In a June 13, 2013, SecurityWeek interview, SkyHigh Networks CEO and co-founder Rajiv Gupta described a company built to help organizations adopt cloud services while addressing security, compliance and privacy concerns. He outlined a three-part service—discover cloud use, assess risk, and apply controls—and reported early customer and staffing figures that belong to that period, not to the company today.
Why Gupta founded SkyHigh Networks
Gupta told SecurityWeek that his interest in cloud computing began during his work at HP Labs. He recounted previously founding Confluent Software, which he said became part of Oracle, and Securent, which he said Cisco acquired. Those company-history details are his account in the 2013 interview.
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Before choosing a direction for SkyHigh, Gupta said the founding team evaluated five potential breakthrough ideas in areas including storage, mobile and service management. The team spoke with 120 companies, he said, and repeatedly heard both enthusiasm for cloud adoption and concern about its risks. He framed SkyHigh as a way to help businesses use cloud services while meeting security, compliance and privacy requirements.
What SkyHigh said its service did
Gupta organized the service around three functions: discovery, analysis and control. His explanation describes the product concept as he presented it in 2013; it is not an independent product audit or a statement of current capabilities.
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Discovery: identify cloud services in use
Gupta said SkyHigh analyzed logs from an organization’s egress devices to identify cloud services employees were using. The aim was to give organizations visibility into their cloud exposure, including use that might not be apparent to central IT.
Analysis: assess service and usage risks
He said SkyHigh maintained a registry of more than 2,000 cloud services and assessed each against 30 parameters. The factors he cited included multi-tenancy, commingling of data, encryption at rest, key handling, breach history, penetration testing and single sign-on. These counts and methods are figures Gupta reported in the interview.
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Gupta distinguished risk inherent in a cloud service from risk in how people used it. To illustrate the latter, he described a salesperson accessing far more opportunities than usual or an employee reaching a service from an unfamiliar location. Those were examples of the product idea, not independently verified detection results.
Control: apply measures such as access restrictions or encryption
After discovery and analysis, Gupta said the service could support controls such as access control or data encryption. The interview describes these as examples; it does not establish a complete list of controls or explain their implementation in detail.
How the 2013 service fits the CASB category
In a later acquisition-era explanation, McAfee described a cloud access security broker (CASB) as providing businesses with insight into and control over data and users moving through cloud resources, including managing access and data movement. That category framing helps place SkyHigh’s discovery, risk analysis and control model in context, but it is McAfee’s explanation—not a statement attributed to Gupta in the interview. McAfee: “Bringing Security to the Cloud and Beyond”.
What Gupta reported about SkyHigh’s early stage
Gupta reported approximately 15 customers and 44 employees. He said customer organizations ranged in workforce size from 600 to 350,000 people. These are interview-era figures, not current company statistics.
SecurityWeek added an editorial update noting that SkyHigh had announced a $20 million Series B after the interview was conducted. The timing matters: the interview answers predate that financing announcement, so the funding update should not be read as part of Gupta’s original account of the company’s stage.
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Gupta described SkyHigh’s business model as subscription-based. Asked about competitors, he named Symantec as a company with a similar vision and contrasted SkyHigh’s service approach with an on-premises appliance approach. These were his competitive views at the time; they are not a current market map or an objective comparison of vendors.
What the interview does—and does not—establish
The interview offers a dated snapshot of a startup’s rationale, product model and reported early traction. It does not establish SkyHigh Networks’ present ownership, branding, product availability or Gupta’s current role. The figures and operational descriptions above should therefore be read as Gupta’s 2013 account, with the later CASB explanation kept distinct.
Sources: SecurityWeek, “Security Startups: In Focus With SkyHigh Networks CEO and Co-Founder Rajiv Gupta,” June 13, 2013; McAfee, “Bringing Security to the Cloud and Beyond”.
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