For security managers, having accurate threat intelligence is one of the most important tools of the trade. The ability to know when and where threats are present – be it of the manmade or natural variety – can mean the difference between maintaining business continuity and keeping personnel safe or falling victim to a calamity.
And while there have been a number of solutions made available to security executives through the years to keep them abreast of the latest potential dangers, the advent of artificial intelligence enables today’s technologies to gather and filter relevant data faster than ever before. One company that is looking to change how corporate security department operate though the use of such software is Topo.ai, which is exhibiting for the first time in person at this year’s GSX conference in Orlando.
Founded in 2018 with its first commercial product being delivered in 2019, Topo.ai aggregates threat intelligence data into a single pane of glass for end-users. SecurtiyInfoWatch.com (SIW) caught up with Steve McGraw, the company’s CEO, to discuss the company’s technology and their go-to-market strategy.
SIW: What is the genesis of Topo.ai and what are some of the problems you are helping to solve for security end-users?
McGraw: Our high-level goal is to basically transform corporate security through modern software. What we really want to do – and where we see a big void in the market – is to build sophisticated, robust and flexible software for corporate security teams. Our customers want us to enable them to respond very flexibly to any crisis. They can never really predict what kind of crisis is going to come upon them and the pandemic was a great example because, all of sudden in March 2020, they are asking us to track Covid cases down to zip code and we were flexible enough to do that. When the bomb went off on Christmas Day in downtown Nashville this past December, we had one client that wanted to know immediately how many of their employees lived within a six-mile radius of that explosion and were those employees safe? The corporate security team was able to answer that question within minutes.
SIW: How does your technology work and what would say really differentiates it from other AI solutions in the marketplace?
McGraw: We have a product called TopoONE and what it does is aggregate threat intelligence into one common operating picture or map. Through that we provide very extensible workflows so that I can determine what that threat is, the nature of the threat and then, if the threat is relevant to my organization – my people, assets, suppliers, etc. – I will then communicate that threat to the appropriate people and ensure that threat is communicated properly and that affected parties are taking the right response. Think of us as being able to aggregate an infinite supply of threat intelligence into one common workstream where you can then adjudicate that intel and communicate out the response to the appropriate parties.
SIW: What do you think are some of the biggest misconceptions about AI in the security market and how do you see adoption of the technology evolving?
McGraw: People expect AI to do more than is currently available. The other misconception is people have simple, rules-based solutions and call them AI. We look at it as the ability to trap and understand the right event and eliminate the noise, so the true signal is sent to the security team so they can process it effectively.
SIW: What are some of your goals for GSX?
McGraw: We are probably one of the best kept secrets in the industry right now. Most of our customers come to us through other customers, so word of mouth is kind of the primary driver for people contacting us. We don’t have a huge marketing budget, so we typically have a great set of customers who will tell our prospective customers that if you are looking for something new and different and advanced, check out Topo. Customer acquisition would be one of the key goals, as well as really for us to understand which new partners we might want to connect with. We have a very large partner ecosystem – we currently have somewhere around 25 or 30 different partners we work with – and we imagine we will identify two or three more partners that would like to be a part of our ecosystem.
The way I describe us is we are a purebred software company and our goal is to build the most advanced software for the corporate security market. If we can achieve our goal of helping transform the corporate security market with modern software, we will call it a victory.
Joel Griffin is the Editor of SecurityInfoWatch.com and a veteran security journalist. You can reach him at [email protected].
