building our unique technology.

Many “IronNetters” have come from the highest echelons of cybersecurity such as the NSA, US Cyber Command, and DARPA. But we’re not resting on our laurels. Instead, we push hard every day to get to world class. Clearly we’re on the right path.

Hands down, no other threat detection tool can compare to IronNet’s capabilities for detecting APTs (not to mention unsophisticated threats that can still wreak havoc on your network). And if you don’t believe me, try our Attack Assessment. Or listen on our June 21 webinar to Bridgewater’s or Texas Capital Bank’s experience with IronNet threat detection technology.

I challenge anyone who is in the dark about what’s on your network to shine a brighter light on what may be dwelling, undetected, there. We leave no trace of APT activity behind.