Redefining enterprise security: Caspida Inc

Caspida uses deep data science and machine learning, leveraging the masses of existing security data to locate the handful of threats posing significant risks to enterprises.

Rapid company growth in a highly competitive market requires a watchful eye on communication, logistics and all other aspects essential for operations. With hackers ready to steal data anytime, anywhere and with data leakage being possible at the drop of a hat, it is has become crucial for companies to place utmost focus on security, not only protecting data with defensive measures, but also detecting what slips through the defenses.

Helping enterprises locate threats, both internal attacks from malicious insiders and external attacks from hackers and nation-states, Caspida leverages the mass of existing security and machine data – applications, VMs, logs, networks, Security Information & Event Management (SIEM) systems.

Caspida uses Big Data to improve enterprise security by locating hidden and otherwise undiscoverable threats, both external cyber attacks and insider threats. Caspida enables enterprises to detect what slips through their defenses so that they can quickly remediate the threat before it becomes a catastrophic data breach.

Founded in 2014 by industry veterans from the fields of data science, Big Data and security to address deficiencies in existing ways of providing early data breach detection, the company serves customers across verticals such as Banking, Finance, Insurance, Public Sector (Government), Education, Manufacturing, and Energy/Utilities.

Leveraging inventions in the Hadoop platform

“We are data science-led, automated and focused on identifying the entire threat kill-chain to provide actionable information. We are unique in supporting a variety of deployment scenarios including dedicated and shared Hadoop clusters as well as working on Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) data”, says Muddu Sudhakar, CEO of Caspida.

The major benefits that Caspida provides include:
• locating hidden threat automatically to improve security
• increasing security analyst efficiency by locating those few, critical threats and avoiding false positive alerts found in existing approaches
• providing a compelling enterprise ROI by streamlining security operations

“With security being on top of mind for enterprise executives and Boards of Directors, one need only read the news to see a steady drumbeat of major data breaches – Sony, Anthem, Target, Premera Blue Cross. Enterprises recognize that existing IT security measures are permeable and that they need to detect what slips through their defensives. We complement existing IT security infrastructure and allow enterprises to dramatically improve security by locating hidden threats in masses of data, enable IT security analysts to become proactive threat hunters and improve their effectiveness, and reduce Security Operation Center costs by streamlining operations”, adds Karthik Kannan, Caspida co-founder and Chief Revenue Officer.

Unique in its deep data science focus that uses machine learning to automatically provide enterprises with a handful of high risk issues to resolve. Rather than creating a blizzard of alerts, Caspida focuses on accommodating different enterprise deployment models (shared or dedicated Hadoop clusters, adjust to SIEM infrastructure, etc) and automatically providing complete information (called the “kill chain”) about the events that led up to a compromise so security analysts can quickly investigate and resolve the threat.

Evolving Data Sciences to compete with threat

“Filling our growing need for rockstar data scientists, threat analysts, and Big Data engineers are an ongoing challenge to meet the customers’ needs,” says Christos Tryfonas, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer.

The company’s current focus is enterprise security including users, devices, and virtual machines (VMs), emerging areas include cloud security (Amazon Web Services, etc.) and virtual container security (Docker, etc.). While initially focused on the U.S., the company has seen interest from around the world and believes that ‘enterprise security knows no boundaries’.

Knowing the Key Executive

Muddu Sudhakar – CEO

Muddu Sudhakar is a seasoned and successful entrepreneur who has served as VP & GM at VMware and Pivotal from 2010 to 2014 for Big Data Analytics and Cloud Services and was co-founder and CEO of Cetas. Prior to that he was the Chief Strategy Advisor & VP/GM for Cloud Information Services at EMC and also the CEO and founder of Kazeon from 2003 to 2010.

He holds a PhD and MS in Computer Science from UCLA and has several publications and pending patents to his credit.

Karthik Kannan – Co-founder and Chief Revenue Officer

Karthik Kannan is a successful entrepreneur specializing in product management, marketing and sales, who prior to joining Caspida, was co-founder and VP of Products at Cetas and VP of Marketing at Kazeon prior to that.
He has spoken at several conferences including Hadoop Summit and TiECon.

Dr. Christos Tryfonas – Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Dr. Christos Tryfonas serves as the CTO and co-founder at Caspida and has also co-founded and served as chief architect of Kazeon Systems and as Principal MTS at Sprint Advanced Technology Laboratories where he focused on network intrusion detection, DDoS and network security analysis. His current research interests lie in the areas of security, analytics, data science, and cloud technologies.

He received the Diploma in Computer Engineering and Information Sciences from the University of Patras, Greece, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Engineering from the University of California, Santa Cruz.