 Hi, this is your host Sophan Bhatia and welcome to another episode of TFR. Let's talk and today we have with us Vishal Jan co-founder and CEO of Veltex Vishal is great to have you on the show. Great to be here Sophanil Thanks for the opportunity and I look forward to our conversation. Me too. First of all, thanks for joining me Since you're also the co-founder of the company tell us a bit about what was the kind of original story of the company? Why you felt that there's a need for this company and what kind of problem you're trying to solve? Okay, absolutely. So my background has been in the cloud networking and the security space and before starting Veltex, I was at another startup doing security and A lot of the customers I was talking to they were in their cloud journey They were early, but a lot of them were looking for a solutions to secure their workloads in the cloud A lot of them were using the old technologies The lift and shift mindset and I saw that the lift and shift rarely has worked in the cloud You have to be cloud born cloud native cloud is not same as your data center and I saw the opportunity Three of the co-founders got together. We have known each other for 20 years Done startups together in the past and what we focus on is securing the cloud workloads Mainly the fact that everything in the cloud is connected So how do you secure the cloud networks in the public cloud last year security was a big team There are a lot of you know instant actually they keep happening. It's just sometimes They do get the coverage on a home home page or a front page of a newspaper but security remains a challenge because Compared to the traditional IT world in the cloud native word especially multi-cloud environment Security cannot be someone else's problem. It cannot be an afterthought So talk a bit about how you folks have seen the whole security landscape has changed and also cloud Multi-cloud what new challenges it has brought not only for the companies who are running their workload But also companies like yours. We're trying to secure some of those workloads. Yeah I think definitely now as you said cyber is a big thing. I mean as I talk about The next big war is not going to be a physical is going to be all cyber So the actors are from like different states You must have all about ransomware. So cyber is everywhere now One thing we are noticing is that a lot of the enterprises are moved to the cloud I mean there they want their agility They they want lower cost. They want more profits, you know at the same time They also want to make sure that the security posture in the cloud is much much better actually then it used to be in the data center now What we see the changes The cloud is not same as a data center the things that change the applications used to be monolithic They have now become like microservices The architectures used to be like just a VM based now You must have heard the enterprises use containers VM serverless platform as service now one thing is in the cloud The connectivity is ubiquitous The workloads talk to the internet from the internet talk to each other the multi cloud in this dynamic environment Where there is less change control? How do you want to make sure that you want to be secure the same time you want to be agile? There's no point going to the cloud and be slow like at a center have a change control so if you want to have this agility and security both together that creates some challenges for enterprises and Opportunity for them to leap past their competition as well. They do it right from the cultural aspect Teams structure of teams within companies we talk about DevOps that's a cops. Sorry We can use whichever label we want but the whole idea is that once again in old days developers run Create an application. They don't even know where it's running because software was bought it was downloaded install Now it's running on your own infrastructure So you are actually responding for the whole life cycle off that That's why we do talk about DevOps all those things So talk about cultural changes that are also happening to ensure that you know the Responsibility doesn't end just by writing the code you have to run the code maintain the code manage the code Yeah, no absolutely and that's a big change in the cloud developers On the show, I mean it's all about developments the developers so that the business can go agile now At the same time they need to and they have some responsibility towards security. I mean you must say all about shift left Now you can say that developers do care about security. It's hard to say that yeah They don't care about security But you also want to make sure that you enable them and give them enough tooling on the security side to Make sure that they're doing right things So it's a combination of shift left where you build your security as part of the development process at the same time Like lock for shell last year was a big wake-up call for the enterprise is to say okay Yes, they can be vulnerabilities outside the application right in the application. No app is ever invulnerable So you need to secure and build your defenses so a combination of building security inside the applications and then putting security controls outside getting the visibility of What's going on putting right controls is what is a change another culture change? I think we are seeing is as the enterprises are going to the cloud a New position like cloud security architects cloud architects that's coming up too because I said The cloud is different than data center So and the companies and enterprises want to have a better architecture for securing their clouds and since you're talking about some grant and one of the Kind of worrying trend not trend exactly is that a lot of companies are also starting to look at cost cutting or Becoming more cost efficient a lot of layoffs are happening. There's a magic number seven percent I don't know what is the reason but which also means the teams are a smaller Do you see any impact that will have on security because of that or if if you do What do you think how companies should approach it so that as you said they remain innovative They can move faster, but you know, they should also Keep their workload secure. Yeah, I think that's a great point I think one thing is that the cloud is a lot about automation, you know, that's like the First thing in the cloud. So if the enterprises used to be using humans to do a lot of their stuff then They will be challenged in this new environment because you can't have a lot of people to do it So the layoffs and all are impacting the organizations which used to rely a lot on manual work No automation, but it also now gives them an opportunity to actually a go and look towards Technologies which are cloud native which are born in the cloud which helps them automate a lot of this Lot of their security. For example, you want to make sure you get the right visibility You know what's going on and then you want to secure at the same time You want to consolidate a lot of these functions together because if you have silos, it leads to more people It leads to more data gaps. So what we are seeing at least When we talk to our customers in the cloud, for example in data center where networking used to be static You have network teams and security teams in the cloud. They go together You can't be having a networking and change control have people and then do security on top You need to combine cloud network security all together and that's what we call like The enterprises are demanding what we call secure cloud networking security without networking is not useful and It's an opportunity in my opinion like every downturn as we have seen a lot of the innovation happen in downtown because The enterprises want to be more efficient. Talk a bit about now the company What kind of solutions you're offering because we're also looking at a lot of companies Of course, they are big tech bohemats who have all the tech skills But there are a lot of companies who are not tech companies per se, but they do have to move to the cloud They have to embrace all these technologies. So they also look at things like low code or no code So we do have to lower the barrier of entry for them So they can once again move fast innovate and remain secure So talk a bit about your solutions. How you're helping the whole spectrum of your customer base Okay, no, that's a great point and what we are seeing is as you talked about the The companies are becoming smaller in this environment But in the in general as the enterprises are going multi-cloud and some of them can be single-cloud as well There's always a lack of the technology and talent in the cloud, you know, not all the enterprises have limited technologies I mean, I would say the talent in place. So The one thing we are we are helping is we are helping to Help them automate all that stuff So if they take all the old technologies and put them in from the data center to the cloud They need off talent to do manual labor, for example They have to manually plum the networking manually get all the visibility get multiple silos We are putting them together as I said, we do secure cloud networking. We first Do networking and that's a base then we have security I mean you you cannot have workloads in the cloud being insecure and on top of that you do cloud and cloud is all about as I said like Single policy across cloud single policy across your workloads things like those so In general even large organizations or smaller organizations the way we are helping is help them With this so they can go be agile with Small teams and at the same time make sure that their workloads are fully secure and what we do is security from the point of view of Internet to the workloads Workload to workload and workload to the internet So that's where we focus on in the networking jargon That's called securing the ingress east-west and the egress for your cloud workloads You folks also released a survey last month. Can you tell us a bit more about the survey? What was the goal of the survey and what was the findings? We do the survey every year like last last year the biggest thing which came on in survey was the lock for shell Definitely was on top of mind of everybody. So this year the goal was just to see Where the organizations are in their cloud journey and what we saw was that yeah They are getting more and more advanced in the cloud journey last compared last year We saw a lot more enterprises are now multi-cloud I believe the number was around like 95 percent were saying they are multi-cloud or they will be multi-cloud We saw another thing in the survey that Knowledge organizations are now hiring what we call have a position like cloud security architects cloud center of excellence So they're looking at the cloud much more Seriously and 86 percent of organizations are currently employing an in-house cloud security architect. So pretty much that's what We we did a survey for just for Understanding where the customers are one thing we are seeing in our customer base The prospects we talked to in our customers Few a couple of years back. A lot of the customers were more in a lift and shift Mentality. So what they call is a cloud 1.0 take the data center Replicate everything in the cloud that does not help that doesn't make them agile that makes the cost higher makes them even less secure Now they're going to more a cloud To the architecture which are more like more distributed In the quality terms, they have a lot more accounts lot more VPCs Things like those. So things are much more dynamic. So they're looking for Things towards making their life simple. They're looking for consolidation. They're looking to have a single tool in their workflow And then things like that in last couple of years There was a lot of focus on what we call as posture cloud posture There was even a whole industry called cloud security poster management now. This is again It's great great to have the right visibility But what we're hearing from customers is that it is getting a bit commoditized Every customer has what they call a tool for doing the visibility 67% of respondents actually now see that the CSPM offered by the cloud provider is sufficient however And only 53% of them are looking to make a new CSP investment I think what is coming out is especially after the lock for shell Was a wake-up call. You need security outside your application. You can assume Okay, I find all the vulnerabilities and I can patch them immediately You will have network paths in the environment you need to secure your your workloads. So The shift in the focus from posture to prevention is what we are seeing a lot none of the folks are saying that They're agreeing with the fact that the cloud is much more dynamic and in fact 94 percent of respondents believe that secure cloud networking is Important to their overall cloud strategy and that's actually good for what we do at Baltics. We saw that a while back as well We spotted that and we are probably the only startup who do Cloud networking and security all together. There are companies who offer security built from the on-prem side They offer like appliances. They're unaware of cloud. They're unaware of cloud networking Then you have the other guys who do just cloud networking, but don't do security But we realize that all these have to come together And then the third spectrum is you can take the basic Lego blocks from the AWS Azure GCP by definition They will never be multi cloud Solutions plus at the same time what they gave is a Lego blocks and it's a lot has to do by the organization to put Them together. So what we said is like enterprises have Limited tech and talent. They want a unified solution. They want something automated They want something which gives you a single workflow for visibility and prevention all together And so that's pretty much is in line with what We have been working with our customers came out in survey. So Yeah, I mean and yeah I mean cloud is definitely evolving and we'll see more and more interesting things come up next year We shall thank you so much for taking time out today and normally talk about the survey talk about the company and also the whole Landscape how it's changing and evolving thanks for all those insights and I would love to have you back on the show Thank you. Thank you so much for giving an opportunity. It was a great discussion especially in today's context So great to have you talk to me