Hello World: Sharing the Story of Critical Stack

By: Dustin Webber, CTO, Critical Stack

It’s been a big month for us over at Critical Stack. You may know a little bit about who we are, and perhaps you’ve even taken advantage of our Intel Marketplace to access critical intelligence for the Bro security monitoring platform. With this marketplace, we have helped thousands of organizations in more than 60 countries detect network abusers and intruders in real-time.

But you want to know a secret? We were just starting to have fun. We’re real nerds for security, to the point where we like to create products and put them out into the world, just to see what people think.

But we aren’t just playing around over here. Behind the scenes, over the last three years, we’ve been cooking up something big. We’ll be sharing more details about this in the coming months, but in the meantime, we wanted to peel back the curtain and give you a peek.

Who We Are

So, who is behind Critical Stack?

The team here has been hand-picked for a very specific mission. We’re super-proud of the people here, many of whom are world experts on their particular areas of interest. Most of us have spent our entire careers in reactive security, and this is a project we’re all beyond excited to unveil. You can learn more about our team here, and we’ll be sharing some team member spotlights in the coming months so you can get to know us a little better.

The Origin Story

So how exactly did Critical Stack come into being?

It all started back in the summer of 2014, when Liam Randall and I co-founded Critical Stack with one goal in mind: to securely orchestrate network security stacks. First, we launched the Intel Marketplace as a free source of threat intelligence, parsed and delivered by the Critical Stack team, crafted around the Bro network security monitoring platform.

Alongside the Intel Marketplace, Liam and I began consulting with a wide variety of organizations on deploying Bro sensors. As we worked with more and more organizations, the repetitive steps involved sparked an idea. What if it were possible to completely automate enterprise infrastructure deployments in a more secure manner?

While the Intel Marketplace took off in its own right, the Critical Stack team began to approach the challenge of enterprise infrastructure automation. As our work proceeded, we began to pitch the concept to large organizations, including a bank you might recognize: Capital One.

When we first pitched Critical Stack to Capital One, we posed this question: “Why can’t a bank use containers — as long as they’re secure?” Capital One was already making the move to standardize on microservices and containerization in the cloud, so it was a natural fit.

Critical Stack + Capital One: A Match Made in Container Heaven

As you may know, Capital One is not just any bank. They have taken a global leadership role when it comes to technology. We at Critical Stack saw them as a perfect company to model the benefits of secure infrastructure automation.

Capital One was intrigued, but not just by the idea of using Critical Stack’s technology for themselves. They saw an opportunity to invest in what we are building at Critical Stack and help us bring it to a wider audience.

In fact, they decided to purchase us, and we joined the Capital One family in 2016 and in November of this year announced the launch of Critical Stack to beta.

Why Critical Stack? Why Now?

It’s no secret that organizations big and small are making the leap to cloud infrastructure today. Many are all-in, and those who aren’t are scrambling to keep up because of all the benefits it offers, from scalability and flexibility to dramatic cost savings and increased speed of deployment. But many enterprises, especially those in regulated industries, have significant security and compliance considerations as they look to scale in the cloud. Today, it’s possible to scale your infrastructure at the click of a button — but if it’s not secure, what’s the point?

This is exactly why Critical Stack is poised to transform the cloud infrastructure market, especially for large enterprises. Our goal? Help enterprises automate infrastructure deployments in the cloud, without sacrificing security, compliance, or simplicity. Resilience is our keyword. If you can’t compromise assets upstream, then there is far less work to do downstream.

So much of what we see happening in security today looks like sloppy farming. The cows are already out of the barn, and folks are scrambling to catch them. We want to build a more secure barn and make sure the cows don’t get out in the first place.

Sound exciting?

We want to share this journey with you. You can follow along here, on our blog, or you can sign up for our newsletter. We won’t send you daily or even weekly emails, but we’ll ping you with:

● Fresh news and company updates

● Actionable tips you can apply to your organization

● Questions about what your needs look like and how we can better serve you

It’s our goal to transform how enterprises think about infrastructure, and we’d love for you to join us on the journey.

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Thanks for reading.