GhangorCloud’s security solutions have a higher degree of policy automation, which helps reduce their cost, especially on the OPEX side. They also use real time identity management for more stringent access control by individuals to specific data.

San Jose-based GhangorCloud has announced its formal launch, with a roster of next-generation security solutions, including its Information Security Enforcer family of turnkey appliances.

GhangorCloud was founded by Silicon Valley security veteran Tarique Mustafa. The company’s name comes from the Urdu and Hindi languages. While most clouds do not bring rain, a Ghangor is a monsoon cloud, which does,

“It is widely used in romantic poetry, and it brings down a bounty for everybody,” Mustafa said.

GhangorCloud intends to bring down a bounty for everyone using it through a unique identity and role based GRC paradigm that uses powerful correlation engine and security algorithms to identify, classify, and protect large volumes of information against Advanced Persistent Threats in real-time.

“We don’t claim to be pioneers here, but we spent a lot of time while in stealth listening to the pioneers,” Mustafa said. “Not being a pioneer is a good thing, because you don’t get the arrows.”

GhangorCloud learned, in assessing the strengths and weaknesses of existing systems, that an ideal system had to be easy to use for end users, easy to deploy for IT, had to be a high-efficacy solution, and had to be reasonably priced.

“We knew we had to provide analysis of the content in such a way that minimum human intervention is required,” Mustafa said. “That required a higher degree of policy automation process. Existing policy engines tended to be completely messed up. They are a nightmare. So we simplified the policy definition process and automated it to a great extent. We made some foundational tech breakthroughs here, and simplified it to such an extent that it’s easy to set policies correctly. This contrasts with the old paradigm, which is a piecemeal approach with manual intervention.”

The result is that GhangorCloud’s technologies allow customers to reduce administrative tasks related to data protection from days to minutes, mitigate the risk of data breaches and internal malicious threats, automate compliance requirements, and proactively protect information throughout the organization. It also lowers the cost of compliance and reduces total cost of ownership, eliminating the expenses associated with hundreds and thousands of hours of manual document tagging.

GhanghorCloud’s Information Security Enforcer solution also uses identity management and security clearances in a way in which that Mustafa said has not been used previously, to give much better protection against internal data loss.

“We consider not only unique identifiables, but also their individuals’ role in relation to data, which hasn’t been used this way before for information protection,” he said. To illustrate, he used the example of Edward Snowden in the U.S., who had a valid identity, in a security environment that had best-of breed leak protection in place.

“When Snowden downloaded his documents, there was no capability to analyze information in real time, utilizing access control policies based on his role, and determine his downloads were unauthorized,” Mustafa said. “We have that capability. We also have 14 different attack vectors against evasion attacks.”

Mustafa said that while their solutions are designed to be enterprise capable, their simplicity and cost means they will find customers lower than that in the market.

“Our cost is about 20-35 per cent that of our competitors,” he said. “For one large bank which was paying $1.2 million in CAPEX alone for a year, our CAPEX cost was $380,000. Their OPEX costs were $2.8 million and ours is $105,000 over three years. OPEX is especially low because of our policy automation.”

GhangorCloud will start with several resellers out of the gate, and the channel will be their main go-to-market tool.

“We don’t have the luxury of resources, so the channel will be our major go-to-market and some direct sales,” Mustafa said. “We have no distributor now, but on our road map, we anticipate by Q4 of this year considering a distributor who can manage the resellers.”