Grey Matter
Securing Decentralized Hybrid Cloud Networks

Organizations are doing an excellent job of reacting to constant change, be it aligning to the latest emerging technological trends, or transitioning rapidly from office to remote or “work from home” environments, they are facing a massive challenge in ensuring security. The problems include the often deferred (high) cost of modernization and the complexity of ensuring security on distributed, heterogeneous networks that are highly vulnerable to breaches owing aspects such as rapid expansion, and BYOD practices. In addition, organizations lack governance at multiple endpoints such as software, database connections, APIs, and everything present inside their network. Chris Holmes, CEO of Grey Matter, refers to these as “soft endpoints,” as they are easily susceptible to missing latest security updates. Also, prevalent compliance adherence based on security reporting usually has no context and significantly lags regarding the pace of change. “And this is where Grey Matter comes in,” mentions Holmes.

Grey Matter provides a cloud-native management platform that securely and intelligently connects all enterprises' complex multi-environment applications, data, databases, APIs, containers, public and private cloud. Using the AI, telemetry, and detailed audit tapping features of the Grey Matter platform, enterprises get instant reporting on health and usage in a NOC/SOC style overview. By optimizing an enterprises’ decentralized, hybrid, cloud-native, and legacy systems, Grey Matter ensures efficient performance and maximum ROI.

In an interview with CIO Applications Magazine, Holmes shares industry insights and how the company’s platform is helping its clients secure their environments.

Could you throw some more light on the Grey Matter platform?

Grey Matter is a unified platform with multiple services that allow enterprises to host cloud analytics, cloud governance, enterprise governance, and API catalogs. Our platform also includes AI recommendations, helps in IT operations, enables human collaboration, and provides an end-to-end health subsystem to protect our client’s security environment.

The Grey Matter platform has three core elements. Its first element is called Fabric, the platform's core Envoy Proxy-based mesh technology. Fabric generates and captures telemetry and audit data. It is an advanced multi-mesh zero-trust security environment that supports enhanced network filters such as identity propagation from inside out, identity trust, and live audit tapping.

The other element of the Grey Matter platform is called Platform Services, with which we augment the endpoints of our client’s network. The data mesh platform helps to manage observability on top of our clients’ databases, data flows, and data structures. The last element of the platform is what we call Sense, an end-to-end analytics environment for all of the operational intelligence that is generated by Fabric and Platform Services. Sense includes an enterprise governance catalog API, IT Ops functions, per-service and per-segment neural net modules, and an end-to-end health subsystem for all of your environments, presented in a way that enables human collaboration.

How has COVID-19 impacted enterprise IT environments, and how has Grey Matter positioned itself to assist clients during such times?

With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, most industries, including IT, saw a massive wave of digitalization, and all the back-office systems became more relevant than ever. What has further changed in recent months is the growth of end-point vulnerabilities inside enterprise networks. Enterprises have to deal with multiple cloud technologies, cloud vendors, and tools to manage their cloud network. They have many Kubernetes platforms sprawled all over the place in hybrid operations, and they’re trying to manage security across all of their endpoints.

For example, recently, Colonial Pipeline, an American oil pipeline system, suffered a ransomware attack that forced the U.S. energy company to shut down its entire fuel distribution pipeline. In the wake of such a massive attack, NSA identified that most IT security strategies in global enterprises are based on perimeter defense. To this end, Grey Matter helps by introducing zero-trust security and segmentation that works inside out, handling multiple nodes, elements, and services running in the enterprises backed by AI-driven intelligence for IT operations.

What does your client onboarding process look like?

When the client approaches us, we start to draw their network infrastructure. We apply the data plane and control plane to our clients’ network to build and maintain the IP routing table and forward IP packets, respectively. Our no-code installation is driven by DevSecOps and GitOps installs on our clients’ cloud-agnostic systems, cloud systems, and legacy systems. This helps them save money on rebuilding or refactoring their legacy systems. We are a no-code GRCI solution, where “I” stands for an intelligent solution dropped onto our client’s platform that wraps any soft endpoint to do things like telemetry collection and audits for real-time compliance reporting.

Could you please cite a customer success story?

One large enterprise had numerous applications and services running across multiple clouds and were segmented within the cloud. On a global scale, this client had thousands of virtual private clouds (VPCs) in their enterprise running on different infrastructure and environments such as bare cloud infrastructure and Kubernetes. The organization also had hybrid computers that operated from their own data centers and could not report what was happening across the cloud.

This is where we came in. With the help of our Grey Matter platform, the client had access to live tap audit controls to ensure that each service, API, or application is no longer building its audit flows. They performed end-to-end analytics and found out which services were performing better and which ones needed to be tuned. They also received service report cards to help understand the performance of their Kubernetes cluster. We not only monitored the API operating the containers but also monitored the container and the Kubernetes platform.

We also helped our customers in developing an enterprise-wide risk mitigation strategy. They had invested in an Identity management infrastructure but could not leverage the investment to its full potential as each application would bring its own kind of identity management system to the table. As there were two identity management systems now, it was quite confusing for our clients to find out which application was using its own IdAM infrastructure versus the enterprises’ IdAM infrastructure. Using a development-friendly strategy, we managed the connectivity of their enterprise IdAM solution, passing that token throughout every endpoint, database, application, and API, thus creating a common auditing structure and zero-trust model from the inside out.

As the client developed better visibility into their risk profiles, they could eliminate licensing processes and react faster to change. Without the need to connect multiple tools, clients can reduce operational costs and the risk and compliance strategy for multiple clouds separately. Our clients can deploy our platform across all of their cloud environments and get the same level of information and intelligence everywhere.

What are some of the factors that give Grey Matter an edge over other market players?

What truly lies at the heart of Grey Matter is our thought leadership, our people. I believe our ability to cater to an industry niche in itself makes us unique. We have been supporting businesses in the GRC space for five years now with real use cases. This has also helped us gain some recognition at a global level. Our unique focus on an inside out zero-trust platform augmented with AI-driven analytics makes us different from the rest of the crowd. Unlike other companies, our reporting is real-time and does not lag behind the pace of existing change. We don’t require code or instrumentation to get any reports, unlike our competitors, who have to instrument log files and write source code to instrument the information they want.

How has the recent past been for Grey Matter? What has the company envisioned for its long-term goals?

As a bootstrapped organization, we have expanded rapidly with multiple offerings over the last few years. One of the prime reasons for our successful growth is our emphasis on product R&D, which makes up34 percent of our staff. Over the years, we have acquired customers that recognize our work and have faith in us. Recently, one of our customers translated from being an large scale, to full enterprise scale. Knowing we had a hand in that is a matter of pride for us.

In 2022, we are heading toward some open-source components and planning to implement a Grey Matter cloud SaaS platform. Our long-term vision is to continue to be the most innovative service mesh enterprise platform. As for the future, we have considered everything from taking funding, to acquisition, to launching an IPO.