Software-as-a-service vendors looking to enter the lucrative public sector market often go a long way in meeting security and compliance rules. What if this could be done quickly and automatically on a pre-engineered platform?

This is what Anitian Inc. promises to offer. The company is a provider of a prepackaged compliant architecture that can promptly deploy a complete cloud environment to meet compliance requirements. Everything is included: systems, controls and policies.

“Anitian is the fastest way for both existing and new applications to be developed in the cloud,” said Rakesh Narasimhan (pictured, left), president and chief executive officer of Anitian. “We make sure that you can get there fastest time to value and time to revenue pretty quickly by providing the best secure and compliance environment for you.”

Narasimhan and Aditya Muppavarapu (pictured, right), global segment leader of DevOps at AWS Partner Network, spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the AWS Startup Showcase: The Next Big Things in AI, Security & Life Sciences. They discussed the capabilities of Anitian’s automated cloud security and compliance solutions, how it can help companies looking to enter the public sector and government organizations looking to move to the cloud, Anitian’s partnership with Amazon Web Services Inc. and trends for the security market. (* Disclosure below.)

Less time, less cost

Anitian is a partner of AWS, which has more than 6,500 government agencies using its services. These agencies naturally look to the AWS Marketplace for SaaS providers to meet their cloud application needs. Sellers interested in these contracts, however, must meet certifications standards, such as the United States Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, commonly referred to as FedRAMP.

The Anitian Compliance Automation platform wraps around an application to make existing or new cloud applications secure and compliant with FedRAMP, as well as with other standards. The promise is to reduce implementation time by 80% and costs by 50%, comparing to traditional ways to do that: go it alone or hire a consultant.

“If you’re a company and you’re trying to be in the cloud — you want to enter the federal market, for example — you’ve got to get that quickly,” Narasimhan said. “And so, within a quarter, depending on how quickly the two organizations can work, we can get you into the marketplace. That speed is of enormous value to companies.”

But SaaS vendors interested in the public sector is not the only group of customers for Anitian. It also works with a lot of government agencies and organizations, big and small, which are also trying to migrate to the cloud.

“We see us disrupting the consulting and do-it-yourself world to actually providing a dependable service out there that you can rely on for security and compliance,” Narasimhan said.

Securing early in the development cycle

The need for good security tools and services has been accentuated with recent major changes in business’ IT infrastructure, according to Muppavarapu. As customers move to the cloud and modernize their infrastructure, what used to be a simple monolithic application running on a server or data center is now distributed, hybrid and spans across development practices such as microservices, managed services and packaged applications.

In addition, infrastructure platform options have increased dramatically, from on-premises to edge computing, IoT, containers, etc., all of which add more complexity to the system and increase the number of threat vectors exponentially.

“This is complex. It’s very hard to keep up; it’s not something you set and forget,” Muppavarapu stated. “One needs to make sure you have the right guardrails in place to make sure you’re continuously compliant with your own policies or also with regulatory compliance frameworks that are needed for your business.”

This environment calls for security and compliance solutions earlier in the process – that means applying them across application development and delivery cycles, not only in production. This is the called shift-left approach.

“Instead of having one gate that becomes a bottleneck, we should have multiple checkpoints at various stages,” Muppavarapu explained. “This provides a fast feedback for the developers while they’re still in the context of developing that feature so it’s easier and less expensive to fix the issues.”

This does not mean, however, that developers are now responsible for security and that companies can get rid of their security teams.

“We need a process and a mechanism in place to leverage the expertise of the security teams and offer their services to the developers very early on in the development cycles, thereby enabling and empowering developers to write secure and compliant code,” Muppavarapu added.

Automation plays a pivotal role in this process, as well as in all stages of Anitian’s solutions.

“Automation is there in general in the cloud space; people expect it,” Narasimhan said. “The key thing what we have done was pre-integrate not just our platform, but a variety of the partner ecosystem that are on AWS, and so, when a customer is looking forward to taking an application and going to the cloud, they’re not just getting functionality from us and AWS, but also a lot of partner functionality around it.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Startup Showcase: The Next Big Things in AI, Security & Life Sciences. (* Disclosure: Anitian Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Anitian nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE