Click here for Part I, Part II & Part III

Protecting enterprise and government networks against millions of cyber threats every day

Suzanne Magee is the co-founder and chief evangelist officer of Bandura Systems. Chris Fedde is the company’s CEO. Headquartered in Columbia, MD and Lake St. Louis, MO, Bandura Systems is the creator of the PoliWall® TIG™ (Threat Intelligence Gateway), a comprehensive security platform designed to help enterprise and government networks combat emerging cyber threats. The company’s first TIG was developed for the US Department of Defense. Now, Bandura offers its automated, scalable product to businesses, agencies, and institutions seeking to protect their sensitive data without diverting staff resources.

EDWIN WARFIELD: As a network- and security-driven company, how do you protect your intellectual property while ensuring partners and potential partners don’t need to jump through hoops to work with the platform?

SUZANNE MAGEE: With having a Threat Intelligence Gateway, we decided to make that an open platform, because there were companies like Symantec, Webroot, Proofpoint, ZeroFOX, who had a lot of centers out there around the world, and were collecting all this intelligence and then packaging it so that it could be utilized and updated by many different enterprises, mostly larger enterprises. We looked at that market and thought, as that becomes a commodity, how can we get it most easily consumed and used by enterprises of any size? We thought: we’ll build the relationships, technology partnerships, with the threat intelligence providers who all have a little bit of a different focus, and it’s critical that we have identification across the globe of as many different possibilities of threats—indicators of compromise—that we can.

As you can imagine, this growing from moving into the dark web to ongoing threats coming from ransomware, and then various changes to ransomware—NotPetya—I mean, it goes on and on, and who knows what’s coming down the pipe next? These companies are very good at identifying all that and tracking which IP addresses have been compromised—that changes dynamically second by second. So what we did was we created a platform where we could integrate any of those threat intelligence partnerships, also your threat intelligence platforms, called TIPs, they do aggregation of a lot of threat intelligence as well from various sources, but we can take them into our platform and then the PoliWall TIG can take action on those threats.

Part of the problem is firewalls were not designed with this big scale and threats that are now hitting the network. It’s not a fair fight at the present time, so having a Threat Intelligence Gateway equalizes the advantage between the attackers and the network where the firewalls were just overwhelmed by that. So, you have all this threat intelligence information that can’t be used by a firewall because it’s too much, by a factor of maybe 3% could be utilized by a firewall, and 97% of what’s known out there can’t be processed—it’s just too much. We are talking tens of millions of indicators of compromise. And so we partner with the firewalls—that’s another partnering opportunity for us to be able to be that first shield out front—using the threat intelligence information from our providers—Symantec as I said, Webroot, Proofpoint, ZeroFOX; we’re also partnering now with Gigamon, on the virtual side with VMware, going to the cloud with the Google Cloud Partner Program, and others. We are that open platform that makes it very easy to integrate what a customer may already have or what we may be able to provide on a subscription service for them.

Q. What are your plans for the next 5 years? Do you expect to sell to more small and medium-sized businesses?

CHRIS FEDDE: So the customer base, those different verticals all have their own needs. They range from the need to meet compliance regulations, the need to set to ameliorate some of their workloads; all of them, to some degree or another, have secured product overload where they are just getting more and more products and they don’t seem to be improving security, right down to those verticals that are targeted and are perpetually victims of various kinds of attack. So, you’ve got this range of them, but if you think about the range of verticals and the range of problems they have, the needs they have to be solved, they actually have one common denominator, which is if you can keep the known threats from ever being at the front door, you, in fact, meet all those requirements. And so what I have found is if you’ve got a very simple message, and the simple message addresses simple-to-understand problems, then you’ve got one of the biggest factors of success. And there’s no simpler message than “block all the unknowns from ever hitting your network,” and then as you talk to the various verticals, you can apply that to how that helps in their particular problem set. So, it’s simple for the salespeople to understand, it’s simple for them to relate to their customers.

Every vertical is actually a target market for us. We don’t have to specialize in health, we don’t have to specialize in banks, because our message is simple enough that we can take it to any vertical, they will understand how that helps their problem set. That has allowed us to build up a target market right now of small or medium businesses. Why? Look, we’re a small company. We like short sales cycles. Who doesn’t? Smaller companies, medium-sized companies, they do have short sales cycles; they don’t have layers of bureaucracy to wade through. We really do like just sitting in front of people that understand their problem, they want to get the problem fixed and they can, in a straightforward manner, go fix the problem. That’s just golden for a company this size—just go out and make as many as those kinds of sales as we can.

Now, we have a lot of things going on with large enterprises. We love large enterprises. They lead to big deals, they lead to revenue, which we need to thrive, but they are long sales cycles, so we pursue the larger enterprises, but we do it judiciously so that we can not let it interfere with the day-to-day successes we have with the small and medium-sized companies. And as we start introducing and announcing customers that are large customers, that just adds to the credibility and the credentials that Bandura has as a company, which in turn accelerates sales to the small and medium-sized companies. So, to us, we know how to approach all sizes, it’s just a matter where we choose to emphasize right now. And that’ll change; a year from now, you ask the same question, we’ll have a different answer, but right now that’s exactly what the company needs and has demonstrated the success we’re doing.

Connect with Chris and Suzanne on LinkedIn

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Edwin Warfield, CEO of citybizlist, conducts the CEO Interviews.

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