Cody Cornell, Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Swimlane. We talked about the company beginnings and evolution over the years, what are their expectations for the future for their industry, and how Swimlane can fit into every
SaaS security workflow.
Please Present Swimlane to Our Audience. What Services Do You Offer?
Swimlane provides enterprises and managed security services providers (MSSPs) with low-code security automation. Our customers represent the who’s-who of every major industry, including the Federal Government, financial services, healthcare, and energy. Swimlane unifies security operations inside and beyond the SOC into a single system of record that helps reduce process and data fatigue, overcome chronic staffing shortages, and quantify business value.
Our Swimlane Turbine platform helps organizations respond to the overwhelming amount of alerts they get from security tools. We are automating away the very repetitive and mundane tasks across all security operations. As a low-code security automation platform, Turbine is both simple enough for individuals without coding skills and powerful enough to meet the needs of the most demanding security teams. It integrates human and machine data into actionable intelligence for security leaders.
What’s Your Story? What Sparked the Idea, And How Has It Evolved So Far?
Before I started Swimlane in 2014 with my co-founder, I spent 15+ years building security operations programs for the federal government and the commercial sector, including financial services and managed services. In all of my roles during that time, we inevitably used a wide range of tools that weren’t integrated when they should have been. They were continuously releasing warnings with high false positive rates, our workload was becoming intolerable, and the teams were becoming exhausted. That is what motivated us to create Swimlane. We wanted to create a platform that would enable any organization to build their own program and have a centralized system where teams from various organizations could learn from one another and share their innovations, best practices, and ideas to advance the industry. We needed to reduce the burden on teams.
Since 2014, Swimlane has experienced rapid growth in the security automation market. We have established ourselves as the largest and fastest-growing pure-play security automation company with a 700%+ growth rate over the last five years. We’re now protecting nearly $1 trillion in annual revenue among our top 25 enterprise customers. We were also just recognized by Deloitte as one of the top 25 fastest-growing cybersecurity companies as part of the Deloitte Fast 500.
Over the years, the Swimlane platform has matured to accommodate security operations teams’ evolving and growing needs. In 2022, we unveiled Swimlane Turbine, which is poised to be a game-changer not just for Swimlane, but for our industry. Turbine is low-code security automation that goes beyond conventional Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR) by capturing difficult-to-reach telemetry and extending actionability outside the traditional of SOC only SOAR use cases.
What is the mission of Swimlane?
Our mission is really straightforward, it’s to make the lives of the security team better and we do that by helping them prevent breaches and enable continuous compliance via a low-code security automation platform that serves as the system of record for the entire security organization.
What Makes You Stand Out from the Competition?
Swimlane has spent almost a decade assisting the largest and most demanding enterprises worldwide to automate their security automation use cases inside and outside the SOC. We have the most combined knowledge from our customers, partners, and our team compared security automation vendors in the market. Beyond the table stakes of security automation to provide Integrations, playbooks, and case management, Swimlane stands out by providing a low-code, composable user experience that enables citizen automators across the organization. Our Active Sensing Fabric captures data closer to the point of inception, not just from SIEMs or other traditional sources of alerts. Self-service business intelligence is provided through highly-configurable dashboards and reports. This culminates into a true system of record for security operations. And when you become a customer of Swimlane, it’s not just about the product. It’s about a complete customer experience that ensures success and maximum ROI.
Who Are Your Typical Customers’ and What Are the Pain Points that You Help Them Solve?
Swimlane’s customers include enterprise security operations teams and managed security services (MSSPs) and Managed Detection and Response (MDR) providers from around the globe. Some of the most well-known companies in the world, from the automotive, financial services, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, MSSP industries, and more, are among Swimlane’s clients.
Security teams are still dealing with more specialized and advanced threats, and to deal with these new risks, security operations teams must adopt a more proactive security posture. Security leaders are also accountable for quantifying the business value of security programs to executives, the board, customers, and partners. They are constantly challenged to demonstrate results like increased ROI and improved risk posture maturity. Swimlane’s low-code security automation platform caters to the cybersecurity market by mitigating outsider threats that present themselves when security and IT systems are left unprotected and vulnerable. It also eliminates human error and alleviates threats from outside parties by automating detection, response and investigation protocols into a single effort, allowing complete visibility into IT systems and the ability to handle threats in real-time.
What Trends Are Going to Shape the Future of Your Industry?
The challenge of too much data and not enough people will continue to influence our market. Organizations are realizing that the value of their SIEM and data lake investments are either leaving a lot of data out due to expense, or not providing actionability for the huge datasets they are aggregating. In some cases, they contribute to the problem by producing more data and alerts than can be processed. Executing responses through a data lake or SIEM can be an expensive and slow proposition, and I think we will see more organizations turn to automation as a result.
Lastly, Any Exciting News or Developments That You Would Like to Share About Swimlane?
This announcement of Swimlane Turbine this summer is a breakthrough in security automation. We also recently launched the first comprehensive security automation ecosystem for OT environments. As a part of this partner ecosystem, 1898 & Co., a preeminent industrial control system (ICS) cybersecurity solutions provider, has selected Swimlane as the core automation platform for their managed services and has developed a portfolio of Managed Threat Detection Services. These services are designed to solve the unique difficulties of OT environments. They offer significant benefits, including detection of both OT and IT-born threats, machine-speed threat validation and scoring, and rapid remediation of threats using OT response methods. We also announced two new strategic OT technology partnerships with Nozomi Networks and Dataminr. Working with each technology partner, we have developed a portfolio of pre-integrated solutions that our customers can quickly deploy either through managed services or add to their existing environment.
In addition, we announced a $70 million growth funding round led by Activate Capital this July. The new investment has accelerated our ongoing growth and operations on a global scale as we have also expanded to the Middle East, Turkey and Africa (META) all while continuing to advance our platform innovations in security automation to stay ahead of the competition.
