Founders in Focus: Emanuel Salmona of Nagomi Security
Each month we’ll highlight one of the founders of Okta Ventures’ portfolio companies. You’ll get to know more about them and learn how they work with Okta. This month we’re speaking with Emanuel Salmona of Nagomi Security.
What is Nagomi Security, and what is your mission?
Nagomi Security is changing the way security teams balance risk and defense. We’ve seen that over 80% of breaches occur at organizations that already had a tool in place that could have prevented it, and we want to enable security teams to make the most of their existing security investments to minimize threat exposure.
Our mission is to help organizations increase their cybersecurity maturity, optimize their defenses, be more proactive, and make the most of their technology investments. Armed with tangible measurement, prescriptive remediation plans, and threat context, security teams can confidently balance risk and defense and make better business decisions.
What were you doing prior to Nagomi Security that led you to this moment?
We like to say that we didn’t choose threat exposure threat exposure chose us. Our founding team is comprised of people from companies like Snyk, Claroty, and Demisto — companies that helped customers prevent breaches - and we all felt the same frustration from CISOs and security teams: They buy many different tools but don’t know whether those solutions are optimized against the real-world threats facing them. In our early conversations, we found that every organization had this problem yet there was no real solution other than manual efforts. And we were constantly hearing, “Yes, it’s a huge problem, but it’s impossible to solve.” That seemed like good enough reason to come up with a novel solution, and our early success has proved that the problem is indeed solvable, and customers are elated when they see how easily Nagomi shows value.
What is the Nagomi Proactive Defense Platform? What challenge does it solve?
Despite having thousands of security tools available, cybersecurity teams face an effectiveness problem consisting of:
- An ever-changing threat landscape
- A lack of data to objectively measure and compare security tool coverage, performance, and ROI
- Not enough people to effectively implement, manage, monitor, and configure tools against threats
- The absence of clear and prescriptive plans to optimize security tools against the real threats that matter
This problem leads to a paradox: Given an effectively infinite number of security tools an organization could implement, how can cybersecurity leaders know whether the tools they select are both effective and worth the investment?
The Nagomi Proactive Defense Platform boosts security team confidence by optimizing tools against real threats, offering prescriptive remediation plans, and maximizing ROI.
Why did Nagomi Security want to work with Okta?
It’s no secret that Identity is the new perimeter in security, and it’s an increasingly attractive threat vector. Identity is the centerpiece of how work is done in 2024, and Okta is the leader in Identity. Nearly all of our customers today use Okta, and we want to help customers make the most out of every tool they use. Working with Okta was a total no-brainer, and customers love that we can help them get to a higher degree of utilization of what Okta can deliver.
How is Nagomi Security working with Okta? What support do you look for in a corporate partner?
There is a clear “Better Together” story since Nagomi is supporting Okta’s customers in maximizing the utilization of their Identity suite against ever-changing threat scenarios. We work with our partners to create a stronger tie with our joint customers and make sure that, as an industry, we are solving customer problems in reducing complexity and operationalization challenges. To do so, we need to work together at the field level as well as support stronger integrations and seamless workflows.
What trends do you expect to see in the security industry?
This may be a world record for the longest it took a vendor to say anything about artificial intelligence (AI), so here goes. Right now, AI is changing the way security teams operate. Malicious actors are using AI to improve qualitatively (think phishing emails with no typos) and quantitatively to increase the volume of attacks. Security teams are already under-resourced, and there’s no way for them to defend against an exponential increase in attacks. Additionally, the days of unlimited security budgets are a thing of the past. That means that security leaders will need to make the most out of their existing investments, and they’ll need to prove ROI, impact, and progress.
Interested in joining Okta Ventures? Check out our FAQ here and feel free to reach out to our team or submit your business for review.
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