‘My goal for VALKERIE™ is to have three million assets protected in the next few years across the globe’: Sara Spencer, Founder & CEO of SolonTek Corporation

“Just like our clients, we want two things: security and simplicity.”

Cybersecurity is not just watching out for known threats and risks, it is being on the lookout for those unpredictable threats that are just beyond the edge of the radar. You can have all the policies and processes you want, but what about that one zero-day exploit or unseen threat that appears out of nowhere! Your digital environment is not just a collection of assets, it is an ecosystem that grows and evolves.

SolonTek Corporation has created a methodology that integrates its unique form of predictive analysis and scoring algorithms to see connections between people, processes, and technologies that other systems miss.

SolonTek provides cutting-edge cybersecurity services led by industry experts and powered by robust research and development efforts. The company operates worldwide.

The Silicon Review reached out to SolonTek Corporation’s NC headquarters and spoke with Sara Spencer, founder, who serves as the company’s Chief Executive Officer. Here’s what she said.

Interview Highlights

Q. What groundbreaking and proactive methodology does SolonTek Corporation implement to meet its clients’ expectations?

Our risk methodology is focused on simplicity and a wide view of all the assets our clients want to protect, along with policies, processes, and user awareness/training. To provide optimum security we take into account how every individual asset affects the security posture of other assets, providing holistic security across the entire environment. Proprietary Predictive Scoring algorithms and real-time Risk Assessments work together to offer an unprecedented human consumable view and level of security. However, security is more than just crunching data and monitoring for attacks. We must present that data in a way that can be read and understood easily by top management for effective decision-making.

Q. What can you tell us about VALKERIE™ and how uniquely does it monitor and protect SolonTek’s clients’ organizations?

In creating VALKERIE™, we wanted to solve the creeping problem of being overloaded with too many tools. We are in the same battle as our clients, fighting off a never-ending wave of threats, bugs, and ever-evolving attacks on our digital infrastructure. We have some of the brightest people in the business, with years of experience and cutting-edge skills, and even we were getting bogged down with processes, miles of code, and meeting after meeting. We designed a tool that we would use ourselves as well as our clients. Just like our clients, we want two things: security and simplicity. We want solid security, but the ‘single-pane-of-glass’ to see our status and understand it in one glance speeds up triage and remediation times while reducing human workloads and allowing your teams to focus on more important tasks.

Q. What are SolonTek’s eight cybersecurity pillars?

SolonTek’s unique artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms enumerate data across SolonTek’s eight cybersecurity pillars. Identity – monitoring user behavior, looking for an abnormal system and user behavior. Reviewing accounts for unused accounts and least privilege. Devices – monitoring the health, misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and compliance. Applications – cloud-hosted, SaaS, user actions, least privilege, web apps, services, on-premise segmentation, container workloads, communication workflows, and vulnerabilities. Infrastructure – automatically flag, self-heal or block risky behavior. Data – monitor for unlabeled and labeled data, access, misconfigurations, or null tags and labeling, as well as data leaving your networks, systems, and clouds. Network – monitoring health, misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, compliance, traversal points, and anomalies. User awareness and training – get the assistance you need in the relevant context. Train staff on policies and processes; see who is compliant and who needs to acknowledge policies and procedures. Get guided remediation assistance for misconfigurations and remediation assistance. Policies and compliance – make sure your technical and administrative controls are mapped and working together.

Q. In what industries are your clients? Can you provide us with one or two success stories describing the challenges your clients faced and how your solutions helped them overcome those challenges?

Our clients are mainly in healthcare, managed services, and enterprise verticals that have multi-layered cybersecurity challenges and are bound by complex laws and regulations. We have helped healthcare clients migrate to the Azure cloud, shore up their security so that they can grow, and continue to provide monitoring and incident response using our tool to manage all of this in a single pane of glass.

We have helped a start-up move into an enterprise culture, obtain their ISO certification, and monitor their systems, environments, and people, as well as providing them with incident response and pulling all of their data into a single pane of glass so that it is easier to manage. And provide their stakeholders and leadership with metrics to make an informed decision about their IT, engineering, and cyber spending.

Q. How skilled is the SolonTek team of experts? And how do they bring value to the company?

The SolonTek team of experts comes from some of the most well-known fortune 100 companies, with a combined experience of over 200 years in the cybersecurity and high-tech space. They have defended some of the most critical networks and organizations in the world.

Q. About the future, where do you see SolonTek a couple of years from now?

My goal for VALKERIE™ is to have three million assets protected in the next few years across the globe. Thereby, enabling SolonTek to forge ahead, providing the tools, training, and resources needed to help make the world’s digital landscape a safer place, one customer at a time.

Sara Spencer | Founder & CEO

With over 20 years of experience in IT and business, Sara focuses on cybersecurity and has been serving the industry since 2015. She began her career in IT as a Jr. Unix (Solaris) Systems Administrator for Electronic Arts. Sara holds a B.S. in Computer Networks and Cybersecurity from the University of Maryland Global Campus, and the following certifications: ISO 27001 Internal Auditor, CCNA R&S, AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner, A+, CCNA CyberOps. Since 2001, she has held board seats on several non-profit organizations and volunteer positions in public service.

"The SolonTek team of experts comes from some of the most well-known fortune 100 companies, with a combined experience of over 200 years in the cybersecurity and high-tech space.”