Egress is a company that is on a mission to eliminate the most complex cybersecurity challenge every organization faces: insider risk. The company understands that people get hacked, make mistakes, and break the rules. To prevent these human-activated breaches, Egress built the only Human Layer Security platform that defends against inbound and outbound threats. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Egress co-founder and COO Neil Larkins to learn more.
Neil Larkins’ Background
After graduating from the University of Manchester with a Bachelor of Engineering in hand, Larkins started his career in the tech industry. And Larkins said:
“After ten years in Product Manager and Sales Director roles, Tony Pepper and I founded Egress, and we celebrated Egress’ 16th Birthday this year with over 300 employees. Tony took on the role of CEO and I focused on product and service development and delivery as COO.”
Formation Of Egress
How did the idea for Egress come together? Larkins shared:
“Tony and I had worked together at a previous business that provided encryption to secure data stored on removable media. After a period of accelerated growth, the company was ultimately acquired by Check Point Software Technologies. When we founded Egress, email was replacing removable media for data sharing, so providing email encryption was the natural next step. While we still offer email encryption today, our business has continued to innovate and evolve to leverage the latest technology advancements to stop a broad spectrum of threats.”
“Our business has always been centered on the fact that every organization’s biggest security risk is its people – but it doesn’t have to be this way. Our approach doesn’t demonize people; fundamentally the vast majority of human-activated data breaches are caused by well-intentioned employees just trying to get their jobs done. We aim to make people an organization’s biggest security defense, by making sure they have the security tools they need at the point of risk. We’re here to provide technology that removes this insider risk, helping people get on with their jobs securely and seamlessly.”
Favorite Memory
What has been your favorite memory working for Egress so far? Larkins shared:
“I’ve got 16 years of memories with Egress with some amazing kick-offs and company events, but the one that jumps to the forefront is bringing the Aquilai team into Egress in 2021. Not only was the product a brilliant fit, adding inbound email security to our product suite, but the team behind it was – are! – first-class. The product, which became Egress Defend, strengthened our offering, but the team was the true gain.”
“We also recently collectively celebrated the team members who have been at Egress for ten years or more, and that’s been an excellent opportunity to reflect and raise a glass. It’s of course important to attract world-class talent, but retaining your team is equally crucial as they not only pass down the culture to new joiners, but also help mold the company.”
Challenges Faced
What challenges have you faced in building Egress? Larkins acknowledged:
“Starting the company at the end of 2007, months before a global economic downturn, was a tough and steep learning curve; customers were losing their appetite for new projects, and we hadn’t even finalized our product. We had to hyper-focus our product, fast. Tony and I would work from a coffee shop near my apartment as we didn’t have an office for a while, and we dedicated a chunk of time to ensuring functionality was business-critical to customers. In a time of such uncertainty, we wanted to come out the gates with an undeniable solution.”
“At the same time, we were bootstrapping the business and had to make significant personal sacrifices to get Egress off the ground; for a couple of years Tony and I were on zero salary. We took it week by week, and the agility we showed has not only been the foundation of the business but also the culture at Egress amongst the workforce.”
“It’s not been an easy ride – we made mistakes in areas like target markets, and hired people who weren’t the right fit for the company we were building, but we were determined to learn from them. When the chips are down, we will pivot and find a way forward, because there will always be one.”
Core Products
What are Egress’s core products and features? Larkins explained:
“The three core products Egress delivers are Defend, Prevent and Protect, and together they make up our Intelligent Email Security suite. As of this year, we’ve become the only cloud email security provider to use an adaptive security model to continuously assess human risk and dynamically adjust policy controls to stop advanced inbound and outbound threats.”
“For inbound threats, Defend is easy-to-deploy, intelligent detection technology that defends against the most sophisticated phishing emails. Within Defend, contextual, color-coded banners use real-time teachable moments to reduce risk and augment security awareness and training.”
“Egress Prevent and Protect make up our outbound threat protection. Egress Prevent uses supervised and unsupervised machine learning to detect accidental data loss events and intentional data exfiltration attempts, with a focus on human risk insights. Protect is our original email encryption product that continues to secure customers’ confidential data from unauthorized access and data breaches.”
“We also offer a Secure Workspace for teams to collaborate and share files securely, and the ever-popular Secure Web Form for completely personalized data submission.”
Evolution Of Egress’ Technology
How has Egress’ technology evolved since launching? Larkins noted:
“The most recent technological development at Egress has been the implementation of adaptive security architecture to provide dynamic and automated protection against advanced inbound and outbound threats, transforming the way in which organizations manage human risk on email.”
“Unlike any other product on the market, our adaptive security model generates aggregated individual risk scores for each user by augmenting product telemetry, open-source intelligence, and behavioral data with threat data taken from any third-party security application via a two-way open API. When a score reaches a higher risk threshold, products in the Intelligent Email Security platform will automatically adapt their controls to defend against advanced phishing threats, human error, and data exfiltration.”
“We’re extremely proud to be the first solution globally to offer adaptive security for cloud email, which we believe is the biggest innovation in email security since the launch of integrated cloud email security solutions.”
“This has been backed up by partnerships with leading cyber companies like KnowBe4, which we announced recently. Additional intelligence sources from products within an organization’s security ecosystem enrich our human risk scores to provide a holistic view of risk within an organization. As well as adapting our controls, we’re able to use this combined intelligence to surface actionable insights tailored to each user.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of Egress’ most significant milestones? Larkins cited:
“The Aquilai acquisition mentioned before was a huge milestone, but our expansion to the US has been the most significant. It’s a leap of faith to open a new office, but to do so in another country is tougher than I had anticipated. We sent some of our best team members to the States, some who had helped shape the company in the UK, so we knew the culture would be added to the foundations very early on. We started with Boston and then New York, with both continuing to grow.”
“More recently, the launch of our adaptive security architecture has begun a new phase of cybersecurity in the cloud email space. Being the first solution globally to offer adaptive security for cloud email was an extremely ambitious goal we set ourselves, and the entire Egress team pushed to get it released on time.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates Egress from its competition? Larkins affirmed:
“Egress is the only single-platform solution that seamlessly integrates with Microsoft 365 to stop both inbound and outbound threats with an adaptive security model. This enables us to provide holistic email security reporting including real-time teachable moments to augment your security training program, improve security behaviors, and reduce risk for the long term.”
“Our real-time teachable moments alert users to genuine threats and provide a clear explanation of risk. Not only does this reduce email security incidents, but also improves education and understanding over the long term. In fact, an emergency services customer of 4,000 employees recently told us that the real-time teachable moments within Egress Defend have increased the accuracy of users reporting phishing emails. Before using Defend, 74% of all phishing emails reported by employees were actually false positives, but after a few months of using the product, this fell to 12%. It’s crucial that people can accurately recognize phishing emails – of course, they have Defend in their work emails, but at home or if they’re allowed to access personal emails via work devices, it’s a different story.”
“Finally, one of the things we’re most proud of is the positive feedback our team receives from the customers we work with. We’re relentless in our customer-first mindset – our Chief Product Officer is famous for reminding everyone in the business that we all work in Customer Service – and we consistently hear amazing things about our team.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of Egress’s future company goals? Larkins concluded:
“Like most cybersecurity companies, we’re always aiming for product innovations that keep us a step ahead of threat actors and address a broader array of security use cases, ultimately keeping our customers happy with our offerings. With this comes the drive for strategic growth in sectors lacking cutting-edge defenses, as well as optimizing efficiency within Egress’ operations.”
“But the overarching company goals which we’re striving for, and the rest will fall naturally into place, is to make Egress a fantastic place to work. Our team is world-class, from customer success to the engineering team, from people management to threat intelligence, and it’s absolutely crucial that we attract and retain talented people. Preserving our culture has always been at the forefront of this goal, and we’re proud of the fun, professional and rewarding environment at Egress, where we do the right thing for our employees.”
