The In-Q-Tel funded firm aims to provide federal agencies with cyber protection at scale.
As the recent and massive SolarWinds attack on DHS makes clear, cybersecurity is homeland security.
This will impact more than IT vendors. Manufacturers of sensor-based security solutions such as checkpoint CT, or explosive trace detection will be asked by their DHS customers to ramp up their focus on cybersecurity, including ensuring that the software running these systems are designed from the ground-up with cybersecurity in mind.
So pay attention to Contrast Security. Founded in 2014 and backed by In-Q-Tel, Battery Ventures, General Catalyst and others, it addresses a fundamental problem in cybersecurity. How do developers ensure software code is secured as it is written – not after it is deployed?
Within DoD, its security platform is part of a preapproved set of capabilities that meet cybersecurity requirements for DoD software developers.
The idea behind Contrast Security is that developers can ensure application security from the inside out with real-time assessment — versus application security solutions that evaluate after the fact, Contrast operates from within the application itself, and monitors all parts of the application, including microservices, custom code, application programming interfaces (APIs), and open-source libraries.