The Nx Platform Provides a Global, Data-Driven View of Everything

As a direct result of the SolarWinds and Colonial pipeline cyberattacks, companies are realizing more than ever that bigger walls, wider moats and better soldiers will not shift the paradigm that the hackers are winning. They must now assume that they have already been hacked and that the hackers are likely to be still present. This will require them to operate in a more proactive state and shift from being great fighters to being great data defenders.  The missing link is that they need to have a much better understanding of what data requires greater protection, as trying to protect everything results in a poor defense and the breaches will continue to happen.

Santa Monica, California-based NVISNx [n-vision-x] is a smart data platform that rapidly identifies and classifies all enterprise data and enriches it from various directory services, cyber controls and user behaviors to provide visual insights on what to protect and what to purge. The Nx Platform automates risk analysis to enable its customers to make data-driven decisions for optimizing data protection controls while also defensibly purging files that no longer have business value. It empowers its customers to finally get control of their data assets to reduce their risk, enhance their compliance and save millions in excessive storage costs.

Nx Platform enables a proactive response to these cyber threats by first treating data as an asset and then identifying which assets are more critical amongst huge volumes of data storage across the enterprise. “Our asset-centric approach empowers cyber leaders to enhance their threat hunting capabilities by hunting smarter and not harder,” explained Glen Day, Founder and CEO. It’s incredulous that these rampant ransomware attacks are so successful. Not because the malware has encrypted the data, which is very difficult to defend against, but because the $Ms in ransom is being paid because companies’ data backup plans have failed by either not backing up the critical data or not being able to recovery from the incident as they do not know what data to restore.

In a brief interview with us, Glen Day talked about how NVISNx’s Platform is highly relevant in this digital era. He also talked about the Platform’s new capabilities that are ready to be launched. Read on for the excerpts from the interview.

Q. How has emerging technologies contributed to the success of your business?

Our Nx Platform leverages several advanced microservices solutions such as Kubernetes, to support greater agility and scalability to meet our customers’ enterprise-scale performance requirements. Containerization and CI/CD DevOps technologies supports the flexibility needed to deploy our Platform on any infrastructure as well as the ability to migrate easily among data centers and various cloud services.

Our customers data environments are often very complex and deal with extreme volumes of data storage both in their datacenters as well in their cloud services. Our Platform can ingest and analyze their large and diverse datasets in a timely manner with very fast query response speeds.  Our visual dashboards easily grasp the insights from huge datasets with simple, but powerful, drill-down capabilities to quickly make sense of the derived intelligence to then act.

However, large enterprise environments also typically include a broad number of business stakeholders that need to collaborate before any final actions are executed. So, we recently included a flexible and intuitive workflow automation engine to provide multi-team decision support and give our customers the ability to act quickly and avoid a number of time-consuming emails or meetings to reach a consensus to act. These technology advancements have contributed greatly to the success of our business by providing our customers with a faster time-to-value and transforming complex, data management activities to being proactive rather than reactive.

Q. One of the biggest barriers to businesses when it comes to investing in any kind of technology is the cost. Tell us about the affordability of your solutions.

Many of our customers have found that the Nx Platform pays for itself. In addition to our Platform reducing cyber risk, we have a quantifiable and rapid ROI calculator associated with eliminating surplus data that is often retained longer than needed and no longer provides business value. With the new privacy regulations that are now enforcing the “right to be forgotten,” companies must now completely and defensibly dispose of privacy data wherever that data is stored without exception. There are substantial financial, cyber, regulatory, and legal risks in being a data hoarder and our customers are seeing great value well beyond the considerable cost savings.

In response to this challenge, we have designed a new value-based pricing model that focuses first on saving our customers millions in storage costs and then enabling them to better protect their most critical data. Our workflow automation engine is a key enabler to inform the various business units that have surplus data that could be disposed of with the associated cost saving once purged. Our value-based model eliminates buying barriers and provides our customers with full use of the Platform without confusing licensing models. In the unlikely event that cost-savings are not realized, they can still use the Platform to “Protect the Jewels” for the remainder of the annual subscription at no additional cost. This is a “win-win” scenario for our customers that also further emphasizes our commitment for exceptional service delivery.

Q. Cybersecurity is the top priority of any company. How do you secure your clients’ data without increasing the complexity of their operations?

Unknowingly, companies themselves are increasing the complexity of their operations by “… keeping all data forever, just in case…” and not establishing data management capabilities that automate the classification of all data, not just privacy. Data, as with most assets, has a lifespan in which it should be defensibly disposed of once it no longer provides business value. Unknowingly almost every company has become a data hoarder which results in increased cyber-attack surfaces, expands their compliance scope, and incurs greater storage costs. Throughout our corporate journey, we have been endorsing that companies first understand their data with context and associate the data with the cyber controls and user behaviors to be able to truly protect what data matters most and eliminate any data that is not driving value or presents avoidable risk to the company. One of our best customer quotes from a F500 CIO is “…we are now able to control our data, and not the data controlling us…”

Q. There are other major players in this segment. How do you distinguish your services/ standout from the rest?

The Nx Platform is the only enterprise solution that identifies and classifies all critical data (privacy, intellectual property (IP), sensitive board communications, non-public financials, etc.) and correlates the data with cyber controls and user behaviors to provide a global view of where critical data is located, who has access to it, how is it being shared externally, is it properly protected, is it being retained longer than needed and how to remediate.

Many other competitive solutions focus solely on privacy data. Why? Because the regulations defined what privacy data looks like (e.g., SSNs, credit card number, etc). The Nx Platform was built with unique and operational insights to quickly and reliably contextually classify critical data that cannot be predefined in out-of-the-box analytical models. This is truly a differentiation in addition to our unique integration of cyber data to provide a full 360-view to provide actionable intelligence for multiple business stakeholders.

Q. Do you have any new services ready to be launched?

By the end of Q2, the Nx Platform will have new workflow automation capabilities to allow business stakeholders to easily collaborate and make data-driven decisions within the Platform. We will also be enhancing our contextual classifier engine to be even faster and more reliable and include new RPA capabilities to drive even more automation and insights for greater efficiencies and cost reductions.

The Leader Upfront

Glen Day, Founder and CEO: NVISNx is Glen’s fourth startup. He has decades of experience in both running cyber and privacy programs as well as being a trusted advisor to some of the world’s largest companies. Prior to starting NVISNx, he was a Cybersecurity & Privacy Partner at Ernst & Young (EY). He is a retired Navy Commander who specialized in Information Warfare and was Los Angeles County’s first Chief Privacy Officer. His professional experience and foundation have provided him with the operational focus and unique experiences to develop NVISNx’s strategic vision.

“Our Platform delivers a global view of your enterprise data to empower proactive insights to protect what matters most and purge surplus data.”