The Breach Ready Dialogues return with a powerful discussion featuring Agnidipta Sarkar, our Chief Evangelist, and Guru Gurushankar, our SVP & GM, Healthcare & Life Sciences. They unpack one of the most urgent cybersecurity priorities today: reducing the time to achieve breach readiness from months to weeks.
This episode breaks down how organizations can prevent breaches and contain spread with ColorTokens + CrowdStrike, including a compelling customer example where ColorTokens instantly visualized their network, triggering both excitement and relief.
For more resources, visit: https://colortokens.com/media-hub/
Agnidipta Sarkar: Hi, my name is Agni and I’m the Chief evangelist for color tokens. Um, I’m, I call myself a rolling stone who’s gathered a lot of moss. I have been an auditor, a consultant, and a ciso, and you now know where I come from and, uh, yeah. I usually talk about breach readiness. Cyber defense, which go beyond the investments in cybersecurity.
Agnidipta Sarkar: And, uh, I try and help, uh, business and technology leaders, uh, find their sweet spot in building these capabilities. Um, in fact, if you want to connect with me, go on LinkedIn and search for color tokens and you’ll find me somewhere. And today I have with me guru, uh, who’s highly inexperienced and, uh, trusted healthcare leader.
Agnidipta Sarkar: With expertise in driving growth and innovation throughout his career, and he’s consistently delivered value to customers worldwide. But, uh, let me not steal his thunder. Guru. Why don’t you introduce yourself?
Dr. Guru Gurushankar: Thanks, Agni. Thanks for having me on, uh, this program. Uh, my name is, uh, guru, guru Shankar. I’ve been in the healthcare, uh, sphere for about 30 years.
Dr. Guru Gurushankar: All of it in either in innovation or in driving growth. And, uh, that’s, uh, around, uh. That’s pretty much what I’ve done and, uh, been done that in both hardware oriented companies and also in data oriented companies. Um, all of them Blue chips, uh, whether it is AWS, whether it is Johnson Johnson or GE Healthcare, or Cardinal Health, along those lines.
Dr. Guru Gurushankar: So with that, that’s my backdrop. And, uh, and here at Color Tokens, I lead, uh, our, uh, healthcare and life sciences vertical. Looking to help. Our customers, our industry verticals, customers reach breach readiness. And this is especially important at this time given the amount of focus the bad actors are having on the healthcare and life sciences sector.
Dr. Guru Gurushankar: So it’s all the more important that we bring good solutions to our customers and help them to get, uh, as, to use your words, to get them breach ready and get, improve their cyber defense posture.
Agnidipta Sarkar: So what’s this whole thing about CrowdStrike integration that I’m hearing now? Uh, I was talking to Harish the other day and he laid out some plans for doing a larger EDR integration play and uh, and the kind of work that we are doing now, and he gave me some of his feedback.
Agnidipta Sarkar: Uh, what are you hearing from customers? How is that going?
Dr. Guru Gurushankar: It’s, it’s, it’s actually fantastic. Let me take a few minutes to explain what we are hearing from the customers, because technology is one thing. The value, at the end of the day, it’s all about how the customers use it for which, and how the benefits they derived and how they enhance their posture. So if you take that angle, let me just step back in history a little bit Historically.
Dr. Guru Gurushankar: Microsegmentation as a concept. Customers all got it. They all wanted to do it. They all loved it. And if you really look at early stages where I call Phase A, it was all done primarily by hardware. So somebody dropped a firewall, they segmented into XN number of sections and had various assets inside it, and they started using the English Word segmentation inside that.
Dr. Guru Gurushankar: So that was Phase A dominated by all of the hardware players who are doing that. And you can imagine that as the number of segments got, gets larger and larger, it becomes more and more difficult to implement some of those things. Implementation became a pain point. It’s all about. There. There are significant implementation issues, significant cost issues, and by the time you go through that trouble of getting everything implemented, by the way, foundationally, it is not a segmentation tool, it’s an access control tool.
Dr. Guru Gurushankar: Foundationally, let’s start with that. So that’s problem number one. Problem number two, by the time you go around implementing it in your entire real estate, you are ready for a hardware refresh. That’s problem number two. Problem number three. The CapEx that’s involved with all of these things that’s going around.
Dr. Guru Gurushankar: So it gives significant heartburn to not only the ciso, the CIO equally the CFO. So that’s all on the that part, phase A of it. Phase B, we went to software based and we are in Phase C, which which was. Software based segmentation, still starting to look at applications, primarily applications where color tokens has innovated and gone forward is in Phase C.
Dr. Guru Gurushankar: We are in Phase C, which is all around. If you just, even if you look at IT applications, let’s say somebody has thousand applications and by the damn they do 20 applications a week, you’re looking at significant number of weeks. So we have actually inverted that. And we are saying we have actually had a innovative process by which we go around doing, uh, segmentation.
Dr. Guru Gurushankar: Where we come to applications last by where we look at all the risky ports and all other things. We take care of it first. We call it progressive segmentation, but I would like to just emphasize that the word progressive is not the same as the English word progressive. Just because you do one app every day and slowly go from two apps to five apps to 10 apps, you could say that’s progressive.
Dr. Guru Gurushankar: That’s not what we are saying. We are seeing progressive segmentation as in we have changed the ball, we have changed the game, we have turned the game upside down. We cover your risks first. We come to applications last. So before we touch your first application, we have dropped your risk profile by more than we.
Dr. Guru Gurushankar: So you’re
Agnidipta Sarkar: progressively, so what you’re telling me, it’s like progressively reducing the breach exposure.
Dr. Guru Gurushankar: Exactly. We drop it by 50% or above in the first 60 to 90 days. And that is highly innovative and we are the only ones who offer that. So that’s the innovation that we bring to the market. So let’s have, so if you look at this.
Dr. Guru Gurushankar: Line of innovation as the industry has moved along. The fundamental question that customers always ask is, I know it’s good to do, make it simple, make it easy, make it painless for me to do. That’s number one. The second thing customers ask is when I want to do it, give me the results sooner. Don’t gimme the results after four years when I, I’m not sure.
Dr. Guru Gurushankar: Four years is too long. We don’t know who, who, what’s the con configuration? Who’s going to be in the chairs and everything else? I am implementing it. Gimme the resource.
Agnidipta Sarkar: The CISO churn is three years.
Dr. Guru Gurushankar: Fair point. That’s why I said four years. So, so give it within my, uh, my period. So it’s so, it’s natural, right.
Dr. Guru Gurushankar: We have a candy. We want to taste it. Would you have a, would you prefer to have a candy where you can taste the sweet after four years? No, I have a, I open the wrapper, have a candy. I want to feel the sweet right at this minute. So that’s where we are innovating and uniquely positioned in the market and in the industry to bring such things to our customers are in that aspiration, in that goal.
Dr. Guru Gurushankar: While our core Product X Shield does the same, there is another flavor that brings instantaneous microsegmentation to our customers that in that vector, EDR integrations come in. And the first, first EDR integration is our crowds like integration. Customers are telling, I already have agents, I already have EDR running.
Dr. Guru Gurushankar: They asked us, is there any way you can just leverage this and give me the same benefits so I don’t have to drop one more agent? I don’t have to go through the trouble of getting everybody in my organization aligned. Go through the change management process of getting a new agent on board. I have already done that with CrowdStrike agents, a Falcon deployment.
Dr. Guru Gurushankar: Can you leverage this? And elevate my security posture was a key question that customers were asking. So if you put your customer hat back on, you say, I have six tools running from this, how can I leverage and get more and more out of it? Rather than having each tool, uh, independently deployed this also?
Dr. Guru Gurushankar: It plays into the bigger picture of, you know, this better as a CISO of Platformization and, uh, that’s going on in the industry. It plays into that also. So with all that in mind, I’m coming from that angle with all these reasons is why I’m super excited about, uh, our. CrowdStrike integration solution.
Agnidipta Sarkar: And then there is this whole factor of connecting.
Agnidipta Sarkar: You know, like what CrowdStrike says is, uh, we stop breaches. And I think what what color tokens does is that we stop proliferation of breaches. It’s a, it’s a com. It’s a combined effect of two different technologies that bring in a higher level of security for the customer who’s using it.
Dr. Guru Gurushankar: I put it in a very simple way.
Dr. Guru Gurushankar: Stop breaches, plus contain breaches, is being breach ready?
Agnidipta Sarkar: Brilliant. So who is the ideal customer and in what industry verticals are you seeing this to be more faster adopted than others?
Dr. Guru Gurushankar: The ideal customer is one who has CrowdStrike and who has, who does not have microsegmentation, but microsegmentation is on the roadmap and given that they have gone through a, they have just gone through the full implementation of CrowdStrike and deployment across all of their CSA was and endpoints X number of assets they have gone through.
Dr. Guru Gurushankar: Now they’re, they’re waiting for, okay, now that it’s all stable, I’m going to start this next journey. The one who, that is the ideal customer and the other, the ideal industry is obviously, I mean, you can take the theoretical approach and say everybody should have it, but I would flip it backwards and say the ideal industry verticals are the ones there.
Dr. Guru Gurushankar: That are prioritized and targeted by the hackers, unfortunately, or unfortunately. Unfortunately today, that happens to be the healthcare industry that happens to be the critical infrastructure industry and critical infrastructure, whether it be energy or whether it be manufacturing, the critical infrastructure industry and your healthcare and life industry.
Dr. Guru Gurushankar: It’s extremely important and. And any in that, within that vertical, any customer with a CrowdStrike deployment would be the ideal. And, and, uh, no microsegmentation is the ideal customer profile for that could benefit from these solutions that we are bringing to the market. By the way, this is actually a unique solution.
Dr. Guru Gurushankar: This is a very unique solution that we are bringing in that is. Changing how microsegmentation is brought into customers. So my talking to customers and partners alike, the constant reaction I, I, when I talk to, I talk to multiple customers and partners when I typically talk about the various things that we do.
Dr. Guru Gurushankar: And towards the end I talk about, uh. Uh, our integration with other players like CrowdStrike, ED, like other EDR integrations, like CrowdStrike, the almost uniform common answer, the common reaction I’ve gotten is this is pretty big and this is, this touches a real pain point for us. That guru, next time you talk, can you actually make sure that this is your topic number one of our conversation.
Dr. Guru Gurushankar: That has been the conversation. That has been the feedback from customers that I’ve had, so. I truly believe in the voice of the customer. As engineers, we can, uh, all be delighted with what we build, but when the market tells, when the customers tell you that this is what I love, this is what I want, I want you to bring this to me, then it’s something that it’s, it’s almost imperative upon us to bring it to the customers and bring it to them, uh, ASAP and bring it to them with full force.
Dr. Guru Gurushankar: And that’s exactly what we are embarking upon.
Agnidipta Sarkar: I think two points you made that struck me just now, and I believe they go into what you, what you talked about my experience as a CISO as well, and, um. The first thing is that the effect of breaches on critical national infrastructure is very, very prominent and high.
Agnidipta Sarkar: In fact, as we talk, um, there is a salt typhoon attack that is still going on in many countries. Uh, they are attacking the telecom infrastructure and they’re sitting inside, um, our networks. So, um, what you’re saying makes complete sense and, and it also reminds me of a recent study that. The MIT Sloan did where they interviewed I think some 37 or 39 CEOs, and I think nine of them were actually leading, and these CEOs were of companies who were attacked, and they came up with a statement saying that there has been an unprecedented data attack to shut, shut down our enterprise.
Agnidipta Sarkar: Nine of these CEOs were on the forefront of the war room, which was handling the attack. And it came out with some very astounding findings. Number one, they always thought that they were ready, but they were not breach ready. And the number two is they were always under the impression that some IT product is going to come in and save the day.
Agnidipta Sarkar: And they did not know that they had flat network. They did not know that the attacker could come in and go anywhere. So, yeah, I, I see what you’re saying. And, uh, you know, I, I hear, um, I mean, it’s very, very great to know that, you know, um, these are people who could, you know, get it done in one day, then that cu would be the happiest.
Agnidipta Sarkar: Right. And, uh, if you, if you look at the two verticals that you talked about, um, they are the ones where the effect is felt the most. But, uh, let me ask you this. So, if a customer does come to us, what should they be expecting from this whole CrowdStrike EDR integration that we are doing?
Dr. Guru Gurushankar: They should expect, uh, seamless and rapid. I almost, nearly instantaneous visualization.
Dr. Guru Gurushankar: And a very rapid microsegmentation, so, uh, deployment after that. What do I mean by that? It sounds like just words. Let me walk through a particular customer, uh, who remain unnamed, but, uh, let me walk through one customer experience.
Dr. Guru Gurushankar: We had a customer. Looking, looking to us. Uh, but who did not actually want, uh, who wanted a network analysis done? Not even segmentation at that point. They were considering segmentation down the line, but they wanted to understand how flat was the network, what was the vulnerabilities, et cetera, supposed to be, uh.
Dr. Guru Gurushankar: We, we started, let, let’s do with, uh, it’s supposed to be a paper exercise. They didn’t want new agents installed under their systems, so they said, we don’t want new agents. So actually no, let’s do it as a paper exercise, and then we’ll consider whether we should do microsegmentation or not. Then we ask them the question, do you have a.
Dr. Guru Gurushankar: EDR, uh, running. CrowdStrike was running and they were okay. They said, okay, let’s do this. We said, we gave them a brief of our solution. They went through it, they were happy. They said, let’s do it. We had a session start at the top of the hour within about 20, 25 minutes. We were visualizing all traffic
Dr. Guru Gurushankar: within 30 to 40 minutes. All tagging grouping was all done by the end of the 55th minute, 55, 57. If I can be accurate, if the customer was ready, we could have enforced.
Dr. Guru Gurushankar: So what was a long, drawn paper exercise? What was a long, drawn nine month project? What was something that is a humongous mountain of resistance? Our change management to overcome and the customer saw what was possible in front of their own eyes on their own screens, taking shape in about 50 to 60 minutes off a bot.
Dr. Guru Gurushankar: Significant. It’s not a small number of real estate, significant number of assets, a significant number of server. When they saw that the customer’s eyes popped, the customer’s first reaction was, this is extremely powerful. I thought this would take me somewhere six to nine months. I thought this would take me, uh, 12 months, and you are showing that you are making this much progress in, in 60 minutes.
Dr. Guru Gurushankar: That, to me, is emblematic of what a customer should expect. Reducing the barrier to the whole implementation, making it simple and easy for the customer to use, and most importantly, driving value. As I said, you open the candy wrapper, you want to feel the sweetness within 30 seconds, not after four years.
Dr. Guru Gurushankar: How do you get the value instantaneously? Those are. What the customer, what we, what’s the brand promise and what the customers should expect from this integration. And that’s exactly, by the way, while I shared the story of one customer, multiple customers, sub every customer before and after, we have been seeing rough, roughly the same experience.
Dr. Guru Gurushankar: And when you see these things start pulling up into one single experience. You should feel comfortable that, you know what, that’s not an aberration. That is the median.
Agnidipta Sarkar: Right, right. And I think, so if I, if I were to conclude this, um, what you’re telling me is that there is speed, there is, uh, ease of adoption.
Agnidipta Sarkar: There is, uh, the realization that this is going to contribute to, um, building, uh, resilience in digital operations. So that they will get the combined power of what you talked about earlier, the EDR and the microsegmentation, and eventually this is going to make sure that they’re going to be able to. Uh, handle incidents much better and probably go about doing business as usual when the attack could be happening in one of the micro segments that the com that the organization would have and that would eventually help them comply with regulations in their industry as and when necessary.
Dr. Guru Gurushankar: Absolutely. All the good things we promise when we do our, when we deploy and do our microsegmentation, all the good things, it so happens that. You have just added a catalyst and you can make it go faster and smoother. So the way I I, I answer look at it is, remember we started with the equation? Prevent breach plus contain breach is breach readiness.
Dr. Guru Gurushankar: While that is a slogan, it’s not a slogan that has to wait for years. You can see that come to life, come to life in
Agnidipta Sarkar: days,
Dr. Guru Gurushankar: hours,
Agnidipta Sarkar: in hours.
Dr. Guru Gurushankar: Ours. And that is, that is the value of this. So that is the value to the customer. And as color tokens, remember we started out by saying that we had the Phase A of, uh, hardware based segmentation.
Dr. Guru Gurushankar: And by the way, people still call that segmentation. I always ask, are you doing microsegmentation? Do you do it at the asset level? And then they say, no, no. So that there’s that part, phase eight. To where we have come, where it is all around highly innovative, uh, segmentation that we are offering progressive segmentation where we take care of the risk, 50% of the risk within the first 60 to 90 days, it is yet another.
Dr. Guru Gurushankar: It yet another step in our effort to make it painless for the customer, make it rapid and deliver value rapidly. It’s all about how do we deliver value rapidly. That’s what we are,
Agnidipta Sarkar: you’re going, you’re going ahead. You’re, you’re not, you’re no longer doing micro-segmentation alone. You’re using that technology to build cyber defense.
Dr. Guru Gurushankar: Thank you.
Agnidipta Sarkar: Thank you, guru. Thank you so much.
Dr. Guru Gurushankar: Thank you. Looking forward, how to see how this brings value to our customers. Thank you.
