Lorenzo Modesto CEO of 6pillars.io has been in tech startups since the birth of the Internet in the 90s. He’d expected that by 2023, automation would play a far greater role in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) due to statistics showing that the majority of security issues in the cloud are directly related to misconfigurations. In fact, Gartner believe that by 2025, 99% of cloud security failures will be the customer’s fault.
“The vast majority of products will report a misconfiguration, and then just say, ‘you need to fix this stuff’. It might create a ticket,” he says. “If you’ve got a CSPM that is creating a lot of noise, that is wrong. Even worse, if it’s creating tickets — automation is being used to create work! The reality is that, not only can the majority of those issues be remediated automatically, but they can be remediated in complete safety.”
The opportunity to automate
Lorenzo and Doug Kelly, COO of 6pillars, met working together. “I met Doug at Bulletproof Group and we worked together for seven years,” explains Lorenzo. “Right from our initial discussions, we were very much aligned with regards to the opportunity to automate away as much as possible for the understaffed teams that manage these environments — bringing scalable security to the cloud.”
The team aligned the launch of 6pillars with being a global launch partner for the inaugural Level 1 AWS MSSP program in August 2021. “The name 6pillars comes from the six pillars of cloud best-practice in AWS. When we launched there were five, so we rebranded in December 2021,” explains Lorenzo. “The competency and achievement of other AWS partnerships ensures the trust required by our customers.”
They’re enjoying the Accelerator. “It’s been said that startups are the ultimate mental challenge — it’s great fun.” says Lorenzo. “You get to work with very smart peers. You get to learn a massive amount and you get to pivot and grow at speed. The harvest at the end of that is getting the recipe right; getting the mix of product, distribution and team right.”
AUTOMATE+
6pillars’ AUTOMATE+ delivers safe, self-healing automation that maximises security and availability in AWS.
Misconfiguration is a common cause of security incidents. “We can very easily and safely both fix that misconfiguration automatically and on an ongoing basis, maintain continuous compliance with best-practice,” explains Lorenzo. “It will detect that a deviation from best practices has been found and it will, if it’s been configured to do so for that particular control, take action and remediate it in a matter of minutes, reliably and safely, 24/7/365. It will then report back that the remediation action has been taken if further investigation is required.”
“Automation is absolutely required to fix the largest problem in cloud security and compliance, which is the skill shortage. Bad actors have adopted automation faster than everybody else. Ransomware is automated, even compromising of hosts is automated. One of the main causes of the recent massive increase in security breaches is due to automation having been adopted faster by bad actors than their targets.”
6pillars has 20 customers across Asia, the US and Australia, ranging from AWS themselves to large cybersecurity companies and large startups in the US.
What’s next
In the CyRise Accelerator, 6pillars has validated product-market fit, won more customers and talked to investors. “The main hypothesis that we wanted to prove or disprove is our main differentiator, which is automated remediation,” explains Lorenzo.
“What we’ve also wanted to develop during the CyRise Accelerator is to leverage our NLP-to-Automation patent-pending IP to allow customers themselves to contribute automation to the platform, thereby increasing its value for both themselves as well as benefiting all other customers. Customers have asked for a choice of remediation options and now they can define that themselves.”
Meet the team
CyRise Demo Day will be held at Aerial UTS Function Centre on 9 May 2023 at 6pm. RSVP here to get your free ticket.
Learn more about 6pillars at: 6pillars.io
