Black Hat 2024: Elisity Connects Dots from ICS to ID Microsegmentation

James Winebrenner and Galina Antova join Dark Reading's Terry Sweeney at News Desk during Black Hat USA to discuss technology evolution and how we're benefitting from generations of security technology to better lock down data and devices. For Antova, networked devices have gotten much more specialized, whether it's Internet of Things (IoT) or operational technology (OT) on the floors of manufacturing plants, for example. "We started with visibility and then moved into asset management and network detection," she explains. "Based on that visibility and context, we're now at the stage where we can really get into risk reduction through identity-based segmentation," all to blunt attackers' growing appetite for any identity data that could give them unauthorized access.

Winebrenner explains that identity-based microsegmentation decouples the security policy from the underlying network architecture so that the network itself can still achieve its availability performance goals. That are required for whatever process is the segmentation policy is abstracted from the underlying network constructs and really derived around the identity and the context of the user, devices and workloads that are running in that environment.

"There's multiple places where identity and context exist for different applications, for different user bases, for different asset classes," Winebrenner adds. "Being able to bring all of that together into a centralized place and then affect policy around that composited identity is really important." Plenty of security teams understood the potential of security to be an enabler for faster digital transformation, operational technology, and other physical systems, Antova says. "If we want to optimize our manufacturing processes and the technologies [that need] to be integrated, that requires we get telemetry out of those processes," she adds. "And the enabler for that is security."

James Winebrenner is the CEO of Elisity, redefining network security with an identity-based microsegmentation approach. Elisity helps customers across life sciences, clinical healthcare, oil & gas, and manufacturing secure their critical infrastructure and meet compliance objectives. James previously held executive leadership roles at Aviatrix and Cisco and built the global go-to-market for groundbreaking software-defined networking company, Viptela, which Cisco acquired in 2017. James has over 25 years of experience in cybersecurity and infrastructure, having started his career at Check Point Software.

Galina Antova is a cybersecurity entrepreneur, board director and investor. She co-founded Claroty in 2015 with the mission to secure all cyber-physical systems across industrial, healthcare, and enterprise environments. Claroty is a pre-IPO company that has raised $740 million, employs over 600 people globally, and serves many Fortune 1000 companies. Galina also serves as a board member of Elisity, Cloud Range and BIH. Before co-founding Claroty, she was the global head of industrial security services at Siemens and a technical leader at IBM’s software group. As an expert on critical infrastructure cybersecurity, Galina has advised and collaborated with boards and CISOs worldwide to shape the strategic direction of digital transformations and effectively communicate risks and remediation steps.