It doesn’t come often that you see a company and tell yourself “I’ve gotta join this company”. Especially not after 25-odd years in the industry. Well, it so happens there is one such company – Soha Systems.
Let’s go back a few years.
Enterprise perimeter has always been a “thing” for me (perhaps because I don’t like walls.) This way or the other, most of the companies I worked for dealt with perimeter. Truth be told, nobody really likes perimeters, or DMZs, for that matter. Perimeters and DMZs are necessary evils (because the evil they protect against is, well, more evil…).
When the Jericho Forum was established back in 2004 and proclaimed the disappearance of the perimeter, I became an enthusiastic follower. Then the cloud emerged, and the perimeter became fuzzier and more porous.
Then came the cloud security companies: CASBs, cloud gateways, cloud SSOs, the list goes on and on. Hugely underwhelming. They mostly replicated in the cloud the old on-premise technologies and methods. Of course, all wrapped in fancy terms: “Identity defined perimeter”, “software defined perimeter”, and “software defined security”. Everything became defined by something else…
Yawn. And slight panic.
If these technologies didn’t quite work in the old world, how will they ever resolve the same (and graver) problems in the cloud? It kind of reminds me of Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity: “Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”.
The last couple of years, with the massive adoption of the cloud and fast migration to the cloud, I felt IT is running out of options. I wrote a few posts about it (The Ethereal Perimeter; Divide & Distribute: Counter the Flux of Security Breaches, The Ethereal Identity and the Identity Chain of Trust). I pitched for a paradigm shift. There has to be a new approach that will redefine the way users and applications are secured in the cloud.
Enter Soha.
Soha realized the enterprise isn’t just migrating to the cloud, but the very nature of what the enterprise is has changed. The enterprise has literally flipped: From a state where both users and applications are behind the firewall, in trusted and confined environment, to a state where most users are in effect outside the firewall, in an untrusted environment.
That called for something no one else has done yet: Rethinking the entire role of perimeter, breaking the problem into its core elements, and creating for each a solution that redefines it:
- DMZ is an expensive and overly complicated pain? Then, build it as a native cloud service that deploys is minutes instead of months.
- Remote user access pokes holes in the enterprise network (e.g. VPN…)? Then, invent remote access to applications that does not require any network access, is more secure and easier to use.
- Staging an application in the cloud is cumbersome and “unclean”? Then, make a solution that is literally touch and go.
And so much more.
Soha literally redefines how enterprise networks in the cloud era. No other company has taken that challenge. To undertake this kind of heavy lifting, a special type of person is required. An uncommon combination of skills, experience and passion. This is the team I met at Soha.
So — a huge problem to solve, ingenious solution, incredible market opportunity, great team… Wouldn’t you want to join such a company?