When a cyberattack strikes, chaos often follows. Systems shut down, communications collapse, and leadership scrambles to understand what’s happening. Yet, amid the turmoil, one fact is clear: prevention alone is no longer enough.

That’s the insight that led Arvind Parthasarathi, veteran entrepreneur and founder of CYGNVS, to create a platform designed not just to prevent cyber incidents, but to help organizations respond to them with clarity, speed, and resilience.

From Academia to Startup Vision

After selling his previous startup, Parthasarathi turned his attention to giving back. Working pro bono, he joined Project Crossroads, a research initiative spanning nine global universities, including MIT, Stanford, Oxford, and Tokyo. Their mission: to establish a “standard of care” for boards and executives around cybersecurity oversight.

What he discovered was striking. “Organizations were pouring money into prevention,” he recalled, “but when incidents actually happened, the response was total chaos.”

That realization became the seed for CYGNVS (pronounced Sig-nus). Founded in January 2020 in a borrowed conference room, the company’s name draws from Cygnus, Latin for “swan.” Cyber incidents, often likened to Black Swan events, demand a new kind of preparedness—and CYGNVS was built to provide it.

The Out-of-Band Advantage

At the heart of CYGNVS is the idea of an “out-of-band” platform—a secure, independent command center organizations can rely on when traditional systems are compromised.

Attackers increasingly target corporate communications first—email, conferencing tools, even identity systems—precisely because that’s where crisis coordination happens. If the attackers are already listening in, a company’s defenses can crumble before they’re even activated.

Parthasarathi compares CYGNVS to a hurricane bunker: a place where legal teams, executives, and responders can gather safely, run playbooks, and protect privilege and confidentiality. Crucially, the system is company-owned—not tied to individual accounts vulnerable to insider threats or employee turnover.

Rethinking Crisis Response

Traditional incident response plans often sit buried in dusty binders or forgotten folders. In practice, they’re rarely updated, much less followed in a real emergency. CYGNVS transforms those outdated manuals into interactive, mobile-first workflows.

Rather than confronting leaders with an 80-page document during a breach, the platform drip-feeds tasks step by step—adaptive, guided, and designed for how people actually behave under stress. “Human beings in crisis don’t think the same way,” Parthasarathi explained. “So we shift the paradigm: two steps now, two steps later, until the organization executes as one.”

The result is muscle memory. Just as submariners drill daily for emergencies, CYGNVS clients run tabletop exercises frequently—not annually, but monthly, even weekly—building resilience into their organizational DNA.

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Why adaptive identity, dynamic trust, and cultural alignment are shaping the next era of enterprise cybersecurity.

By Karl Woolfenden

A New Era of Identity

Cybersecurity has always been an arms race—attackers innovate, defenders scramble to catch up. But for Jim Alkove, co-founder and CEO of Oleria, the most critical battlefield is no longer the perimeter or even the cloud. It’s identity.

“The challenge we’re seeing is that traditional identity solutions haven’t kept up with the pace of change inside organizations,” Alkove explains. “Roles evolve, responsibilities shift, and yet too often, access controls remain rigid and outdated. That creates both friction for employees and risk for the enterprise.”

Identity management, once seen as a compliance function, has now become the nerve center of organizational security. In Alkove’s view, the future of digital trust depends on making identity systems adaptive, intelligent, and above all, aligned with how businesses actually operate.

From Checkbox to Competitive Advantage

For decades, identity was treated as a regulatory requirement—ensuring auditors could confirm that only the right people had access to sensitive systems. But as enterprises undergo digital transformation, identity has moved from the server room to the boardroom.

“Companies that treat identity as strategic—not just a back-office function—are the ones that are going to move faster, innovate faster, and protect their data more effectively,” Alkove says. “We see identity as the connective tissue across the enterprise.”

That philosophy underpins Oleria’s Identity Maturity Guide, a framework that helps organizations benchmark their current posture and chart a course toward adaptive trust models that evolve as roles, teams, and responsibilities shift.

Quote: Jim Alkove

“We see identity as the connective tissue across the enterprise.” — Jim Alkove, CEO, Oleria

Building for Speed Without Sacrificing Trust

In today’s enterprise, access is rarely static. A developer might join a project team one week, pivot to a new initiative the next, and transfer departments a month later. Traditional access models—granting and revoking permissions manually—create bottlenecks. Worse, they leave dangerous gaps when employees retain privileges they no longer need.

“You can’t have a model where people wait weeks for access while projects stall, or worse, where they keep access long after they’ve switched roles,” Alkove warns. “We want to ensure identity management moves at the same speed as the business.”

Oleria’s mission is to create dynamic identity systems that update in real time, ensuring employees have the right access, for the right duration, under the right circumstances. That agility, Alkove argues, is the only way enterprises can innovate without compromising security.

Quote: Jim Alkove

“We want to ensure identity management moves at the same speed as the business.”

By Karl Woolfenden | BCN.news

Cloud adoption has transformed modern enterprises, but it has also introduced unprecedented complexity. As organizations scale across multiple providers and hundreds of services, the promise of agility often collides with the realities of misconfigurations, compliance demands, and overstretched DevOps teams.

For Ian Amit, Founder and CEO of Gomboc, the gap between finding problems and actually fixing them is where the industry has been falling short.

“We never had a find problem,” Amit emphasized during our BCN.news interview. “Finding is easy. Fixing and remediating is the problem.”

With more than 25 years in cybersecurity—spanning roles at Rapid7, Amazon, and ZeroFox—Amit has witnessed the same cycle play out: tools excel at surfacing alerts, but engineers are left drowning in tickets. Gomboc, founded to break this cycle, applies a deterministic AI model that transforms misconfigurations directly into actionable code-level fixes.

From Complaints to Solutions

Amit admits that Gomboc started as his “way of complaining” about the state of cloud security. “I was raised on the premise that you are not allowed to complain unless you can do something about it,” he explained. “So, Gomboc became my way of doing something.”

What makes the problem so acute? Consider the landscape: most enterprises now operate across at least two or three cloud providers, each offering hundreds of continuously evolving services. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) frameworks help teams manage this sprawl, but they also create a widening knowledge gap.

“Cloud providers continuously update and release new services,” Amit said. “That growing knowledge gap is exactly where AI should be applied—as a force multiplier that helps humans ingest and process massive amounts of data more effectively.”

Deterministic vs. Generative AI

Much of the industry conversation around AI focuses on generative models. But Amit cautions against this “shiny new hammer” approach.

“Generative AI is probabilistic, not accurate. In engineering, we can’t afford hallucinations,” he explained. “You might produce 10 times the code faster, but you’ll also produce 10 times the bugs.”

Instead, Gomboc leans on deterministic AI. Unlike generative models, deterministic AI ensures repeatability, precision, and trustworthiness. “Without those three elements, you’ll lose the trust of engineers,” Amit said.

The distinction is critical: where generative AI might flood teams with draft fixes, deterministic AI provides verified, contextualized solutions that engineers can confidently deploy.

The DevOps Pressure Cooker

DevOps professionals often find themselves caught between competing metrics: speed and reliability. A flawless deployment can be undone overnight by a policy change from a cloud provider, forcing teams into reactive manual patching.

“That human at the other end of all those tickets is bogged down, and it slows everything down,” I observed during our conversation. Amit agreed:

“Finding issues is easy. But when you’re opening more tickets and creating more alerts, you’re just adding work. The engineer still has to stop what they’re doing and fix it. We focused Gomboc on the most annoying, repetitive parts of that process—figuring out the actual fix.”

Instead of producing another queue of alerts, Gomboc delivers fixes directly into developer workflows. The platform’s dashboard, which Amit describes as a “reverse dashboard,” doesn’t just measure risk—it shows hours saved.