Avnos: Reducing Organizations' Cyber Attack Surface

One of the key challenges that businesses face today is the lack of bandwidth to keep up with the ever-evolving threat landscape. Malicious attack tools, attack tactics, and techniques are evolving at a rapid pace, and traditional set-and-forget security products (such as antivirus products) are inadequate against them. Today, businesses need products that allow them to have better visibility and control of their environment, allowing them to take action and contain damage if and when breaches do occur. Reducing businesses’ cyber attack surface and simplifying the complexity of traditional perimeter defense is Avnos’ main goal. The firm’s flagship product, Avnos EX, addresses the biggest challenge that all businesses face today–the lack of visibility and control of their environment. The product helps customers to have full visibility and control of their entire operating environment, and provides answers to questions like which workstations are connected to the network, what applications are running, which applications are authorized and which ones are not, whether there are known or unknown malware/ransomware execution in the environment, whether there is a need to isolate a workstation from the network without having to physically terminate internet connectivity, and many more. “Avnos EX’s unique approach to mapping organizations allows our customers to easily visualize their entire organization at one glance,” says Dvir Atias, Co-Founder and Head of R&D at Avnos. The ability to design granular locations, departments, and sub-departments within Avnos EX allows customers to constantly have up-to-date information about their company structure and enterprise assets.

Avnos EX consists of two key solution capabilities - endpoint protection and endpoint management. Avnos EX endpoint protection helps to provide granular visibility and control over businesses’ enterprise assets - workstations, servers, and applications. Understanding that there is no silver-bullet to all cyber threats (no one-product-fix-all solution), Avnos’ patent-pending multi-layered protection technologies work hand-in-hand to help businesses narrow their cyber attack surface to the minimal. “And in the event of a possible breach, Avnos EX enables businesses to isolate their workstations/servers for investigative purposes without having the need to physically terminate network connectivity from these machines,” notes Atias. On the other hand, Avnos EX endpoint management capabilities enable businesses to manage their enterprise assets in a simple and elegant manner, helping them to understand their security posture by identifying vulnerabilities and prioritising risks across the organization. It also allows businesses to identify critical departments and workstations/servers, and possibly apply the strictest security policies a n d actions to these assets.

Explaining what makes Avnos relevant among its customers, Atias says that although requirements and concerns might differ from one organization to another, the cyber attack surface remains largely the same across all organizations. Be it humans (weakest link), or unpatched vulnerabilities, or inadequate security controls in place to deal with breaches, Avnos EX’s unique capabilities address all of these with simplicity and great efficiency.

In addition, Avnos’ multi-tenanted cloud-platform allows customers to onboard within the shortest possible timeframe, thereby greatly reducing their Total-Cost-of-Ownership (TCO) of deploying Avnos EX. Without the need for hefty on-premise hardware investments and with the use of a simple software installation package, customers can onboard their workstations and servers and have full visibility and control to their environment within minutes.

In one instance, a large financial organization suffered a major breach in their environment, and the infection went from one workstation to hundreds of workstations within hours. The infection caused the organization’s workstations to be unusable and crippled their business operations severely. It successfully bypassed their network perimeter defense and workstation antivirus product, leaving them with no means of containing the infections for investigative and remedial actions. Physically isolating network connectivity from infected workstations would still render the workstations unusable as internet access is required for the staff members to carry on with their daily work. Coincidentally, this organization was in touch with Avnos just weeks before the infection, and the CIO decided to reach out to Avnos for help. The Avnos team went onsite to support the customer and started deploying its software across all of the infected machines. Once the software was deployed, the team could isolate the infections from the workstations without having to terminate network connectivity, allowing staff members to continue with their daily work while the team starts to investigate the breach and work on remedial actions. It took no more than an hour for the Avnos team to contain the infection, saving millions of dollars in financial losses due to operational downtime. “This customer is now a ‘Customer Reference’ of Avnos, and the CIO is a regular reference speaker at most of our product events and conferences,” proudly mentions Atias.

Atias and his team have an in-depth understanding of the cyber security threat issues that businesses face today, and that understanding lays the groundwork for several innovations. The firm, which is the first Singapore cybersecurity startup with a mix of Singaporean and Israeli co-founders, focuses on reinvesting revenue and profits back into R&D which allows it to continue to innovate and differentiate itself with its customers.

Interestingly, the team’s vision is actually a multi-year roadmap with multiple product modules to achieve its grand vision – with Avnos EX as the first module launched earlier this year. Avnos’ immediate technology and product roadmap includes further enhancing the current capabilities of Avnos EX, and targeting 2019 for Avnos EX v2.0 release. EX v2.0 will have brand new innovative features and functions, which will help to propel Avnos to be one of the most comprehensive endpoint vendors in the market.

In addition to this, Avnos has also begun work on its second product module–Avnos MX. “We can’t share more on MX for now, but these two products (EX+MX) will help to redefine the traditional network perimeter as we know it today. We are really excited about this vision of ours, and we are looking forward to having MX launched in 2019, together with EX v2.0,” asserts Atias. The company is also planning to have strategic alliances with other cybersecurity startups across the globe. “We have already concluded strategic partnerships with other global cybersecurity startups and we expect announcements to be made soon. This will help to expedite time-to-market for joint-product-offerings, providing a much more comprehensive solution suite for our end customers,” states Atias.

Indonesia continues to be one of Avnos’ focus market, and with the team winning “Best Employer In Technology Startups Award In Indonesia” in 2017, Avnos aspires to become Indonesia’s number one cybersecurity vendor in the coming years in terms of market share. When it comes to geographical expansion plans, Avnos will continue to have more focus in the Asian market for the next 2 years. “We have recently signed up an exclusive strategic distributor in Australia, and are already starting to see traction from that market. We are targeting another three to four new sales offices across the Asian market in the next two years, with immediate priority for Malaysia and Hong Kong,” concludes Atias.