It’s said that success is where preparation meets opportunity. This is certainly true of the coming together of three InfoSec entrepreneurs to found the solution to challenge the inertia of cloud security and deliver visibility, protection and analytics cloud-forward enterprises need to chart a fast path to a digital future.

“The worldwide public cloud market is projected to grow from $228B in 2019 to $355B by 2022.” Gartner*

Cloud native security solutions are declared a big enabler of this growth. These are exciting times for those operating within the cloud security space. Even so, this scenario carried concerns for Britive co-founders Art Poghosyan, CEO, and Alex Gudanis, CTO.

Seasoned security entrepreneurs each with 20+ years of industry experience, they were beginning to see rapidly widening gaps between the needs of enterprises building innovative digital services in the cloud and the limitations of traditional security solutions made for data centers.

Stepping back a few years, Art and Alex had come together to form Advancive, a leading Identity & Access Management (IAM) consulting and solutions implementation company in 2010. Art’s background in cyber security consultancy and Alex’s in technology vision and architecture proved a powerful combination for helping enterprises move into the cloud securely. The company’s exponential growth led to eventual acquisition by Optiv Security.

During the Advancive years, the two had also joined forces with Sameer Hiremath, industry veteran in security product development, now VP of Products and the third co-founder of Britive. The three executives began to piece together all of the feedback they had received from customers detailing their frustrations in trying to connect legacy solutions for managing privileged access into new multi-cloud scenarios, each with their own policies and taxonomies. They knew there was a better way.

Their collective vision was to create a dynamic and intelligent solution to help companies with privileged access protection in multi-cloud environments. Britive was the result, multi-cloud native, offering centralized visibility of access across the entire landscape of cloud platforms and apps, in addition to policy enforcement and threat monitoring, all in one platform.

Critically, the Britive team built this new platform on a revolutionary Dynamic Permissioning model, which empowers users and machine IDs to grant themselves pre-authorized privileges Just-In-Time (JIT), returning to a state of Zero Standing Privileges (ZSP) once the admin task is completed to minimize the potential attack surface. Zero Standing Privilege enforces the principle of least privilege by ensuring that privileged access is active for users and machine IDs only for as long as needed, for the minimum access level needed, before closing.

“It’s no longer simply a matter of ‘who has access to what,’” says Poghosyan. “An added layer in Britive’s dynamic permissioning platform addresses important questions like ‘is this the right amount of access?’ and ‘are those privileged activities appropriate for this role?’”

Furthermore, through integrating with the various cloud systems and cloud applications an enterprise uses, the API-first Britive platform is able to provide an added layer of machine intelligence to detect unauthorized users or users overstepping their roles.

*Source: Managing Privileged Access in Cloud Infrastructure, Gartner, June 9, 2020.