I had the opportunity to interview Komand founder and CEO, Jen Andre in late June to learn about her experience in cybersecurity as well as her path as an entrepreneur. I was excited to learn of their latest news that they’ve been acquired by Boston security leader, Rapid 7.
Andre’s motivation to become an entrepreneur stemmed from two factors during her professional experience working in security operations and as a security analyst for Fortune 100 companies. Andre co-founded, Threat Stack, a cloud security company that still operates in Boston.
Andre discovered her passion for improving the analytics for security analysts while in an R&D role when she was developing new security products. “I was able to build cool new things while working with smart people,” Andre explained.
“As we were building and inventing some of these technologies, we often went to the business leaders and said ‘Hey, we’re building this thing that’s better than our competitors or this would be helpful to our customers,’” Andre says. “But there was no ability for us in that R&D role to productize the technology”
However, after bringing in a growth CEO to lead that organization, her appetite for being a part of an early-stage startup, prompted her to found Komand in late 2015.
“I was compelled by the concept of building a security orchestration automation product,” Andre explains her inspirations. “This is a problem that I had experienced as a security analyst and was part of the reason I left being a security analyst. There is a lot of tedious work when your monitoring for security threats.”
Andre went on to say, “It was surprising to me that fast forward 10-15 years and security teams are working in the same way. Where they have one console open and 10 different tools and they’re manually copying and pasting data across these tools as they work.”
Andre set out to build an automation tool that would help these teams remove the manual and tedious grunt work. As a result, she describes Komand as the glue layer for connecting different security tools.
“[Komand] allows people to connect different actions across different systems and it enables security analysts to do this without having to create code,” Andre explains. “They can create a workflow which is similar to a ‘If this, then that” recipe to conduct automated actions.”
As a result, Komand customers are able to handle a higher volume of evaluating security threats and in doing so frees up time for security analysts to focus on more strategic projects.
For more information about Komand and the recent acquisition with Rapid 7 visit, https://www.komand.com/company
Sarah Salbu is a contributor to VentureFizz and a communications manager at Mendix. Follow Sarah on Twitter: @SarahSalbu.
Images courtesy of Komand and Rapid7.