Dale Peterson’s interview with Ilan Barda, Radiflow CEO, Part 1: The drivers that led to developing CIARA

OT Cybersecurity luminary and self-described “ICS Security Catalyst” Dale Peterson recently interviewed Radiflow CEO Ilan Barda, as part of his S4-affiliated Response Unsolicited series.

In the interview, Mr. Peterson and Mr. Barda discussed Radiflow’s entering the industrial risk assessment and management field and took an in-depth look at the CIARA risk assessment & management platform. The interview concluded with a discussion about the current state of the OT security industry.

In this segment of the interview Mr. Peterson asked Mr. Barda about the driving market forces that led Radiflow to develop CIARA.

You can watch the full interview here. A transcript of the clip is available below. 

Transcript

Q: What was the driver for Radiflow to move in that direction as opposed to just continuing down the visibility and detection space?

A: So first of all thank you for having me it’s always interesting to hear these sessions.

As mentioned we have been around for a quite a few years and we have been following the market evolution. What we have seen is that the visibility and detection market is still very much there. Most of the customer tenders are still very much focused on this aspect. But we’ve seen also that customers are looking for a bit more.

It started with vulnerability management: these customers want to understand what they need to do in order to improve their security posture. And then we have seen that as an evolution of the vulnerability management there are just too many vulnerabilities, so customers also need some tools to prioritize. And that’s when we have decided that it’s worthwhile to add this additional layer of functionality which will also give this risk scoring and some recommendations how to prioritize your vulnerabilities and your security controls based on risk and not just based on vulnerability mapping.

Q: Well let me approach the question maybe from a different standpoint. When you decided to invest in this CIARA product and bring it to market amongst the many things you could do, was it something that your customers were asking you for or was it something that you were anticipating they should be asking for and will be asking for?

I think it was a mix. It was indirectly requested by them, not as a direct request saying we do want to have this functionality, because it was somewhere like mid of last year that we started developing this product so it was not a direct request by any customer but it was indirectly there.

When we deployed the visibility tools and we started to discuss CVEs and all that stuff, we started to hear from customers all kinds of complaints: “we could use something that will give us some priorities, we just have too many vulnerabilities, the whole screen is red”. So that’s where we decided to take it one step forward. But it was not a specific requirement coming from any customer.

If you’ve found this article interesting, please visit and follow Radiflow on LinkedIn, where you’ll find a wealth of exclusive content.