We sat down with John Cassidy, CEO of King & Union to discuss the company's mission, why threat intelligence is so critical to enterprise security, and the benefits of factional ownership of threat intelligence.
Tell us about King & Union - the company and its mission.
King & Union is a company founded by security analysts for security analysts. We are applying the lessons we learned and delivering the tools we wish we had. Our Avalon SaaS platform delivers a truly innovative, problem solving, and partner driven solution that democratizes access to threat intelligence data for thousands of organizations. We eliminate the long procurement process and multi-year contracts associated with threat intelligence feeds today. The Avalon Marketplace “tokenizes” fractional datasets via partners feeds, integrations, and enrichment sources. By providing only the intelligence security analysts need when they need it, King & Union is making threat intelligence more accessible to more enterprises.
What makes threat intelligence so critical to securing enterprises across the globe?
No company, no matter how big, can get a handle on all the threats facing their organization. A security defense today is comprised of multiple vendors and solutions that are managed in-house, along with a slew of outsourced managed security services that are integrated into a unified security strategy. For security analysts who are the consumers of threat intelligence, it gives them the ability to see, understand, and stop the most critical threats facing their business. It boils the ocean into actionable insights into threats, techniques, and targets, together with specific remediation advice. Threat intelligence is the fuel that powers security analyst investigations.
What benefits does fractional ownership of threat intelligence provide?
In the same way that Charles Schwab is expanding access and democratizing stock market investing, King & Union has made fractional ownership of threat intelligence a reality.
The problems are similar. It is about reducing costs to expand access. Threat intelligence is expensive, and often comes with annual contracts, or longer. For many smaller companies, this is not going to be a problem because threat intelligence has simply been out of reach, or severely limited by cost and people constraints. Even the companies with large budgets cannot afford every threat feed they may need. Adding to the challenge is that it is hard to measure the return on investment for the security organization. Post COVID-19, businesses are looking to bend their cost curves, and high-ticket items with nebulous ROI like threat intelligence are an obvious place to look for “cost synergies”.
With Avalon Marketplace, for the first time, analysts can identify, procure, and leverage threat intelligence from a wide-range of sources on-demand. Fractional ownership gives analysts the operational flexibility to move rapidly between data sets that are most relevant to critical investigations. For the business, fractional ownership and usage analytics can help to train and develop the team while bringing greater precision to threat intelligence spending. This is true innovation.
King & Union is democratizing access to threat intelligence for security analysts as Schwab is doing to stock market investing for the individual investor.
Where should security pros that are interested in learning more about fractional ownership go?
Visit us at www.KingandUnion.com to learn more.
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