Inside the Accelerator: ASecureCloud
The Catalyst Cyber Accelerator is the first cybersecurity-focused commercial accelerator in Canada. Headquartered at the Rogers Cybersecure Catalyst at Toronto Metropolitan University, the Accelerator offers technical, strategic advice, mentorship and business resources to cybersecurity businesses that are ready to become national and international competitors.
In February, the Accelerator launched its fourth cohort with seven innovative Canadian cybersecurity businesses. In this series of articles, we’ll be talking to the entrepreneurs behind each business about the Accelerator experience.
ASecureCloud makes it possible for anyone to build a secure cloud environment that they can fully control. Their technology helps cloud security consultants and administrators build their own security controls using native AWS (Amazon Web Services) security services and features. ASecureCloud allows users to build secure AWS environments in minutes, choosing from a library of 750+ customizable configurations and best practices.
We talked to co-founder Abdul Kittana about how the technology works, and what to expect from the company in future.
What is the elevator pitch for ASecureCloud?
Right now, all computing is moving to the cloud, from startups to large enterprises. The cloud is becoming the default destination for all computing workloads. But the effort to manage it and operate cloud environments requires a lot of different skills, a lot of manual work, a lot of upskilling of existing resources and finding new talent. It can be very time-consuming, expensive and complex.
ASecureCloud provides a user-friendly, guided experience to help anybody simplify their cloud-building and cloud operations in a secure way. As opposed to other products that focus on the security assessment or security checks after the cloud has been built, we come in a little bit earlier and make sure you’re building the actual cloud environment securely. We automate that for you by dynamically generating the code needed to build it.
Where did the idea come from?
[Co-founder] Osman Rachid and I have both been working as security consultants for over 10 years. Osman worked a lot in the government; I worked a lot in the private sector, including four years at Amazon as an Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud security consultant. Both of us came to the realization that a lot of our work when we go to clients to help them secure or build their cloud environments has been repetitive. It’s very similar work, with small differences from customer to customer. We thought that we can build a platform to automate that, and instead of having to rely on external experts like us, we can automate 70–80 percent of that work for our customers. Basically, automating our jobs!
What brought you to the Catalyst Cyber Accelerator?
I heard about the Catalyst from startups that have done the Accelerator program before. They provided really good feedback about their experience, especially about meeting experienced people in the industry that can guide them; meeting other partners; and even meeting other startups in the same stage. Having all the connections and mentorship and guidance — for myself and Osman, this is the first startup we’re doing, so there are a lot of things we don’t know. It’s good to have that kind of environment where we can learn from people who have done it.
What has the experience been like so far?
The Catalyst has been great — in fact, it exceeded our expectations. We didn’t realize how many resources there would be, especially the Entrepreneurs-in-Residence and Corporates-in-Residence. We’ve had a lot of help structuring our thoughts on marketing, branding, sales and the product life cycle. People who have done this before can give us the first-hand experience to say, “I know where you are right now. This is going to be tough, but I’ve done this before, and here is how you make it work.”
It’s been much busier than we expected, but that has also been super helpful. Doing the workshops, doing the homework and then coming back has constantly clarified our thoughts and helped us with our strategy.
What do the next five years look like for ASecureCloud?
There are a lot of things we want to do. We want to be the go-to destination for anybody wanting to deploy on cloud. Right now we focus on Amazon Web Services, but in the future, we want to cover other cloud providers and any other product that is deployed on cloud. Any user out there, regardless of skill level, can come to ASecureCloud. We offer a very extensive free tier, and we’re going to continue doing that because we want to continue providing that service and value to the community. Even without having to sign up, any user can come in and use us as a resource and deploy/configure in a fraction of the usual time, regardless of how much they know about cloud security.
Right now, anyone who has a question about coding goes to GitHub. We want to be like that, but for the cloud. We also want to be a little bit more than GitHub because GitHub just presents you the code, but we actually want to generate the code for you. You answer a few simple questions in plain English, we generate the code for you, and you’re ready to go.
We started this as a side project with basically a free tier. We didn’t have anything paid. We’ve been able to grow that to thousands of users coming in every month deploying from it. That’s a core part of our go-to-market strategy: we have an extensive free tier, and we’re layering on top of it a premium tier that provides extra services to customers.
