The cloud has dramatically changed the pace of technology innovation, driven in part by the need for organizations to achieve greater business capabilities that enable them to go to market faster.

With the onset of COVID-19, suddenly the need for speed has shifted into an even higher gear, along with a fluctuating business landscape that relies on digital channels as never before. 

“For those of us in technology, we were probably always the bottleneck of our business counterparts who said, ‘If you could do this for me, I could grow the business … incrementally bring more customers, revenues’ and so on,” said Erez Yarkoni (pictured), vice president of worldwide sales, telco and cloud (pictured) at Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. “Cloud platforms have done a tremendous job allowing developers and operators of technology to change the speed in which they service their businesses.”

Yarkoni spoke with Jeff Frick, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent. They discussed matching security agility with business agility, the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence to prevent and remediate threats, and the maturity curve of cloud security. (* Disclosure below.)

Matching the speed of business with the speed of security

The idea of business agility is increasingly rising above the more commonly held theme of lowering costs. And, along with business agility is the notion of security agility.

“At the end of the day, the big benefit from cloud is business agility, but cost has to come with it,” Yarkoni said. “We cannot sacrifice cost in everything we do, and we look at overall how we use cloud technologies and other technologies and make sure that the cost fits into what our business demands from a cost structure. But it is (more) about business agility now. It’s also about security agility.”

Markoni explained that as organizations began to build methods and capabilities to drive business agility — requiring iterations, sprints and delivery of functionality in a matter of weeks — security became an inhibitor. AWS and others started baking security into their platforms. Check Point’s cloud security offering integrates with an organization’s internal processes so that organizations can “match the speed of the business with the speed of security,” according to Yarkoni. 

Check Point also uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to find threats and prevent them from happening using a component called a “threat cloud.” The company collects about 80 billion events per day from every gateway, appliance, virtual appliance and every type of security agent it has around the world and puts them into the threat cloud for processing. ML and AI algorithms are applied to ultimately prevent security breaches or any type of threat from occurring, as well as remediate those that have been discovered to have already happened.

“We’re moving very strongly into protecting your runtime and applications in the cloud, your APIs and working with organizations through that maturity curve (of cloud security) and getting them all the way up to threat hunting capabilities,” Yarkoni said. “I hear from customers that they need to move quickly through that maturity curve as they have accelerated and continue to accelerate their move to the cloud.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Check Point nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE Media