21 Amazing Things That Happened at Cyware in 2021

Cyware has experienced tremendous business growth in 2021, and there are a number of people who contributed to our success story. From functional leaders to employees to contractors, to partners and customers, and investors and advisors, there are so many people to thank, and there are so many great things that happened at Cyware in 2021.

We set out to grow Cyware in a way that is entirely focused on positive business outcomes (PBOs) for our customers. With a team having deep-domain expertise in SOAR and Threat Intelligence domains, we know that the daily challenges organizations face extend well-beyond simply protecting the business - that enterprise cyber teams need a way to pull together disparate cyber technologies, processes, and personnel to more efficiently respond to an unforeseen evolution of the cyber threat landscape.

Here’s a high-level summary that encapsulates why our growth will reach new heights in 2022 based on our organizational performance and incredible benchmarks achieved in 2021!!

1. Cyware is a “customer-first” organization. Anything less than retaining every customer we have isn’t acceptable by our quality standards and objectives that we have as an organization. Our 100% net-dollar retention rate in 2021 demonstrates our commitment to our rapidly-growing global installed base, and to enhancing every SecOps teams’ capabilities around advanced Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR) cyber fusion, and threat intelligence operationalization.

2. Just seven months after raising Series A, Cyware raised $30 million in Series B funding, in March 2021. The round was led by Advent International and TenEleven Ventures, as well as pro-rata from existing investors. Our investors have hundreds of millions invested in their respective cybersecurity portfolios, and support Cyware’s rapid growth trajectory, and fully trust in Cyware’s vision of ‘building a self-responding collective defense network’ delivering advanced SOAR and Threat Intelligence capabilities.

3. As part of our investment and growth strategy, we also welcomed additional experienced investors and cybersecurity leaders to Cyware. Eric Noeth, Managing Director with Advent International, was appointed to Cyware’s Board of Directors. We also welcomed Alex Doll, Founder and Managing Member of TenEleven Ventures, Greg Clark, Managing Director of Crosspoint Capital Partners, Andrew Peterson and Zane Lackey, Co-founders, Signal Sciences (acquired by Fastly), and Tom Noonan, Board of Directors, ICE/NYSE as new investors in Cyware.

4. Our collective defense threat information sharing network continues to grow further as 23 major global information sharing communities (ISACs/ISAOs/CERTs) now leverage our technology to automate the sharing of threat intelligence with over 10,000 member organizations worldwide. Some of the major ISACs/ISAOs that recently joined Cyware’s sharing network include Aviation ISAC, Maritime Transportation System (MTS) ISAC, Space ISAC, Research & Education Networks (REN)-ISAC, Manufacturing-ISAO, Faith-Based-ISAO, and more. As a result of our collective efforts, Global Resilience Federation (GRF) witnessed over 300% year-on-year increase in operational intelligence sharing for its managed ISAC and ISAO communities.

5. As part of our continued international expansion, we marked our footprint in the APJ market with the induction of our new team. Within a few months, we onboarded several new clients to deliver unprecedented innovation in cyber fusion, threat intelligence, and security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) in the APJ region.

6. Cyware won a number of industry awards for both its SOAR and threat intelligence solutions based on a series of stringent growth and performance criteria, including:

• Cyware won the Overall SOAR Solution Provider of the Year award at Cybersecurity Breakthrough Awards 2021.

• The industry also acknowledged us with the Editor’s Choice Threat Intelligence Winner in Cyber Defense Magazine’s Global InfoSec Awards.

• Cyware won an esteemed channel provider award, being recognized as the winner of the “Security Innovation Award” by the CPI Channel Innovation Awards.

• In the leadership category, Cyware was named as a finalist in the CyberScoop 50’s “Big Thinker of the Year” category, and in the “Cyber Industry Leadership” category for 2021.

• Cyware also made it in as a 2021 finalist in the highly-regarded SINET 16 awards program.

7. We introduced several new threat intelligence solutions for industry ISACs and ISAOs and their member organizations. These capabilities are driven by our growing threat intel ecosystem solutions, including CTIX Spoke, MISP Data Sharing, Cyware TAXII Client (CyTAXII), and Cyware Browser Extension (Threat Crawler) among others.

8. While implementing our SOAR product roadmap, we rolled out a major release for Cyware Orchestrate (previously known as CSOL). The Cyware Orchestrate SOAR platform allows custom apps creation through its Appstore that helps organizations seamlessly manage third-party integrations. Additionally, to foster continued advances in “any-to-any SOAR” technology, we formed an independent Connectors and Integrations team with the sole focus on doubling down on our existing 250+ SOAR connector integrations for security, ITOps, and DevOps technologies.

9. Meanwhile, Cyware Situational Awareness Platform (CSAP) further expanded the boundaries of information sharing and alerting with new exquisite feed management features and enhanced web dashboard and mobile app designs among others, through a major release in the third quarter.

10. Coupled with our strong automated approach, we adopted an immutable infrastructure model by building and deploying all our products on Docker-based platforms. This enabled us to not only further simplify our IT topology but also significantly enhance security for all our cloud-based clients. Additionally, all our products now feature a microservices-based architecture and design that allows us to keep pace with the ever-growing needs of our clients be it on the scale or the performance front.

11. We continued to grow our footprint with several new channel partnerships in North America, Middle East, APJ, and South Asia regions, making our global partner ecosystem stronger than ever. Furthermore, in pursuit of global partner enablement, we will be soon launching Cyware Academy, a self-paced online training program for all Cyware products.

12. 2021 brought some great partnerships our way. E.g., Ivanti and Cyware joined hands to automate and scale IT Ops and SecOps workflows to deliver unified end-to-end SOAR capabilities for enterprise teams. Our collaboration with industry leaders RiskIQ, Flashpoint, Polyswarm, and alphaMountain aims at delivering enriched and high-fidelity actionable threat data while automating threat data actioning workflows through CTIX Enterprise and CTIX Lite Platforms.

13. No story in the security industry is complete without its globally renowned conferences. We interacted with amazing people at several such onsite and virtual events, including Black Hat, GISEC, GITEX GLOBAL, FIRST Conference, Ivanti Solutions Summit, Tanium Converge, FS-ISAC Summits, Health-ISAC Summits, GRF Summit, SANS Cyber Threat Intelligence Summit & SOAR Solutions Forum, The Cipher Brief Threat Conference, and Evanta’s CISO Executive Summit among others. We were also honored to be the contributor sponsor of the inaugural International Cybersecurity Challenge (ICC) at the US Cyber Games™ 2021 held in Athens.

14. We know how security warriors puzzle out on the operational space of threat actors by leveraging the MITRE CAR framework. Cyware has been contributing to this framework by submitting various analytics repositories that also contain detection mechanisms for various techniques used by cybercriminals. Additionally, to help analysts efficiently analyze threat data, we equipped them with the right combination of essential resources including Cyware Threat Response Docker, and our other community resources (Cyware Threat Feeds, STIX conversion, CVSS calculator, etc.).

15. To provide security teams with actionable insights on the growing ransomware threat, we conducted a study in partnership with Ivanti and Cyber Security Works (CSW) and released The Ransomware Index Spotlight Report — an exclusive index update that aims to help organizations understand the growth trajectory of ransomware.

16. Cyware was recognized by leading analyst organizations including Gartner, Forrester, IDC, and Aite-Novarica in 2021 for its commitment to innovation in SOAR and threat intelligence. We also partnered deeply with analysts to educate the market on how organizations can substantially improve SecOps across many programs. Here are some key highlights :

• Cyware was recognized by Gartner in multiple reports, including Emerging Technologies: Adoption Growth Insights for Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR); 2021 Market Guide for Threat Intelligence Products and Services; Hype Cycle for Security Operations 2021; Emerging Technologies and Trends Impact Radar: Security. Cyware also kicked off a virtual seminar series, Unified Cyber Security, featuring Gartner analysts, top global CISOs and Cyware clients, where the discussion centered on how organizations can build collective defense.

• Cyware partnered with Forrester to analyze the impact of lack of automation and collaboration on security preparedness. The report, “2022 Opportunity Snapshot: Automation And Unification Enable A Cohesive Attack Surface Defense” highlighted that about 71% of security leaders report their teams need access to threat intelligence, security operations data, incident response data, and vulnerability data.

• Cyware was recognized by IDC in IDC Market Glance: Cybersecurity AIRO, 1Q21.

• Cyware was also recognized by Aite-Novarica as one of the 12 SOAR vendors in their report: Security Orchestration, Automation and Response: Rise of the Independents, (downloadable from Cyware here). Cyware was called out for its unique product capabilities as a Threat Intelligence-fused SOAR offering. Incident Response Program Design: Living in an “Assumption of Breach” World and CISO Guidance for Zero-trust Architecture: A NIST-based Approach are the other Aite-Novarica reports that featured Cyware.

17. Several security experts, industry leaders, and cybersecurity enthusiasts engaged with us via different media, including through our webinars and newly launched podcast series called CyberCast, which now features eight episodes on both Apple and Spotify podcasts. Our widespread reach within the industry has increased, and Cyware’s growing LinkedIn subscriber base to over 28K followers is an example of that. To learn more about happenings at Cyware, check out our media interactions, watch our on-demand webinars, and follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter to receive regular updates from us.

18. As a part of our “cloud-first” strategy, we helped several large enterprises migrate their security operations to the cloud with the help of our advanced Virtual Cyber Fusion Center (vCFC) offering environment-agnostic SOAR capability. E.g., in the Middle East, the National Bank of Bahrain Group (NBB Group) became the first organization to deploy Virtual Cyber Fusion Centre (vCFC) in AWS in the entire Middle-East region.

19. This year witnessed an uptick in the supply chain attacks with hundreds and thousands of organizations globally feeling the heat. We actively tracked these attacks and created a dedicated resource for organizations to keep track of all alerts, indicators of compromise (IOCs), and other relevant threat intelligence. We keep publishing several such live updates from time to time and you can subscribe to them here.

20. Our pledge to work towards creating a safe, secure and situationally aware cyberspace only got stronger with every passing day through our pro-bono community efforts such as Cyware Social. We continued receiving more love and warmth from thousands of our subscribers who don’t miss starting their day without reading our threat intelligence newsletters and daily alerts.

21. The last and the most important, our mission to build a world-class team focused on solving advanced security challenges with next-gen SOAR, cyber fusion, and threat intelligence innovation continued with high momentum as we more than doubled (2x) our global team size. We displayed a high degree of nimbleness and adaptation to the pandemic-driven changing work environment and we were also recognized as a Great Place to Work by GPTW Institute. Furthermore, we checked all boxes on our industry compliance requirements, including ISO27001 and SOC 2 Type 1 certifications. Even in the second year of the pandemic, we stayed strong and kept our morale high. Our collaborative efforts and dedication inspired us to reach where we are today.

We kept learning, innovating, and delivering throughout the year. At the beginning of 2021, Gartner analysts, as part of their Predicts series for IT Risk Management, stated that “ Cyber risk is identified as a top source of risk for board members, increasing scrutiny of security and risk management (SRM) leaders…” And that “The siloed nature of today’s security disciplines is quickly becoming a liability as cyber-physical systems (CPS) continue to multiply due to IT/OT convergence and the emergence of Internet of Things (IoT) solutions that connect the digital and physical worlds.”

Cyware has made a point in directly addressing these evolving security fusion dynamics of business in 2021, providing a modular approach in enhancing cross-functional collaboration between IT and Security teams while eliminating technology and people siloization.

With our team members, partners, clients, investors, and advisors by our side, we succeeded in making 2021 a remarkable year. With 2022 knocking on our doors, we look forward to taking SOAR, cyber fusion, and threat sharing to the next level with our solutions and building a more automated and cyber-resilient collective defense environment for our clients.

To learn more about Cyware’s solutions, contact us.