Better than solving security issues is to avoid them. Cybersecurity software provider Qualys Inc. wants to enable security tools to be built into the DevOps device chain to eliminate potential issues before they become real problems.

“The best time to remediate is the time of zero,” said Sumedh Thakar (pictured), president and chief technical officer of Qualys. “If you never let the issue gets into a production environment, you never have to worry about fixing it.”

Qualys’ goal is to create a platform that helps customers not to look at security in multiple silos, but in one place. “That’s really the next big thing for us,” he said. “It is to have a single platform where customers can go all the way from DevOps to production, to remediation, to response, all orchestrated through the same platform.”

Thakar spoke with Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Qualys Security Conference in Las Vegas. They discussed the trends in the cybersecurity landscape, the role of machine learning and artificial intelligence in this scenario, and the advantages of the Qualys´s business model. (* Disclosure below.)

Being close to customers as a recipe for innovation

What helps develop security strategies is living the same digital transformation customers are going through, according to Thakar. “We have a massive black form; we have 3 trillion data points every index, we have 1 million writes per second on our Cassandra clusters, so we are dealing with the same infrastructure innovation that our customers are doing,” he said. “As the customers are moving into DevOps, we have already moved into that.”

The recipe of closely following customer needs is part of Qualys’ business model. As a subscription-based company since day one, Qualys is not encouraged to try to sell multi-million-dollar deals to costumers at one go.

“We want to make sure that we understand customers’ needs so that they actually buy only what they are going to use,” Thakar said. “Then we can go back and they can grow more as we show the value.”

In Qualys’ cybersecurity tool arsenal, machine learning and artificial intelligence start to play an important role. These technologies rely on massive historical data to uncover trends and understand how standards have evolved.

“So only cloud-based solutions can actually do that because they have a large amount of customer telemetry they can understand. And from that sense, Qualys’ platform is absolutely super for that,” Thakar stated.

Models developed from machine learning and AI can help predict potential problems. “The really exciting part is to be able to bring that as an additional toolkit for customers in their arsenal, to respond to threats much faster and better than in the past,” Thakar concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Qualys Security Conference. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Qualys Security Conference. Neither Qualys Inc., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE