Interviewee: Canming Jiang
Role: Founder & CEO
Organisation: Datawiza – Cloud Delivered Access Management
Tell us a little about your back story and how you ended up at Datawiza?
I started my career as a software engineer at Cisco writing security software for network switches. Then I joined a cybersecurity startup called Shape Security as one of the early engineers. I spent about 4 years with Shape Security and Shape was eventually acquired by F5 for $1B at the beginning of 2020.
Later on, I learned that with the emergence of IDaaS platforms and the adoption of modern security protocols (OIDC/OAuth & SAML), implementing authentication and authorization for applications/APIs becomes more and more difficult, not easier. That’s the major reason we want to build Datawiza and offer a super easy solution to enable modern authentication and authorization via just a few clicks. And we call it Access Management as Service (AMaaS).
What would you be doing if you weren’t at Datawiza?
If I weren’t at Datawiza, I may work at other tech companies as an engineer.
Tell us more about Datawiza? What is the mission and vision?
Datawiza’s mission is to improve the security of business applications by implementing a Zero Trust application architecture. This is achieved via a robust cloud-delivered SaaS solution for access management. Actually the Datawiza solution is the first SaaS alternative and a brand new market alternative – Access Management as a Service AMaaS.
Our solution eliminates the need for developers to build authentication and authorization into every application. Additionally, because the Datawiza solution is cloud-delivered we’re able to add enhancements centrally and improve the Zero Trust application architecture for every application that is being managed.
What are the main problems you are trying to solve?
We’re working to improve the overall enterprise IAM (Identity and Access Management) architecture via a unified vs. fragmented approach that’s proven challenging for enterprises to deliver a consistent authentication and authorization functionality for every application in their portfolio, especially in a mult-cloud (including on-prem) and multi-identity (cloud and on prem) environment.
Legacy, purchased applications and new application development are often delivered with different IAM solutions. Because of this fragmented implementation it becomes impossible to easily and quickly identify aberrant behavior trying to compromise the security and data of critical business applications.
Why is this a problem now?
The movement of business applications from on-premise to the cloud accelerated the fragmentation of the enterprise IAM architecture. Additional complexity comes as organizations consider hybrid and multi-cloud application deployment. The attack surface is dramatically expanded which increases the likelihood that a malicious actor can exist within the enterprise network searching for data and attempting to compromise critical business applications
What makes Datawiza unique in solving this?
Datawiza has put together a team of application security and cloud security experts to develop our AMaaS solution. The following two unique things make it special in such a multi-cloud and multi-identity world:
- Super lightweight distributed proxy
- Centralized cloud management console to manage the access of all apps in hybrid environments
What are the main benefits for your customers of working with you?
The man customer benefits are 3 fold:
- Provide a Buy vs. Build Alternative by providing application authentication and authentication as a highly secure and rapidly implemented service so an enterprise has an alternative to spending significant developer time building the functionality from scratch into every B2B or B2C business application.
- Unify access management in order to rapidly identity aberrant behavior
- Implement a Zero Trust application architecture via AMaaS so an enterprise can easily tailor fine grain accessibility by application as a centralized policy
What is your vision for 2022 and beyond?
Datawiza is at the beginning of our business journey therefore we need to cement the technical and business value of AMaaS in the US and then globally.
The interview was conducted in December 2021.