Winning the Cybersecurity Posture Market – With Breadth and Depth

When I was an engineer fresh out of graduate school and joining Cisco, I was often impressed with our then CEO, John Chambers (now an investor in Balbix). It would describe the pursuit of large and growing markets where Cisco had ambitions to become #1 or #2 in the market. A decade, and many security products later, his clarity of thought and his aspiration to lead in new markets have always stuck with me. If I had to describe why I joined Balbix, it would be for this reason: to be part of a company that will be number 1 or number 2 in a large and growing market. Balbix is ​​a leader in a market that has been called many names, most recently the cybersecurity posture market. But why is Balbix in the cybersecurity posture market? Allow me to explain…

What is the cybersecurity posture market anyway?

In its simplest definition, cybersecurity posture is an assessment of how secure your organization is. For a more detailed definition, see here.

From an end-user perspective, you determine where your organization stands by inventorying and establishing a baseline of what you have in terms of assets, vulnerabilities, and controls. This allows you to map your attack surface. It also helps you understand the risk in your assets.

Once your baseline posture is established, it should be continually and automatically updated. Of course, real-time visibility is important, but the value of cybersecurity posture management is much more than that. Defining your security posture baseline allows you to drive a multitude of use cases with meaningful results, for example:

1. Cyber ​​Asset Attack Surface Management (CAASM)
2. Risk-Based Vulnerability Management (RBVM)
3. Cyber ​​Risk Quantification (CRQ) and Board Level Reporting

There are many other overlapping and tangential use cases related to security posture, but Balbix focuses on these three that are the top concerns of CISOs today.

It’s a fragmented market today. Who wants to play?

As you may have deduced from the use cases above, the market is crowded. And noisy. Today it is fragmented, but that is changing rapidly. Some vendors, such as CMDB and asset management vendors, IoT/OT management vendors, and traditional vulnerability management vendors, play in one use case and want to expand into another. Some cloud security vendors also want to provide a holistic view of on-premises and cloud assets. Meanwhile, endpoint detection and response (EDR) and extended detection and response (XDR) vendors are leveraging their endpoint footprint to move up the food chain and provide analysis and insights into vulnerabilities.

Then there are Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs) that consolidate different point products into larger offerings. And, not to mention, global systems integrators, who drive CRQ programs by anchoring their services with some of the previously mentioned security product categories.

Finally, there are vendors I call posture-native: cybersecurity startups that are built from the ground up using a data-driven approach. They’re building modern technology stacks that look at both on-premises and cloud networks, scale, and have automation at the center of what they do. No points if you guess which bucket Balbix is ​​in!

Some of these players will go it alone, some will partner, some will be data sources or enabling technologies for others, and some may be a combination of these. Balbix, for example, creates a unified risk model by ingesting data from our customers’ existing IT and security systems (including those mentioned above) and then works directly with our customers or through service partners. to help our customers manage and improve their cybersecurity posture.

Balbix’s unique approach – breadth and depth

Balbix has built its platform around an asset-centric risk model, where an asset can be a physical device or virtual asset observed on a network, an application running on an asset, or a user observed on a network. Balbix can discover assets using API-based connectors in third-party sources or using its own native sensors. Balbix then uses advanced analytics to rank assets and populate over 400 asset attributes, correlate and infer vulnerabilities, and calculate risk for each asset.

This asset-centric view provides Balbix users with a risk model that has both the breadth and depth they need for visibility, vulnerability management, and cyber risk.

Zoom out – solve for width

Balbix dashboards allow CISOs and their teams to quantify their cyber risk in monetary terms (dollars, yen, etc.) to improve how they communicate cyber risk to their CEO, CFO and board administration. With Balbix, CISOs can deliver data-driven insights and quickly improve their posture against cyber risk by focusing on their most critical vulnerabilities first. Balbix is ​​the only platform that can address CAASM, RBVM and CRQ use cases in a single view.

Zoom in – solve for depth

At the heart of Balbix’s vision is the ambition to use data to solve some of the toughest security challenges. Being data-driven allows Balbix to be able to explore the smallest details with precision. Customers can slice and dice asset and vulnerability data for more informed remediation and reporting. Balbix customers can also use this data to work at high speed when critical issues arise. For example, Balbix helps its customers identify thousands of applications using log4j, including thousands of custom applications.

For me, it’s the breadth and depth of its risk model that will allow Balbix to win in the cybersecurity posture market, and that’s why I’m excited to be part of the team.