RecoLabs hopes to secure enterprise collaboration

Collaboration security provider, RecoLabs (Reco), announced that it has raised a $30 million series A round to secure collaboration tools in today’s modern enterprise.

The company’s collaboration security platform is designed to allow organizations to securely gain visibility throughout and share information through multichannel collaboration tools such as Slack, G-Suite, Jira and others.

As remote and hybrid work arrangements continue to impact the business ecosystem, employees increasingly expect more transparency, better technology, improved collaboration and greater flexibility. As a result, the number of new technologies for digital workplace solutions has increased and collaboration tools are one part of that stack.

However, this development ushers in a new challenge. A recent report states that remote work has increased cyberattack frequency by 238%. Another report by Verizon says that 85% of all breaches involve exploiting a human vulnerability. This underscores the fact that most breaches originate from the users of these collaboration tools and it’s critical that companies understand the context of these breaches. 

Reco claims to create tools that help organizations secure sensitive assets by mapping and monitoring contextual metadata. The company claims that it uses applied machine learning (ML) to create a model of the interactions and collaborations among an organization’s employees, teams and outside vendors, allowing them to understand and visualize threats from collaboration and sharing. According to Reco, this will result in the creation of a contextualized knowledge graph that allows security teams to detect and respond to unauthorized or unusual activities in real-time.

Workflow in the modern enterprise

Collaboration tools are becoming the new standard and an indisputable part of today’s business. In fact, Gartner predicted that nearly 80% of workers will use collaboration tools. These tools provide access to technology that allows onsite and remote employees to engage and communicate both within and outside their work environment. 

Following the COVID-19 outbreak, there was a 176% surge in collaboration apps installed on enterprise devices, making collaboration security risk management a major focus for CISOs.

While collaboration tools enable people to work faster and more effectively, Ofer Klein, cofounder and CEO of Reco, said they also expose companies to a new set of vulnerabilities and an increased area of risk. These risks and problems, according to Reco, can be broken down as follows:

Inability for legacy systems to keep up

Legacy systems are computers with out-of-date software, hardware or both, that are still in use instead of newer versions. The systems continue to suit the needs for which they were created, but they are no longer expandable. They require many static rules, which quickly become obsolete and slow down operations.

The lack of dynamism might result in a lot of noise — either they detect everything and obstruct the business, or they don’t detect enough. Because of the lack of dynamic and resource-intensive structure, security teams must manually change rules such as permissions, whitelists and deal with alerts regularly, making them exceedingly taxing to manage.

Legacy systems suffer from a lack of visibility

Legacy tools are unable to comprehend why an event occurred. For example, this can occur by enforcing static rules that prevent specific files from leaving the organization. Whereas it used to be straightforward because data didn’t leave the business, it’s now more challenging because information is legitimately shared outside the organization. However, there is no way to successfully protect the collaborative tools without first understanding why this is the case.

CISOs, employees and companies as a whole are all affected by these two major challenges. According to Klein, protecting key assets is a major responsibility for any company and the only way to recognize actual collaborative security problems is to understand the business context of every interaction. Reco, he claims, plays a major role in this.

Reco says that organizations can intelligently detect and rectify common challenges like erroneous outside vendor access and files being transferred to or shared with the wrong user using its security solutions. It accomplishes this by utilizing the Reco Ontology, an overarching metadata view supported by two internal algorithms: Process-Discover, which discovers interactions, classifies entities and categorizes them via their actual business process.

Content-based security to context-based security

Insider risk and data loss prevention (DLP) are becoming major concerns for businesses with a distributed workforce and a growing reliance on technology. While it may seem self-evident that modern workplaces require modern security solutions, several organizations are hesitant to abandon their legacy systems. This could be due to apprehension about the unknown, exorbitant technology costs, or a lack of time to revolutionize.

After the pandemic, nearly 74% of manufacturing enterprises rely on legacy systems to complete work and  up to 90% of organizations are stifled in terms of growth and efficiency because of outdated technology. 

Klein, in an email interview, said Reco offers a novel approach to collaboration security by learning the context and the reason for each collaborative event. Instead of reading the contents of user interactions, Reco claims to have developed a Business Context Justification (BCJ) engine, which uses applied machine learning and cognitive analytics to know why, not just how, an attack occurred. This, according to the company, is the “game changer” that sets it apart from the competition.

According to Klein, the BCJ is responsible for creating the collaboration map and comprehending the business context. The collaboration map depicts the context of every interaction between teams within the company. Reco can use the BCJ to create security incidents based on non-business-related events. Through a better understanding of the dynamic organization, the justification for actions evolves over time. Reco says that this eliminates the requirement for manual intervention in security incident reporting.

Furthermore, the company claims that its Business Context AI engine doesn’t require any manual policy creation, tagging, classification, or ongoing maintenance. It claims that this frees up 40% of security teams’ work while maintaining a high degree of protection without slowing down the continuously evolving business.

Reco says that its “no agent” feature allows users to join in minutes and receive immediate value. According to the company, this results in the lowest number of false positives, while also detecting events and situations that no other tool can detect – for instance, sharing sensitive information in the wrong Slack channel. Reco claims it only reads meta-data, not the actual content of emails, Slack messages or files.

Reco plans to invest the funds to grow its team and accelerate the go-to-market in the U.S. The series A round was led by Zeev Ventures and Insight Partners, with participation from Boldstart Ventures, Angular Ventures and leading private investors.