David Schlesinger: Why I Joined Riscosity
Exploiting vulnerabilities in third-party vendors is one of the most popular attack vectors. It’s a problem I became all too familiar with in my previous roles and one for which I evaluated many solutions. I was really impressed by how the team at Riscosity developed a no-code, no-agent solution for securing data in transit and gaining complete vendor visibility.
How Riscosity is different
Riscosity solves two major pain points for organizations.
- Organizations typically don’t have a birds eye view of all sensitive data being passed to third-party vendors or even a clear understanding of who their vendors are.
- Organizations don’t have a quick way to remediate new issues as they appear. Remediation typically requires code changes that can take time to implement, and at larger enterprises can take months or even years to fully propagate throughout the organization’s systems.
Unfortunately, solutions that attempt to address these pain points either require injecting code or running an agent alongside your application. Injecting code can work, but comes with the added cost of introducing new dependencies. It’s in conflict with the problem these solutions are trying to solve in the first place and can result in many new transitive dependencies.
Agents have their own set of problems. For large enterprises getting these agents installed is time consuming and cumbersome. In addition to the need to keep agents maintained and updated, there’s a potential performance impact from additional resources consumed by the agent. Scaling your application requires installing new agents and adds additional burden on staff and systems.
Riscosity is different. It’s a no-code, no-agent solution that allows organizations to solve the described pain points in minutes. There’s no need to modify code, verify, and test it. Riscosity will continually monitor your infrastructure to prevent data leaks but also inform you of new vendors, requests to those vendors, and the data in those requests. Riscosity ensures data sovereignty that aligns with regulatory requirements while offering geo-fencing controls to maintain compliance. This all happens with a design that allows for enterprise scale and minimal latency. The approach is seamless and efficient, which makes me genuinely excited about the product.
Engineering excellence at its core
People define an organization, and Riscositiy’s team is exceptional. Riscosity has two founders, Anirban and James. I previously worked with both of them at Cloudflare and knew I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to work with them again. The engineers have a deep understanding of application security, networking, and have taken a security-first approach to building a platform that customers can install in their private cloud with confidence that they’re not introducing additional risk. Our CTO James has built an engineering team that operates with both discipline and agility.
Where I fit in
Startups are a lot of work, but the excitement and energy is worth it. Riscosity’s CEO Anirban likes to joke that the work we do together makes us our company’s “Seal Team 6”, because we tackle tough challenges quickly and effectively. In my role as Chief Architect, I not only get to spend time researching and contributing to the future of an exciting product, but I also wear multiple hats—evangelizing the product, talking to customers, and working alongside the engineering team to improve the product for those customers. It’s a broad role that keeps every day interesting.
My belief in the team and platform that Riscosity is building is what made my decision to join Riscosity easy. It’s an honor and a privilege to be a part of it.