Cohesity CEO and President Sanjay Poonen spoke with Semperis CEO Mickey Bresman about the importance of identity resilience and the partnership with Cohesity.
In his previous company, Bresman saw “...what it actually takes when you try to bring back the identity systems. And, that's basically what prompted us to say—there has to be a better way.”
It’s so important to protect one of today’s crucial workloads, Active Directory.
“Active directory is all about trust. I trust the identity that is trying to access something,” Bresman said. “Now, imagine if somebody was able to encrypt your A...
Questions asked in this interview
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2:35How do I go back to a point of fast recovery, stable recovery, and how can I trust the environment post the restoration?
6:26One of the things that happened to the two of us, right?
This is Resilience Universe, a podcast about leadership, resilience, and transformation at the intersection of AI and data security, hosted by Cohesity CEO and President Sanjay Poonen.
Hello everyone. I'm excited today to be talking to Mickey Breman. Welcome. I've gotten to know Mickey. He's CEO and founder of Saviynt. And look at this. We've got black shirts. I mean, maybe it's Mickey Poonen and Sanjay Breman. Saviynt and Cohesity. Mickey, why don't you tell us a little bit first about Saviynt, how the company got started and what was your vision for what's now being called identity resilience?
Yeah. So, it's been about a decade now and the starting of the company had to do as you can imagine with what happens when you don't have identity resilience. And our story basically started with the previous company that I had, the professional services one. We were brought in to assist several different companies when they had a worst day ever. Basically, the identity going down and we saw time and time again what it actually takes when you try to bring back the identity systems. And that's basically what prompted us to say there has to be a better way. So imagine the following situation. We were brought into a telco company. They went down. Nothing works. It's us and Microsoft together and we're trying to bring them back up. We eventually find out that was a malicious activity. Somebody actually took them down. But in order for us to understand what to do and how to bring them up at the time, this is more than 10 years ago, it was a very new type of a thing to deal with. And then we see a financial institution going through something similar. That basically prompted the idea that we have to find a way to make it better. Fast forward where we are now, over a thousand customers.
Amazing. 25% of the 100 biggest US companies are using Saviynt as their identity resiliency platform and we're growing over 70% year-over-year and about 500 employees roughly.
Wonderful. And listen, one of the things I understand, correct me if I'm wrong here, Mickey, when this infrastructure goes on Active Directory and related areas of Microsoft, Microsoft has a manual that's like what, like 500 pages?
It's a very complex manual. It's not 500 but it's about 40 steps that you need to do per every DC in the environment. So the manual process, I tried to do it, that's actually how we concluded that it's not going to be sufficient. One of the customers that we tried to do it manually for took more than 5 days.
