‘7 Minutes’ With Fortanix Vice President of Products Ketan Shah

**Editor’s Note: “7 Minutes” is a feature where we ask channel executives from startups – or companies that may be new to the Channel Partners audience – a series of quick questions about their businesses and channel programs.**

Cybersecurity vendor Fortanix, which launched its first partner program early this year, is growing in all regions domestically and internationally.

Fortanix provides runtime encryption, which keeps data encrypted even when in use by applications. Its platform allows applications to process and work with encrypted data. Its Self-Defending Key Management Service (SDKMS) appliance is a cloud-ready hardware security module (HSM)-as-a-service offering.

Last week, the company revealed that it was named a “cool vendor” in Internet of Things (IoT) security by Gartner, which said “the ability to encrypt main memory with customer-controlled keys will be useful in cloud environments when handling both secrets and concerns about main memory being physically accessed, captured by another virtual machine (VM) or snapshotted.”

“We see being named a Gartner cool vendor as continuing the tremendous industry validation we’ve seen this year,” said Ambuj Kumar, Fortanix’s co-founder and CEO. “Fortanix is successfully helping organizations across a trio of compelling use cases – secure cloud adoption, trust in connected IoT devices, and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) data privacy compliance.”

Fortanix’s Ketan Shah

We asked Ketan Shah, Fortanix’s vice president of products, about his company’s channel proposition and its plans for the future.

Channel Partners: Tell us what customers love about your product or service. What’s the secret selling sauce?

Ketan Shah: Fortanix’s solution is very relevant to the top-of-mind initiatives today for most organizations. The adoption of public cloud is creating new data protection challenges, specifically for encryption and key management. Fortanix SDKMS enables organizations to seamlessly adopt public, hybrid or multiple cloud for their applications while retaining strict control over their data protection policies and encryption keys.

Customers cite the following reasons of what they like about our SDKMS solution:

• SDKMS delivers HSM-grade security for keys and secrets without any tradeoffs to simplicity and scalability. The solution offers cloud-like simplicity for management and operations, and supports a variety of interfaces including RESTful APIs for modern cloud and mobile applications.
• SDKMS is powered by runtime encryption and Intel SGX, delivering unmatched privacy such that keys and secrets are protected even when in use and no one other than the authorized user can access the keys even if the infrastructure is compromised or if the infrastructure is an untrusted cloud environment.
• SDKMS offers unified HSM, key management, tokenization and runtime encryption plug-ins for custom cryptography. All the capabilities are offered with the ease of use of a single solution and an all-inclusive consumption model with strong (total cost of ownership) benefits.
• Customers have flexible deployment options; they can either run the solution on-premise[s] using an appliance or sign up for a Fortanix-powered global SaaS service.

CP: Describe your channel program — metal levels, heavy on certifications, open or selective, unique features? Do you work with masters and/or distributors?

KS: The current focus and value are to partners that have a security practice and want to increase that business. We launched the program given two significant go-to-market/product developments: strong demand for SDKMS … (and) a channel-friendly SDKMS appliance.The FX2200 is an ideal building block to implement SDKMS in a private cloud or as a managed service.

The Fortanix Partner Program is flat in structure, with contract options for resellers and MSPs, including a referral program. The Fortanix program offers partners …