Fugue evolves its cloud security offering with SaaS product

Fugue put its cloud expertise to work with a new product introduced late last year.

The Frederick-based company makes technology that ensures that a company’s cloud infrastructure stays in compliance with security policies. Its team works with government-oriented firms and regulated industries such as healthcare and finance, where companies have adopted specific sets of security controls — acronyms like HIPAA and GDPR — that are seen as a best practices.

The technology is designed to automate the processes that ensure that policies are always being followed in order to prevent breaches: The company establishes a baseline. Then, Fugue can detect if there is “drift” from that baseline, and adds automation to the process of bringing things back in compliance.

It aims to provide a single source for security, compliance and infrastructure teams to see whether there are misconfigurations or unauthorized changes made to things like passwords.

With a product released in late 2018 called Fugue Risk Manager, the company turned to the cloud with a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering that VP of Product Strategy Richard Park said has simplified the process for introducing the technology to organizations.

That means Fugue provides access to the product over the web directly, as opposed to the “self-hosted” software model, where the product is installed on a customer’s private cloud-hosted environment. He called it the “next evolution” of the company’s technology.

“It’s really what we’ve been selling for years now, in a much more easy to access package,” he said.

Along with advantages on the access side presented by not having to install software, Park said the big reason the company decided to go with a SaaS product was provided by customers, as large enterprises are growing more comfortable with security products being delivered this way: “Customers said, we prefer SaaS over any other way of distributing software,” he said.

Yet if it didn’t change the company’s core value proposition, it’s making a difference when it comes to communicating and demoing, as well as installing. Trials themselves are easier to get up and running, too.

“With Saas,” said Drew Wright, a Fugue cofounder and VP of communications, “it’s a lot easier and faster for people to get it up and running, kick the tires and see the value.”