There's no contesting that cyber attacks are a fact of life for most, if not all companies. The challenge these companies now face is finding a way to efficiently manage the variety of cybersecurity tools they use from different vendors — something that can soak up a lot of time in the event of an incident.
To that end, local cybersecurity veteran Jen Andre has a new solution to help companies automate various security tasks, respond to threats faster and save precious time with a Boston startup called Komand. The company has developed a "security orchestration and automation platform" that serves as a command center for all of a company's security tools, which are connected using their APIs.
"People want to buy the best-in-class tools that can protect against threats and that means buying from multiple vendors," Andre told me. "That creates complexity for the security team" — something Komand helps address.
In the lead-up to Komand's official launch later this quarter, BostInno has learned that the company closed a $1.3 million seed round last year through Hack Secure, the cybersecurity investment syndicate started last year by Accomplice general partner Chris Lynch and venture partner Cort Johnson. The round was led by Mike Egan, son of the late EMC co-founder Richard Egan and a former EMC executive himself. Hack Secure and Minnesota-based Stonehammer Capital also participated in the round.
The platform is designed to allow security teams at companies to quickly perform security tasks, such as disabling a hacked user's account or putting in a firewall rule, across multiple tools, in a much faster turnaround time. It allows them to build automated workflows without writing a single line of code. With a handful of companies like Acquia using Komand for a private beta test, Komand has been able to cut the time to detect, investigate and respond to security incidents by up to 83 percent, Andre said.
“Komand’s ability to orchestrate existing tools yields increased velocity and productivity for our security teams by increasing workflow automation,” Craig Chamberlain, director of security research at Acquia, said in a statement to be included in a forthcoming announcement.
Another way to think of Komand, Andre said, is an "IFTTT for cybersecurity." IFTTT stands for If This Then That, the web service that lets you tie together disparate applications to perform specific actions through a chain of conditional statements (such as "if I post a photo to Instagram, upload the photo and caption to Twitter," my favorite IFTTT recipe).
By allowing companies to complete security tasks at a faster rate, Andre said Komand can help companies reduce errors and remove the need for teams to write custom code to automate their own tasks. As a result, she said, that means companies can cut down on man-hours and possibly even decrease the number of personnel they need. So should security personnel be worried about losing their jobs?
"This isn't a problem that can be solved by human beings alone."
Andre said with the increasing number of cyber attacks, there will be an increasing need for people to join the cybersecurity workforce in general. At the same time, however, she said there's a need for security professionals to have better tools.
"This isn't a problem that can be solved by human beings alone, so I think tech needs to step in to make human beings more effective," Andre said.
Andre has been in the cybersecurity game for a while, having previously co-founded the venture capital-backed Boston cybersecurity startup Threat Stack as its chief scientist. Before that, she had spent seven years at Norton AntiVirus creator Symantec as a senior software engineer, where she wrote code for the company's managed security services business.
After leaving Threat Stack in March of last year, Andre became an entrepreneur-in-residence at Accomplice, where she teamed up with Johnson and Lynch for Hack/Secure early in its conception and became a board member. Andre had previously known Lynch from when he led Accomplice's seed and Series A rounds for Threat Stack.
“Jen, Cort and I have been thinking about this space for some time. The concept was really born from our collaboration on Hack Secure. I invested in Komand early on, not just because of the veteran team with its successful track record, but because we’ve seen time and time again the need for efficiency in the security space,” Lynch said in a statement. “With the launch of Komand, we look forward to seeing how companies put the platform to use and quickly realize the many benefits of high-velocity security operations.”
