Protecting Cloud-Native and Traditional Applications with Runecast's AI-Powered Platform

Stan Markov, CEO & Co-Founder of Runecast

All of my Runecast Co-Founders and I met at IBM and hailed from technical backgrounds. We had diverse roles as administrators, architects, and DevOps engineers, working closely with IBM’s customers globally. We were entrusted with building IBM’s Global VMware Center of Excellence, where we defined best practices and security guidelines for our customers. However, along with the successes, we also faced numerous firefighting situations like service outages and unexpected compliance audit findings.

Throughout these experiences, we noticed that the majority of the problems we encountered were already documented somewhere – whether in knowledge bases, documentation, security guidelines, or even blog articles – but that the valuable information needed to prevent misconfigurations and potential security breaches existed in a human-readable, unstructured format. We knew that if we could find a way to extract and continuously parse this data into machine-readable rules, we could assist organizations in identifying misconfigurations or non-compliances before they became critical security risks or caused operational outages.

Understanding the tremendous amount of time, money, and frustration that could be saved for both administrators and organizations as a whole, we were compelled to embark on this mission and released Runecast Analyzer 1.0 at VMworld in late 2015. The name Runecast is a reference to the ancient practice of casting runes to see the future. This is what Runecast allows you to do for your hybrid cloud environment.

Runecast Evolution

From its humble beginnings as a VMware ITOM solution, Runecast has experienced explosive development. We expanded our platform to secure and optimize any workload, regardless of where it runs – on-premises, in the public cloud, or within Windows or Linux workloads and in containers. Over the past two years, we have significantly strengthened and broadened our automation capabilities, earning accolades such as being named a Gartner Cool Vendor, earning an EU grant for innovation, obtaining a US Patent, and receiving numerous awards for our unique approach.

Today, Runecast has evolved into a hybrid and multi-cloud platform, empowering organizations to tackle their security, compliance and ITOM challenges proactively and in an integrated way. Our customer base has grown exponentially – especially in heavily regulated industries such as Financial Services, Defense/Government, and Healthcare/Pharma – and we have assembled a team of passionate individuals, whom we affectionately refer to as Runecasters. Together, we are dedicated to delivering innovative solutions that redefine the way organizations secure and optimize their IT infrastructure.

Current Challenges in Security, Compliance and IT Operations

As the digital landscape continues to evolve, organizations are embracing cloud-based infrastructure and cloud-native applications for its scalability and flexibility. However, this transition brings with it new challenges in managing vulnerabilities, ensuring compliance, and optimizing IT operations in a holistic way. As they adopt new flavors of infrastructure, many customers ended up with multiple siloed toolsets spanning development and runtime leading to lack of visibility and increased cost of ownership. Continuously increasing regulatory compliance requirements, although necessary, increase the operational overhead. Enterprise security, development and operations teams often lack the right skills to manage security and operations in a complex hybrid and multi cloud environment.

  One of the key advantages of Runecast is its ability to consolidate or displace various security toolsets with a single, comprehensive Runecast product.  

Consolidating Security Toolsets for Enhanced Efficiency

One of the key advantages of Runecast is its ability to consolidate or displace various security toolsets with a single, comprehensive Runecast product. You can connect Runecast to your on-prem environment, public cloud accounts, Kubernetes clusters and Windows and Linux workloads, no matter where they run. You get all capabilities in one source of truth - risk-based vulnerability management, CSPM, KSPM, VMware Security Posture Management, configuration drift auditing, CIEM, best practice analysis. This consolidation streamlines operations, reduces costs, and provides organizations with a holistic view of their security and compliance posture. By unifying risk-based vulnerability management and continuous compliance monitoring, our platform empowers organizations to detect and respond to security incidents swiftly and effectively.

AI-Based Automation for Vulnerability Management

Harnessing the power of NLP and NLU, Runecast's platform enables organizations to identify vulnerabilities and compliance gaps both continuously and proactively. Our AI-based automation analyzes vast amounts of public data, including security advisories, the CISA KEVs catalog, exploit databases, best practices, and regulatory requirements and parses the relevant information into machine-readable rules that are used by the patented Runecast rules engine to identify and prioritize vulnerabilities, significantly reducing the time and effort required for manual analysis.

Prioritizing Remediation Efforts and Reducing Costs

In today's resource-constrained environments, it is crucial to prioritize remediation efforts effectively. Runecast's AI-powered platform reveals vulnerabilities and compliance gaps, taking into account factors such as severity, potential impact, and business context. This intelligent prioritization allows organizations to focus on the most critical issues, reducing the risk of security incidents and optimizing resource allocation. By eliminating time-consuming manual research and analysis, and helping to optimize workflows, our platform helps organizations achieve significant cost savings. The best part is that it deploys in about 15 minutes and we’ve designed it to need no learning curve.

Reducing the complexity of hybrid cloud protection with CNAPP and AI-Based Automation

In conclusion, the AI-powered Runecast platform offers a powerful solution to the challenges of securing the mix of cloud-native and traditional applications. By consolidating security toolsets, providing intelligent threat monitoring, and leveraging AI-based automation, organizations can enhance their security posture, streamline operations, and reduce costs.

Bio

Stan Markov is CEO and Co-Founder of Runecast Solutions Ltd. and is responsible for setting company strategies and supporting the Senior Management team in all aspects of innovation, stability, and growth. Before Runecast, he spent almost a decade with IBM, leading the VMware Center of Excellence in IBM Global Services and gaining experience in large-scale transition, digitalization, and transformation processes. Stan is also an IBM Redbooks author, vExpert, VMware Certified Instructor Mentor, and holds the highest VMware certification: VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX), no. 74. Outside of work, Stan enjoys spending time with his family and traveling to unique locales.