The cloud security industries' primary focus is to enable organizations to adopt the cloud with confidence. Organizations are increasingly using Cloud applications to drive their businesses forward, but the risk of their sensitive information being exposed is creating a hurdle in their adoption. But when the name promising to secure your critical data in the cloud is to the tunes of an exemplary industry veteran, you can't help but feel assured. Pravin S. Kothari, Founder, CEO CipherCloud is one such name. A true industry expert with three successful security companies in his repertoire, Kothari today has built CipherCloud, a provider of cloud information protection into the fastest growing company in the security industry.

Cloud computing is gaining more traction. According to Gartner the market will grow to $206.6 billion by 2016, 25 percent of organizations will use a cloud information protection technology like CipherCloud's, as security and compliance issues become ever more important. With security as a major stumbling block, data security represents the biggest barrier to cloud adoption. As a result Kothari built his company at lightning speed to harbor trust in the Cloud.

"When I founded CipherCloud it was clear to me that the entire enterprise market was accelerating its move to the cloud. Our vision has been to create solutions that enable organizations to safely and securely complete their cloud journey while maintaining a high level of security and retaining control of
their information," says Kothari.

The company's ground breaking technology delivers cloud encryption and tokenization gateways that secure sensitive information in real-time. It is meticulously working towards enabling organizations to securely adopt cloud applications by eliminating concerns about data privacy, residency, security, and regulatory compliance, the unique company is soaring high everyday owing to the inspiring leadership of Kothari.

Kothari's personality traits resonate evidently in several aspects of his company as well. He nurses an inherent penchant for all things fast, be it riding up a storm in his 500-horsepower Porsche Panamera or creating a company right from scratch within a span of two months. CipherCloud was conceived by the
veteran alone and within two months of its starting Kothari made the company's presence felt in at the Dreamforce Conference, in December 2010 by presenting a prototype of the company’s unique product to recruit early customers and offer exposure for his new company. Being a one-man show, Kothari staffed the booth alone up to 10 hours a day for four straight days of the conference. The company was cited by CRN as one of the "10 Hot Cloud Computing Vendors to See at Dreamforce".

"This is my fourth startup and the third company in security. I used all my previous experience, and understanding of the security market to start and quickly ramp up," narrates Kothari. He was the lone ranger braving all of the odds to make his company a success.The company’s presence at the Dreamforce 2010 conference was a great endorsement and within two months CipherCloud was also picked as the 'Most Innovative Company' finalist at RSA, the largest annual security conference in the world. At the RSA conference, CipherCloud was also honored by Information Week magazine as one of "3 Start-ups to see at RSA" and by eWeek as one of "11 Products to Watch at RSA". Most notably in April 2011, Gartner, the world's leading IT research firm, selected CipherCloud as a "Cool Vendor in Cloud Security" for 2011.

"By creating a very clear vision for the product, I was able to rapidly engage with customers to provide me with all their inputs, and work with them to shape the product and ensure initial market fit and a rapid go- to- market. CipherCloud forged a very solid product from the very beginning and combined it with tremendous interest from customers, media, and analysts," adds Kothari.

In a short span of just over two years since the company's wheels have been in motion, they have rapidly and successfully built credibility among several industries where information protection is absolutely critical. They now have over 150 employees, a dozen industry awards and more than 40 marquee customers. Their major customers include organizations in the banking, insurance, healthcare, public sector and high-tech industries. Such is the level of value delivered by CipherCloud to the market that already two top U.S. Banks have migrated their consumer loans portal to the public cloud with CipherCloud's revolutionary and trustworthy solutions. One of the largest mortgage and loan servicers in the U.S. has also been able to use the public cloud to go live with a customer service portal where thousands of internal users and millions of borrowers securely upload loan documents thanks to the security company’s expertise. All the information is encrypted in order to meet the bank's stringent security policies.


Radical Technologies Securing
Critical Data

Highly regulated industries such as banking, insurance, and healthcare face potential security threats owing to breaches and compliance. Studies indicate that some merchants and businesses that manage or store credit card numbers and other sensitive information do not use data encryption software. But awareness towards security breaches and compliance issues is on a rise and more and more companies are now looking towards cloud information protection.

Kothari had the foresight to sense an opportunity in protecting sensitive enterprise information in the cloud and across multiple clouds. He also understood that since cloud data can reside in any country, it can be subject to local law enforcement that can seize that data. He founded CipherCloud to eliminate these critical issues and make it possible for organizations to enable their secure move to the cloud.

Organizations have desire to use have a desire to use more cloud applications and also have control over their sensitive information, but they are concerned that encryption breaks the application command, such as search and sort. Their cloud encryption gateway is designed in a way to enable organizations to protect their data in the cloud without sacrificing application functionality, user experience, or performance, and without making any changes to the cloud application.

To meet the needs of the market and deliver a key differentiation, CipherCloud has developed a radical modus pertaining to data at rest encryption by providing its customers with the ability to retain and manage the keys. This ensures that no one can access their data without their involvement, including their cloud provider and or law enforcement officials. Kothari confirmed that the data stored by the cloud application provider is completely undecipherable to anyone who accesses those servers whether it be one of the provider's employees performing a legitimate system administration task, or a malicious insider seeking to leak information, or an outside attacker who has somehow gained access to the system, or even a government knocking on the cloud provider’s door citing federal laws.

CipherCloud's offerings are simple to understand, but highly sophisticated; they preserve search,sort, and reporting operations for users, for data that remains encrypted, with no loss of productivity or convenience. By delivering a comprehensive set of security controls to its customers including operation-preserving encryption and tokenization, user activity monitoring, Data Leak Prevention, and malware detection, this young company has become the leader in a fast growing market.

"The entire process is initiated by encryption software residing within a customer's network to anonymize sensitive cloud application data in real-time while retaining all the native functionality of the application," explains an excited Kothari.

To expand its customer base the company's product portfolio supports popular cloud applications out-of the- box, such as Salesforce.com, Force.com, Chatter, Google Gmail, Microsoft Office 365, and Amazon AWS. Additionally, its connect AnyApp and database gateway enable organizations to extend data protection to hundreds of other cloud applications and databases.



Journey of an Entrepreneur


Kothari hails from a middle class merchant family in Gondia, a town near Nagpur in the Indian state of Maharashtra. He is a computer science graduate from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay. He is very happily married with two sons and dog named Yogi.

Kothari felt the lure of the Silicon Valley and migrated to California to pursue his passion of building new companies from the ground up. 20 years down the line, Kothari's growth graph has always shown a dramatic rocket-ship like curve with the accumulation of knowledge, learning, and incredible 24/7 work ethic to drive his ideas and new market opportunities forward.

Blessed with qualities every entrepreneur must possess, Kothari knows to differentiate between hype and a truly scalable idea. Having been in the industry for over 20 years he is very familiar with technology, businesses, and the ups and downs of the business cycle.

The dotcom bubble burst of 2000 was a test of character for every entrepreneur and the maverick Kothari emerged victorious among a pile of debris of other tech mishaps. ArcSight, his previous company had managed to land funding right before the bubble burst. Within a few months of the company’s initiation they saw their customer base evaporating fast. Instead of hitting the panic button he followed his instincts like a true entrepreneur would and switched gears and drove the company's focus towards infrastructure and security. This strategic decision put the company on the right track and set in place the momentum that resulted in the company's growth curve. ArcSight's innovative technology and growing market demand for security made the company the largest security information management vendor, which went public in 2008 and was later acquired by HP for $1.6 billion.

"Innovation, technology and a razor like focus on solving the really hard problems is critical to the success for fast growing companies," says Kothari. "A lot of companies can initially hit the bull’s eye by converging towards the next problem to solve, be it consumer, business or security but having that focus and
knowledge of how to execute for success is rare."

The entrepreneur in Kothari thoroughly enjoyed the experience of taking his company from an idea all the way to the A grade exit. Kothari has pledged his life to the refined art of entrepreneurship and he devotes some of his time to mentor budding entrepreneurs at TiE. Stressing upon the importance of innovation he has engrained a culture of thinking out of the box. He also credits the philosophy of focusing on customer success as the most important guiding principle for any company with the aspiration to both make it big and retain their position as a leader in their market.


A Global Company


Pulling off one herculean feat after the other, Kothari has managed to build a truly global entity within two years and his company has already made its presence felt in all major regions of the world. After gaining a strong hold in the U.S. and Canada, which were early adopters of the Cloud, CipherCloud has also secured customers in Australia, Bahrain, Brazil, Germany, New Zealand, UK . Already a known name in Australia, CipherCloud aided a top Australian Bank to migrate sensitive personally identifiable information such as addresses, passport numbers, and credit card numbers to their cloud applications.

The company recently opened its European headquarters branch in London to help drive expected growth in Europe to reach 20 percent of their annual turnover in 2013. As European organizations increasingly adopt the cloud, CipherCloud is helping them to ensure their sensitive information is fully protected and all government guidelines from the European Union Data Protection Reform and UK Information Commissioners Office are complied with.

Not limiting itself only to leading companies in banking, insurance,healthcare, high tech, and the public sector, CipherCloud has a rapidly growing customer base. "We see very strong interest for our offerings among large and medium enterprise companies alike," explains Kothari.

Road to Success and Expansion

CipherCloud's distinctive technology, in just over two years, since its founding the company has rapidly grown its customer base to protecting more than 1.2 million cloud application users, more than 100 million customer records, across 40 enterprise customers, 10 industries, eight countries, and six languages. The company has 150 employees, a strong market traction, marquee customers, a seasoned management team and stellar investors to continue to expand its market presence and industry leadership. The company is in the Cloud Information Protection segment, which has emerged as a must have requirement for organizations using the cloud. Kothari's hard work and discerning approach to
information protection has charted the company's growth graph.

Kothari has his eyes on the horizon and sees continuous expansion in terms of product offerings and innovation. "We see the need for CipherCloud across all verticals because every company wants to retain control over their sensitive information in the cloud. We support a number of commercially available cloud applications with different verticals and demographics," adds Kothari.

Today startups are in a mad rush to secure funding but not every company tastes the kind of success that this young company has seen. Amazed by CipherCloud's impressive numbers, Andreessen Horowitz recently invested $30 million in the company, and they were clamoring to invest even more. Kothari aims to accelerate the CipherCloud go-to-market strategy by growing their sales and marketing teams in North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific, as well as rapidly expanding their portfolio of solutions to support more cloud applications.

2012 witnessed a boost in the encryption sector by a number of new start-ups but Kothari is absolutely unfazed when it comes to competitors in the segment since CipherCloud is already the clear leader with unique and differentiating technology that is seamless to the user, preserves all the functionality of the cloud application and enables the organization to retain and manage the keys. Their biggest challenge is the lack of awareness in the market about the risk that organizations are exposed to when moving their sensitive data to the cloud.

If numbers are anything to go by Kothari is a maverick for sure, similarly if media reports are to be believed then he is a genius too. This entrepreneur par excellence belonged to a small town which formed a small dot on the mammoth world map but his creations in the security space have given him a prominent rung on the cluttered tech space. CipherCloud as a company is growing from strength to strength and Kothari has surely developed trust in the Cloud.