Mahela bats for cloud security experts; co-founds new venture

From left: Chief Partner Officer Chandita Samaranayake, Co-Founder Mahela Jayawardene, and Co-Founder and CTO Stefano Harding 

• Move with industry experts Chandita Samaranayake and Stefano Harding is with belief that cloud security is the future
• Venture ‘Dygisec’ plans to produce 5,000 cloud security experts through Dygisec Cloud Security Academy

Thinking big on the growing cloud security industry, ICC Hall of Famer, global cricket consultant and serial venture capitalist Mahela Jayawardene has co-founded ‘Dygisec’, a next-gen technology company focused on cloud security compliance.

Jayawardene has teamed up with Chandita Samaranayake and Stefano Harding, two industry experts with over 25 years of experience at global technology companies including Google, Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and Virtusa. Harding serves as the company’s Chief Technology Officer, while Samaranayake is the Chief Partner Officer.

With operations in Sri Lanka, Singapore, the US, and with plans to expand into Australia and the UK, Dygisec aims to securely scale global businesses in the ‘New Normal’ with its agentless, data-driven cloud compliance policy engine titled ‘Triton’. It will provide continuous security, compliance, and governance for businesses globally by using a defined set of best practices according to the specific cloud provider and service. 

Continuous compliance is configured according to several standards, including PCI, GDPR, CIS, ISO, NIST, SOC and HIPAA, and cloud service configuration best practices. Triton can automatically remediate issues by combining continuous real-time monitoring with automation features to detect and correct issues, such as improper account permissions.

The first version of the product, integrated with global regulatory frameworks such as PCI/DSS, HIPAA, CIS, ISO 27001, will be available on Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud marketplaces by the second quarter of 2022. Dygisec has already signed up with five global customers in the healthcare, telecommunications, retail and manufacturing sectors with over 60,000 employees and more than USD 10 billion in revenue in total.

Dygisec’s software development team consists of talented engineers and cloud architects in Sri Lanka and the US with more than 15 years of experience in cloud operations and consulting. They all have hands-on experience working with many Fortune 500 companies – from telecom, finance, healthcare to FMCG, migrating over 20,000 VMs successfully to the cloud. Dygisec has also forged partnerships with some of the world’s top cloud service providers (CSPs), including Microsoft, Amazon and Google.

Commenting on his new business venture, Jayawardene said: “The cloud and digital transformation have radically changed the IT landscape and introduced new kinds of threats and security requirements. Furthermore, with the arrival of the pandemic, cloud technology became a necessity, and cloud security topped as a critical concern for organisations as businesses of all sizes shifted to remote work. “Additionally, misconfigurations represent the number one risk for every organisation using the cloud. 36% of cloud professionals say their organisation has experienced a serious cloud data leak or a breach during the last few years.”

“In such a context, Dygisec’s agentless, data-driven platform Triton aims to reimagine cloud compliance for global enterprises in the new normal. The platform continuously monitors and assesses the environment for adherence to compliance policies, helping businesses to stay ahead in the dynamically changing attack surface. Triton stops vulnerabilities by providing unified visibility across cloud environments, preventing misconfigurations in real-time. 

“Triton also provides organisations with the intelligence and context to make informed decisions, securely and continuously monitor the entire cloud infrastructure of the organisation– from spanning workloads, networking devices, to applications – from a single pane of glass,” Jayawardene said further.

Dygisec also has a Cloud Consulting Service practice that builds secure cloud infrastructure and implements cloud best practices security compliance framework based on the customer’s industry. This will be defined as Infrastructure as Code and Policy as Code.

From a corporate social responsibility point of view, Dygisec plans to form a Cloud Security Academy to pave the way for local cloud security experts. With the vision to make Sri Lanka the cyber security regional hub, Dygisec Cloud Security Academy aims to train, certify and expwort 5,000 cloud security experts representing women, financially-challenged and differently-abled individuals to the global market in the next three years.

Headquartered in Singapore, with operations in Sri Lanka, the US, and plans to expand into the UK and Australia markets, Dygisec is a technology product company focused on cloud security and compliance. Its state-of-the-art product, Triton, detects and resolves cloud security risks in real-time using the data-driven security platform while building capabilities around Microsoft, AWS and Google Cloud security products. 

With intelligence-driven defence at its core, Triton helps companies to address risks before they become breaches while maintaining compliance with security standards such as CIS, PCI, NIST 800-53, SOC2, GDPR, HIPAA, and ISO-27001-2013