CEO Amer Deeba on Developments in Normalyze’s Market-Leading Security Software

Not all superheroes wear capes. According to Normalyze co-founder and CEO Amer Deeba, “Cloud security teams, I call them the heroes these days because they have a lot to do and a lot to manage, and the changes in the cloud and [continuous integration, delivery and deployment] cycles happening so fast and so quickly and so many changes and movements happen.”

Amer Deeba should know. In 2020, he co-founded Normalyze — an agentless platform that helps enterprises protect the data they have stored in the cloud — with Ravi Ithal. In recent years, security teams have started to struggle with discovering and classifying data because of the proliferation of data being increasingly stored in multicloud environments, potentially exposing the information to the risk of data leaks.

Enterprises can’t revert to costly on-premises storage. However, Normalyze helps them make their data secure even if it's spread across multiple cloud services. It achieves this through an agentless data discovery and scanning platform compatible with all major cloud storage vendors.

“You need to have the right kind of security skills and understanding of how to build in the cloud and scale in the cloud, and then build the right framework around it from a security perspective, the right tools, the right solutions that can really help you manage the problem in a systematic way, in an organized way, and stay ahead of the game,” Amer Deeba explained in an interview with Anna Delaney of the Information Security Media Group.

The Way Forward

Back when data was being stored on-prem, protecting assets was prioritized by enterprises. The only way forward now, however, is to prioritize data over assets, an approach that wasn’t historically common. The company is changing that by creating security solutions that put data first.

This work is within Amer Deeba’s wheelhouse. He got the inspiration to focus his energies on cybersecurity when he witnessed the fallout of a cyberattack on one of his clients. Seeing such a huge loss inflicted on an organization gave him the resolve to devise scalable cybersecurity solutions. He is a senior go-to-market executive, with experience in successfully executing marketing and sales strategies. A large part of Deeba’s career was spent working at Qualys, where he helped take the company public. At Qualys, he managed the company’s business development, marketing, global enterprise accounts, and strategic alliances.

Now, his Normalyze platform is making the lives of chief information security officers and DevOps teams easier across the world. Deploying this platform is easy and doesn’t require much. It supports all native cloud data stores and is compatible with all kinds of data, whether structured or unstructured. By only scanning the metadata (without collecting any sensitive data) of structured and unstructured data, Normalyze can visually represent the entire data of an enterprise in a graph, allowing security teams to respond to threats in real time.

Since its founding, Amer Deeba and the team at Normalyze have been hard at work improving its platform and have added useful features. Some of the significant developments are:

— Harnessing the Power of DSPM: Users of Normalyze’s platform will now be able to benefit from the advantages of data security posture management. Data security posture management secures data by increasing its visibility. At a time when most enterprises are struggling to have complete visibility of their data, this innovation by Normalyze is quite important. DSPM works in three steps: First, it discovers and classifies an enterprise’s data. Second, it prioritizes data based on the level of risk it's exposed to and the sensitivity of the data involved. It also alerts users to people who have access to that data store. Third, it resolves vulnerabilities and prevents future attacks.

— DSPM Patent: Normalyze has secured a patent that promises to bring the full-scale advantages of DSPM technology. The company is calling it cloud data attack detection. It traces network paths between data stored in the cloud and all access points. This flags possible attack paths. The platform then displays these attack paths to relevant teams, allowing them to quickly identify authorized and unauthorized access.

— Integration of Generative Artificial Intelligence: To increase the useability of their platform, the engineers at Normalyze integrated generative AI and incident response, allowing users to use natural language to ask for the top risks to their data, just as they would ask another human.

The search can also provide remediation guidance based on the context of the risk. The power of AI will expand on the remediation guidance by giving detailed instructions on how data can be secured. This will improve the speed of workflows by reducing communication between security and DevOps teams and allow enterprises to respond to threats faster.

Real-Time Compliance Monitoring

The importance of data can be understood from the wide-ranging regulations that are being enacted globally by governments to prevent misuse of data. These regulations are continuously evolving and noncompliance can result in legal repercussions. This is why security teams must continuously stay on top of regulatory developments — by no means an easy task.

The Normalyze platform now comes with built-in real-time compliance monitoring. A variety of compliance frameworks have been meticulously evaluated by the security research team at Normalyze and they’ve identified the controls that need to be implemented.. The platform currently provides over 500 checks, and the supported frameworks include Azure CIS, GCP CIS, AWS CIS, SOC2, HIPAA, GDPR, NIST Privacy Framework, NIST-CISF, NIST 800-53, and NIST 800-171.

The team has also added support for sensitive data classifications in Azure CosmosDB for Cassandra, Azure CosmosDB for PostgreSQL, Azure CosmosDB for Mongo, and AWS DynamoDB. This has made the platform compatible with more than 30 data stores, whether in a cloud or on-premises environment.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors or management of EconoTimes.