We started Spyglass to put security on autopilot for data teams 🔒 ✈️ 💾

Why?

Cloud database use cases have changed.

The good news: companies have successfully created “central data hubs” in the cloud with Snowflake, Databricks, Redshift, BigQuery, and others.

The bad news: security has been an afterthought.

Our Observations

The themes we’ve observed:

• Data teams are not security experts. Nor do they want to be.
• The scale of users, use cases and data, juxtaposed with governance requirements is daunting. And they continue to increase in size and complexity.
• Everyone is a data user. It’s no longer just developers and data engineers accessing analytics databases. It’s IT, HR, marketing and others functions who access and potentially own a data domain.

The promise of a central data hub has been realized. But security is still catching up.

Feeling the Pain

What does this mean? Data teams today have a hand operated approach to managing security. This includes piles of SQL scripts, shared excel sheets, one-off Slack messages with data consumers and the inability to answer basic questions like “who has access to this?”

What we see is data teams looking for automation that allows them to meet the growing needs of the business, automate repetitive manual work, and provide “self-service” capabilities to their internal customers to affirmatively answer more complex questions like “are we secure?”

Who Are We?

Stepping back, Nick spent the last decade in the world of observability and devops, while Tyler spent his career focused on building security tools for developer teams.

We have both experienced operational complexity, or the mix of software and humans at scale, and how to solve these problems with cultivated software… and ideally fewer humans.

Stepping way back, we began our partnership in middle school over a joint passion for a different kind of software: Diablo II, Starcraft and Counter-Strike. Plundering dungeons, conquering alien galaxies and taking a few virtual bullets together has fully prepared us to pioneer enterprise software.

Charting a Path

As the stewards of a company's most valuable asset—its data—data teams do not have a security platform built for their needs. We want to change that.

Working with companies today, we’ve built a foundation of easy to build security and access controls, automated governance focused on the “principle of least privilege” and enabling self-service to empower a data team's internal customers.

The vision is putting security on autopilot for data teams.

Simply put, this means automating the operational security processes that data teams are tasked with today.

While we have a ways to go in our vision, we’ve been fortunate to partner with an amazing group of early customers to make a significant impact both in our mission and more importantly their businesses.

We’re also grateful to partner with tremendous investors on our mission including Notation Capital, 8-Bit Capital, CoFound Partners and V1.VC.

If these are problems that you’re working on, we’re offering select proof-of-concepts for teams using Snowflake (with support for other platforms in the future).

Checkout our spyglass.software and reach out to us at devs@spyglass.software!

GLHF,

Nick and Tyler.

Spyglass

Security on autopilot for data teams.