The marketing people wanted a serious title, but my alternate title for this post would be “Why being ‘other’ in security is actually a great thing.”
Today, Justin Somaini (current Chief Trust Officer of Box, Inc. and former Yahoo and Symantec CISO), released the results of a security practitioners survey covering the top 20 Innovative Security Companies. We were thrilled to find out that we ranked highest in the list. Being recognized as the best by the people evaluating the best enterprise security offerings is a great feeling.
In Somaini’s words:
OpenDNS came out way ahead of all other vendors. While they have been around for some time, since 2005, their core value of threat and policy management via DNS is a strong value with 43% of people saying they provide “High Value”. It’s also interesting to note that the root of the company was in consumer security and only recently, in the past couple of years, made the move into the Enterprise. With this the value is resonating significantly amongst CISO’s. We should see much more of them in the future as they make their push farther. Competitively, it looks like they have a solid ownership as I struggle to see anyone competing with them in their space.
But here’s something else that is interesting: Somaini’s survey had us listed as “Other” when it came to describe what market we fit into. Not “Secure Web Gateway,” not “SIEM,” not “Application Security.” Just “Other.” This seems like a trend for us. In Gartner’s “Market Trends: Cloud-Based Security Services Market, Worldwide, 2014” we were also mentioned as a Vendor to Watch in the “Other Security” category.
The “other” category in the security space represents the security disrupters that do not fit the “traditional” security categories. However, if we think back, that category has previously included great security companies like Palo Alto Networks & FireEye. We’re in good company.
The “other” category represents companies that look at customer problems and design a new approach to solve it. FireEye accomplished this with their advanced behavior analysis appliance. Palo Alto Networks did it with their approach to application identification, bringing newfound utility to the aging Firewall market. In our case, we’re helping to solve the challenges created by the eroding network perimeter and the rise of the sophisticated attacker. We attack both problems by looking at the last 35 years of enterprise security best practices and applying them to the world we work in today. It’s great to be recognized for our outside-the-perimeter way of thinking, and we’re excited to bring it to more customers.
Thanks to the security practitioners and to Justin for the visibility and recognition.
