As software-as-a-service vendors continue innovating, the public sector remains a virtually untapped market, where heavy regulations minimize testing opportunities for potential cloud services.

Anitian Inc. is working to fill this void through a pre-engineered platform operating on top of cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services Inc., that accelerates and automates the FedRAMP compliance. This makes the government marketplace accessible, given that this market continues to boom even throughout the economic downturn, according to Rakesh Narasimhan (pictured), president and chief executive officer of Anitian, which earned nine Global InfoSec Awards at RSA Conference 2022.

“You have a complete class of SaaS vendors out there who provide enormous innovation that they bring to the marketplace, but the government market, in general, has not been able to participate in it because it’s very complex, takes time, and is very expensive,” Narasimhan said. “So we focused on that opportunity to really make it easier for all these cloud service providers to be able to bring their innovations to the government market, for example, with FedRAMP.”

Narasimhan spoke with theCUBE industry analyst Lisa Martin in advance of the “Cybersecurity — Detect and Protect Against Threats” event, an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, airing on Sept. 7. They discussed how Anitian helps in the penetration of the federal market by making compliance smooth sailing. (* Disclosure below.)

Anitian as a fast path to cloud security

Since one of Anitian’s primary objectives is to enable and empower digital transformation for enterprises, it accelerates cloud migration securely, according to Narasimhan. As a result, software innovation opportunities are massive.

“I think the big change that we brought to the table in Anitian is really what is typically a very manual, complex, time-consuming and quite expensive process, we’ve just brought software innovations to it,” he noted. “That’s customers who are trying to do compliance or security in the cloud, which just provides a platform that basically accelerates a customer’s application migration to the cloud.”

Compliance can prove to be a headache when getting into a new market. Therefore, this calls for innovation, and this is a major Anitian differentiator, according to Narasimhan.

“The biggest thing that we bring to the table is really an acceleration and timeline and completion of their application,” he said. “So if you’re a customer … you’re trying to basically get a new application up and running in a secure environment; in either one of those cases, we have a platform offering that enables you to quickly get up and running and get to production.” 

Since Anitian has successfully enabled cloud software vendors and enterprises to enter the federal market by accelerating time-to-revenue and time-to-market, the commercial players are feeling the trickle-down effect, Narasimhan pointed out. After all, security is a fundamental component.

“We wanted to make sure that first, we’re very good at doing something … that something was really go after the federal market, and the success we achieved in that marketplace had a few insights,” he stated. “What we found is that commercial customers are also trying to go to the cloud. They’re also dealing with the issues of security in securing their environments. And it’s really the DevOps and DevSecOps folks on whom this burden falls.”

Software-oriented approach

By rolling out a platform approach, Anitian enables enterprises to pay a subscription for innovations in record time. This software-oriented approach comes in handy in regard to revenue objectives, according to Narasimhan.

“We thought of actually bringing a software-oriented approach just like people buy email, they buy service, and then all the innovations that come along with it for the subscription that you pay,” he said. “That’s huge productivity, time to market, but most importantly, it enables them to achieve their revenue goals because they’re trying to get to market and service the customer.”

Through Anitian’s partnership with AWS, a secure environment is provided for application development. Anitian provides a pre-engineered environment that passes all the security standards, according to Narasimhan.

“If you’re a customer on the B2B side and you’re going to the cloud to get your applications to the marketplace on AWS, we’re a great solution for you to actually have that engineered platform in place already,” he stated. “That basically provides you a secure environment in which you can start developing your applications and start deploying them, much like your DevOps cycle would work.”

The federal market’s complexity and time-consuming nature sometimes is slow to adopt software innovations. Nevertheless, the pre-engineered framework provided by Anitian usually takes the headache away, according to Narasimhan.

“We’re basically pre-engineering a platform taking care of all the requirements of the standard in compliance and security and then essentially help the customer bring that innovation on top of the AWS environment and making that available to the customers in record time,” he said. “That’s the reason why we’re able to enjoy the success. Historically, the space has been very focused on a lot of consulting.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s pre-event coverage of the “Cybersecurity — Detect and Protect Against Threats” event:

(* Disclosure: Anitian Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Anitian nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE