Chris Drake, founder and CEO of Armor Defense Inc. (formerly FireHost), aimed to build “the world’s most secure cloud.” When customers repeatedly asked FireHost to secure their own cloud platforms, FireHost launched Armor. Drake liked the name so much, he rebranded his company.

Armor offers virtual private cloud, on- and off-premises private cloud and managed security, with VMware as its foundation. “It all sits on VMware and leverages the NSX stack,” Drake told Stu Miniman and Brian Gracely, cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during VMworld 2015.

Driving security

With all the talk around network virtualization, Miniman asked Drake, “What does it do to drive security?”

“When you have a cloud environment, DevOps and systems admins have real-time control over the network interfaces,” said Drake. “So you have to be able to secure at scale and be agile to the business. Software-defined networking makes sense for us because we can manage those security policies in a dynamic environment. We have 1,400 customers and 10,000 virtual machines, and every one is a snowflake. We need to manage them at scale.”

Drake offered sage advice on how to establish a secure infrastructure. “Have a data-focused model,” he said. “What is the data? Focus on the most sensitive data in your enterprise and secure that. When you get things to where you feel comfortable, then you can move across the enterprise.”

He went on to add, “If you’re focused on the entire landscape, you’ll be ineffective and nauseated. This is where people that spend half a billion dollars still lose the battle. Focus on the end points on the data, where the valuable data lives, and you’ll have a successful security operation.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of VMworld 2015.

Photo by SiliconANGLE