In an increasingly digital world, cyber threat has become a significant challenge. Businesses are heavily investing in technologies to boost security for data protection. NVISIONx is the first data risk intelligence platform that fuses business data and cyber intelligence empowering companies to analyze, prioritize and protect their valuable data.
The CEO Views is pleased to recognize Gagan Sarawgi, Cofounder of NVISIONx with “Innovation Excellence Award 2023”. Gagan is an industry expert with more than thirteen years of experience in building and implementing Information Governance and Data Protection solutions. Though, NVISIONx is his first start-up, his entrepreneurial journey started years ago when he began his career in the high-tech company in Silicon Valley and quickly took responsibilities to build and manage innovative products.
Gagan identified a clear gap in the industry and along with his co-founding team set on to the journey of building one of the most complex albeit intuitive and user-friendly solution to enable organizations to manage their data and protect their crown “jewels”. We interacted with Gagan to learn about his journey
CEOViews: Kindly take us through your entrepreneurial journey! How did it all begin?
Gagan Sarawgi: I have worked in various capacities in the Data Protection space starting from business analyst driving product and innovation to consulting and implementing data protection programs. Over the years, I observed that despite investing millions of dollars in the most advanced cyber controls possible and hiring the best talent available in the industry, companies don’t have control over their data. There was a clear gap and obvious reason as to why large corporations were unable to manage their data – the issue was that business stakeholders and IT & Security teams were working in silos.
This awareness of the problem was the key to start NVISIONx to build a comprehensive user-friendly Data Risk Intelligence solution that can build inventory of and provide insights on data stored across various data sources including on-prem & cloud storage and structured and unstructured repositories with overlay of data protection controls enabled on these data stores to better understand the effectiveness of data protection initiatives in the context of the business data.
We have implemented our patented methodology that enables processing of billions of files and building actionable analytics on the data.
CEOViews: How your company has evolved and made an impact over the previous years?
Gagan Sarawgi: NVISIONx has built a first of its kind, Data Risk Intelligence (DRI) platform that enables business stakeholders who creates and understands the data and IT & Security teams that understands security controls to collaborate in the efforts of data protection. Nx Platform is a user-friendly solution that also includes a built-in customizable workflow automation engine that makes collaboration across stakeholders seamless and transparent.
Over the years NVISIONx has helped companies in various verticals in reliably identifying their most critical crown “jewels” and enhancing cyber control technologies to protect critical data.
CEOViews: What type of solutions does your firm provide? Can you explicate them in brief?
Gagan Sarawgi: NVISIONx provides a wide range of data risk intel solutions to cover all aspects of data’s lifecycle. Successful implementation of cyber controls depends on knowing what data is critical for each line of business, where it is stored, who has access, are the controls effective and what are the permissible data flows. Cyber controls cannot protect what it cannot identify. NVISIONx identifies and provides a secure, simplified global view of all your critical data to deliver data-driven insights of what to protect.
The Nx Platform enables identification of unknown systems where privacy data is stored, near real-time processing of privacy rights requests with built in workflow automation engine, and continuous monitoring of vendors with access to privacy data. It provides continuous monitoring of cyber risk and compliance events, vendors with access to critical data, and global view of where data is stored enabling timely risk and compliance remediation while identifying opportunities for cost controls.
Data volumes are likely doubling every 2 years. However, there is still a lot of hesitation to deleting data as business stakeholders don’t have holistic view of their data.
NVISIONx provides interactive dashboards that can be customized to allow users to understand the data in the context of who is accessing what data as well as what data is stale and may have reached its end of life. This allows organizations to defensibly dispose “junk” data to reduce the risk exposure as well as the enterprise storage costs .
CEOViews: What is your role and what does it take to build the first data risk intelligent platform that fuses business data and cyber intelligence?
Gagan Sarawgi: I have led the efforts to build the Nx Platform collaborating closely with the CEO, sales & marketing, dev & UI teams defining product architecture, data pipeline, integration strategy and buy vs build decisions. It’s extremely complex and data permeates every factor of business.
All the data sources come with their unique data structure. There are 2 aspects of architecting a solution of this nature – connecting to various data sources and keeping up with updates to these connection methods and unique limitations of each such repository connection creates its own set of challenges. Second and equally important challenge is scalability. We have implemented our patented methodology that enables processing of billions of files and building actionable analytics on the data.
You can build the best possible solution using the most modern technology, but if the UI is not intuitive and friendly, you will lose business stakeholders’ interest within a few minutes. Thus, user experience was the highest priority during product design. However, my experience in building complex products in prior roles enabled me to appreciate the necessity and complexity to ensure that the product is intuitive and even fun to use and has been critical to successfully building Nx Platform.
NVISIONx provides a wide range of data risk intel solutions to cover all aspects of data’s lifecycle.
CEOViews: What are the biggest technological impacts that are significant in your sector? How do you make use of these technological trends to deliver the best outcome?
Gagan Sarawgi: As a product leader, I am constantly watching the markets to stay on top of the new technologies as well as evolution of existing technologies as both trends impacts our integration and ability to provide holistic view of the enterprise data and deliver meaningful, actionable insights for our customers.
CEOViews: How NVISIONx is set to revolutionize the way businesses control their data? What are the future prospects we can expect or envision in the field?
Gagan Sarawgi: NVISIONx exists to help organizations discover, define, and control their data. We eliminate data obscurity by inventorying and securing all your data while reducing storage cost and cyber security. Our patented methodology harnesses the power of metadata for preliminary classification thus reducing the need to apply AI/ML technologies on the entire dataset and hence enable us to provide full data inventory as opposed to discovering known data attributes.
The industry overall is at the cusp of a major change with new regulations being implemented making organizations more accountable to protect the data. Over retention of privacy data is now considered to be a major policy failure that can lead to heavy fines and penalties – the practice of keeping everything forever just in case is no longer acceptable. Though the problem sounds simple, the process of defensible retention has many complex elements. NVISIONx has built this end-to-end integration to enable defensible retention.
CEOViews: As a product leader how do you test and measure innovation?
Gagan Sarawgi: Successful innovation can mean very different outcome for different product. Thus, the first step for me was to identify & set key innovation goal for NVISIONx. Though it sounds counter-intuitive the key metric of success at NVISIONx is to reduce the amount of time business stakeholders have to spend to achieve their desired goal of data protection. We want business stakeholders to spend as little time as possible in the platform to complete the end-to-end process of data protection. Less time spent is the testament to intuitiveness and enhanced user experience of the platform.
We regularly obtain feedback from customers to evaluate satisfaction, understand any new use cases and evolving needs, identify areas for improvement and assess how our innovation is meeting their needs and expectations. Another key measure is time-to-market for new features and innovation. Our goal is to have shortest possible time to market while delivering quality solution. This allows us to fail quickly and adapt to the constantly evolving market needs.
CEOViews: What challenges have you faced on the course of the journey? What were the lessons learnt? Gagan Sarawgi: The biggest challenge was to bring various stakeholders together in their mission to protect enterprise data. Changing the views of various stakeholders working in silos and getting business, IT and security leaders to embrace a new paradigm of collaborating and treating data as an asset that needs to be managed throughout its life was a difficult challenge. The evolving regulatory landscape has increased the appreciation to view data as an asset.
CEOViews: What are the factors that differentiate NVISIONx from the others in the marketplace?
Gagan Sarawgi: NVISIONx has differentiated itself from competition in all 3 key areas of people, process, and technology.
NVISIONx’s founding team has rich experience in technology and consulting and complimentary skill sets that provided a perfect platform for us to launch the company and hire right talent at the right time. We thrive on innovation and our software development methodology has been to fail quick and iterate.
We always had the vision to gain complete visibility and control of enterprise data that entails building a solution that can scale to inventory billions of records and petabytes of data instead of discovering known data attributes that provides limited visibility and understanding of the context of the data. Our platform is designed to bring business stakeholders and IT & Security teams together without which you cannot implement an effective data protection program.
CEOViews: What are your short-term plans and long-term goals?
Gagan Sarawgi: One of our customers have stated, “I now feel we have a handle on managing the data, not the data managing us”. Our goal is to have business, IT and Security leaders across the board to feel the same.
CEOViews: What are your advice and tips for burgeoning entrepreneurs and emerging business leaders?
Gagan Sarawgi: Entrepreneurship is a lifelong journey with ever evolving path that offers endless opportunities for growth, impact, and personal fulfilment. Stay calm, have patience, and embrace the challenge, learn from the ups and downs, and savour the satisfaction that comes from creating something of value.
