I’m proud to announce that Sumo Logic was one of the top 10 finalists at the 2012 Innovation Sandbox, at last week’s RSA Conference Event. While I’ve been to the RSA Conference many times, this was my first time at the Innovation Sandbox. This year’s conference showcased three important themes in log analysis today: Big Data volumes, data privacy, and the need for better analytics.
A little bit about the format of the Innovation Sandbox:
- Criteria: Innovative technology, big market, strong team, and company needs to be somehow security relevant
- Judges(6): 2 venture capitalists, 2 industry visionaries, 2 potential customers
- Here is a bit more about companies and judges: http://bit.ly/8dOwFh
The room was packed with what seemed like close to a thousand people, and I was pleased by the amount of interest in learning about innovation brought to the market by companies like Sumo Logic. The 10 companies delivered their 3-minute pitches to the judges and answered 2 minutes worth of questions. I happened to go first; here is a 5-minute video of my pitch: http://bit.ly/xxvwc7. Even though Sumo was named a runner-up (congrats to Appthority, the winner), the interest in our cloud-based approach was enormous.
The best part of the experience was the throng of people who approached us after the presentation to see our demo, find out how we get the data from data center and into our service, how we scale to process this much data in a multi-tenant system, and how we deliver the insights that are not possible to distill with an on-premise solution. The discussions really underscored the feeling that this space is yearning for a new approach. People complained about complexity and poor scalability of existing on-premise log management and analysis systems as they were the folks who were tasked with operating these systems or were trying to make due with home grown tools. People were most engaged when we discussed our LogReduce™ and Push Analytics™ capabilities, as these promise to truly change the equation for IT teams and elevate to a new level the insights we derive from log data.
Finally, one of the top questions asked of us was which processes, procedures, and technologies we employ to protect data privacy. It’s obvious that security remains a top concern for consumers of cloud-based services and that it was (obviously) top of mind at RSA. Most attendees already use one or more cloud-based applications for some of their critical data, and wanted to find out how we stack up. Our approach is to encrypt data in transit and rest with strong and frequently rotating customer unique keys that are themselves managed securely. But we don’t stop there, each customer’s data is logically separated from others, we follow strict procedures on who gets to access our production system, access is controlled with multi-factor authentication, access is audited, and we run host based security on each of our hosts.
Overall, RSA Innovation Sandbox was terrific and we look forward to disrupting the Log Management and Log Analysis space and bringing delight to our future customers.
– Bruno Kurtic, Founding VP of Product and Strategy
