In this segment of theCUBE After Dark, we delve into the dynamics of FedRAMP certification within the technology domain, featuring Irina Denisenko, the CEO of Knox Systems. During the conversation, hosted in collaboration with the NYSE Wired community and Open Policy, Denisenko discusses Knox Systems’ innovative approach to aiding organizations in achieving FedRAMP compliance efficiently.
Denisenko, CEO of Knox Systems, brings extensive expertise in the tech industry, particularly in managed federal cloud solutions. Joined by theCUBE hosts, Denisenko highlights Knox Systems’ journey from its roots in educational technology to becoming a pivotal player in FedRAMP certification. Knox Systems develops technology and strategic partnerships enabling rapid deployment of secure software solutions for federal use, aligning with recent governmental technology modernization initiatives.
The discussion uniquely illuminates the challenges and transformations in obtaining FedRAMP certification, particularly in a rapidly evolving threat landscape. Denisenko provides valuable insights on navigating compliance complexities and securing government data, as demonstrated through Knox Systems’ partnerships and innovative use of artificial intelligence and automation technologies. This dialogue, as articulated by Denisenko and reinforced by analysts from theCUBE, underscores crucial industry trends and strategic approaches to federal technology modernization.
Forgot Password
Almost there!
We just sent you a verification email. Please verify your account to gain access to
theCUBE + NYSE Wired @ RSAC 2025. If you don’t think you received an email check your
spam folder.
In order to sign in, enter the email address you used to registered for the event. Once completed, you will receive an email with a verification link. Open this link to automatically sign into the site.
Register For theCUBE + NYSE Wired @ RSAC 2025
Please fill out the information below. You will recieve an email with a verification link confirming your registration. Click the link to automatically sign into the site.
You’re almost there!
We just sent you a verification email. Please click the verification button in the email. Once your email address is verified, you will have full access to all event content for theCUBE + NYSE Wired @ RSAC 2025.
I want my badge and interests to be visible to all attendees.
Checking this box will display your presense on the attendees list, view your profile and allow other attendees to contact you via 1-1 chat. Read the Privacy Policy. At any time, you can choose to disable this preference.
Select your Interests!
add
Upload your photo
Uploading..
OR
Connect via Twitter
Connect via Linkedin
EDIT PASSWORD
Share
Forgot Password
Almost there!
We just sent you a verification email. Please verify your account to gain access to
theCUBE + NYSE Wired @ RSAC 2025. If you don’t think you received an email check your
spam folder.
In order to sign in, enter the email address you used to registered for the event. Once completed, you will receive an email with a verification link. Open this link to automatically sign into the site.
Sign in to gain access to theCUBE + NYSE Wired @ RSAC 2025
Please sign in with LinkedIn to continue to theCUBE + NYSE Wired @ RSAC 2025. Signing in with LinkedIn ensures a professional environment.
Are you sure you want to remove access rights for this user?
Details
Manage Access
email address
Community Invitation
Irina Denisenko, Knox
In this segment of theCUBE After Dark, we delve into the dynamics of FedRAMP certification within the technology domain, featuring Irina Denisenko, the CEO of Knox Systems. During the conversation, hosted in collaboration with the NYSE Wired community and Open Policy, Denisenko discusses Knox Systems’ innovative approach to aiding organizations in achieving FedRAMP compliance efficiently.
Denisenko, CEO of Knox Systems, brings extensive expertise in the tech industry, particularly in managed federal cloud solutions. Joined by theCUBE hosts, Denisenko highlights Knox Systems’ journey from its roots in educational technology to becoming a pivotal player in FedRAMP certification. Knox Systems develops technology and strategic partnerships enabling rapid deployment of secure software solutions for federal use, aligning with recent governmental technology modernization initiatives.
The discussion uniquely illuminates the challenges and transformations in obtaining FedRAMP certification, particularly in a rapidly evolving threat landscape. Denisenko provides valuable insights on navigating compliance complexities and securing government data, as demonstrated through Knox Systems’ partnerships and innovative use of artificial intelligence and automation technologies. This dialogue, as articulated by Denisenko and reinforced by analysts from theCUBE, underscores crucial industry trends and strategic approaches to federal technology modernization.
In this segment, we delve into the dynamics of FedRAMP certification within the technology domain, featuring Irina Denisenko, the CEO of Knox Systems. During the conversation, hosted in collaboration with the NYSE Wired community and Open Policy, Denisenko discusses Knox Systems’ innovative approach to aiding organizations in achieving FedRAMP compliance efficiently.
Denisenko, CEO of Knox Systems, brings extensive expertise in the tech industry, particularly in managed federal cloud solutions. Joined by theCUBE hosts, Denisenko highlights Knox Systems...Read more
exploreKeep Exploring
What exciting announcements were made at the RSA conference?add
What is Knox proud of building based on their years of experience running federal boundary compliantly with data?add
What is the pricing structure for deploying with Knox and what services does it include?add
>> Everybody, welcome back to theCUBE After Dark. We're here at the Embarcadero with Open Policy and the NYSE Wired community. Anshin also is one of our sponsors. This is where we gather. It's kind of an informal meetup on the pier. It's a very cool setting. Open Policy is a dot connector and a network extraordinaire. We're really pleased to have Irina Denisenko here. She's the CEO of Knox Systems, a company that helps organizations get FedRAMP certified. It's a pleasure to have you. Thanks for coming on.
Irina Denisenko
>> Thank you for having me.
Dave Vellante
>> So you guys just started last year. You're the CEO, but you explained to me off camera that you've actually got tech that you've developed in the last several years, better part, half a decade or so, and you had your hands on that. From a technical standpoint, tell us about the history of the company and why you started Knox Systems.
Irina Denisenko
>> Absolutely. Really, the origin of Knox goes back five years when I started a company called class.com, which is an EdTech company. I started it with the founder and CEO of Blackboard, very large EdTech company. And it was a very simple concept, adding teaching and learning tools to Zoom and Microsoft Teams.
Dave Vellante
>> You said EdTech.
Irina Denisenko
>> EdTech.
Dave Vellante
>> Education tech.
Irina Denisenko
>> Education.
Dave Vellante
>> Not ad tech.
Irina Denisenko
>> That's right.
Dave Vellante
>> EdTech some of the best minds of our generation trying to figure out how to get people to click on ads, not that. Education.
Irina Denisenko
>> Education.
Dave Vellante
>> Good for you.
Irina Denisenko
>> And in response to the pandemic, fast-forward two years, we were doing about 20 million in revenue selling just to colleges and schools. So pure EdTech. When the Air Force called us and they said, "Hey, we're the cryptologic unit of the Air Force. We saw your technology. We'd love to use it." We said, "Great." And then they said, "Well, before we buy, you're going to need to get FedRAMP'ed." And I said, "What's FedRAMP?" Well, it turns out FedRAMP is the set of security standards that a SaaS vendor has to meet in order to sell to the US government.
Dave Vellante
>> How long ago was this?
Irina Denisenko
>> This was three years ago.
Dave Vellante
>> Three years ago. You didn't know what FedRAMP was. Now, you've launched the company. You've funded it. Wow, that's awesome.
Irina Denisenko
>> That's right.
Dave Vellante
>> That's impressive.
Irina Denisenko
>> That's right.
Dave Vellante
>> We'll get into that.
Irina Denisenko
>> And long story short, FedRAMP is a very long, expensive process. It costs millions of dollars. It takes at least three years to go get, and then a million dollars a year to maintain it. And so I could not afford that amount of time or that amount of dollars at the time as a $20 million company. And so long story short, I went out and found a managed cloud provider who was already hosting Adobe's federal cloud. And I called them up and I said, "Hey, could you also host my application?" And they said, "Well, we haven't done that before, but let's try."
And lo and behold, six months later, we had Class.com in that federal boundary. Class was FedRAMP'ed. We won the Air Force contract. We won an Army contract thereafter. And it really transformed the business. Fast forward to how did Knox come about. Well, at the end of last year, the new administration made it very clear that they were going to push for modernization of the federal government in terms of technology. And I said, "Well, look, there's no way you're going to be able to modernize with commercial off-the-shelf software if you can't secure that software."
And so we said, let's bring this tool that we have, which is this fast FedRAMP tool to market. And that's why we started Knox.
Dave Vellante
>> Yeah. So your website says FedRAMP in 90 days.
Irina Denisenko
>> That's correct.
Dave Vellante
>> That's fast given what you experienced. So what's the tech behind it? How are you able to achieve such a rapid acceleration in time to compression?
Irina Denisenko
>> The technology is a managed federal cloud that has been running for the last 10 years continuously. So this cloud was stood up in 2014. It's been running continuously both across FedRAMP and the DOD version of FedRAMP which is called DISA. We are impact level four, which is very challenging to get. And essentially what it means is that we run the production environment for our customers. So our customers come in, they park their production environment for federal in our cloud, and we are responsible for managing it. Ultimately, that means that they have two production environments now. One for their commercial, which they continue to manage, and one for federal, which we manage.
Dave Vellante
>> Okay. So you have this idea. You solved your own problem, essentially. How did you fund the company? I think you just did a raise.
Irina Denisenko
>> Yes.
Dave Vellante
>> What can you tell us about that?
Irina Denisenko
>> Yeah, absolutely. First of all, we're running profitably, and it's not so common in the Silicon Valley world, but we're very, very lucky to have some really terrific customers, including Adobe, Spacelift, who we just announced at RSA, Tovuti, who we also just announced at RSA, and many others. In addition, we're funded by phenomenal folks out of first-hand VC, Simon Chan, and quite a few others.
Dave Vellante
>> So you've got this evolving threat landscape, geopolitical tensions. We just did a survey with our friends at ETR. It showed that it's a huge number. I think it was 43% of the respondents had changed their spending to accommodate concerns over geopolitical tensions. A large percentage, 20 or 30% had actually seen attacks from this landscape. So you've got that going on. You've got NIST frameworks. You've got CISA. You have the very rapidly changing environment. How do you help your customers make sure that whatever they do with FedRAMP is future-proofed?
Irina Denisenko
>> That's a great question. Ultimately, it comes back to how are we securing government data at rest and in transit, right? That's what FedRAMP is. That is ultimately what matters. And what we ensure we do is we're staying always up-to-date on what is the latest technology to ensure, not just that we're delivering the most cutting-edge technology tools to federal agencies, such as AI tools, AI agents, and so on, but how are we securing those tools? And really our partnership with Spacelift that we're launching at RSA today is a case in point of that. Spacelift is an infrastructure's code, observability and orchestration product suite that allows us to manage the configuration of every single resource in a very big complex environment with code, right? With automation. That is so crucial, and it's things like that that really make the difference.
Dave Vellante
>> Let's go to the news. You've referenced it a couple times, but double-click on the hard news that you have here.
Irina Denisenko
>> Absolutely. There's a number of really exciting announcements. We came into RSA with two exciting announcements on partnerships. One with open policy who we're here with today and they're doing fantastic work, and we're so excited to be a part of it. As well as with RapidFort, which is a software security supply chain, security company. Very important to harden images, and that's exactly what they do. And then today and tomorrow, we're announcing that Tovuti, one of the largest learning management providers has chosen Knox to FedRAMP them. And that spacelift, one of the largest infrastructure's, code providers and orchestration tool providers has also chosen us to FedRAMP them. And we're so proud to serve them, and we're so proud to be able to offer such cutting-edge technology now will be accessible by the federal government.
Dave Vellante
>> Nice. Congratulations.
Irina Denisenko
>> Thank you.
Dave Vellante
>> How do you deal... And maybe it's not a problem, but I'm just thinking about these entrenched systems with all this technical debt. How do you accelerate around all that hairball spaghetti mess?
Irina Denisenko
>> That's a great question. One thing that's so important is really leaning into infrastructure as code. And I'm sorry to get so technical, but at the end of the day, it is about automation. It is about being able to scan an entire environment and not have to manually understand what's going on, but really leverage automation with infrastructure as code, with AI agents to be able to tell you where are the misconfigurations. One thing that we're really proud of at Knox is we've built an AI auditor based on the 10 years of running this federal boundary compliantly of data that we have, which is there's only 400 folks out there that are FedRAMP'ed total. So it's a very small group of us that have this. We took all of that data and we created an AI auditor to constantly be scanning our entire boundary. That's what allows us to bring folks. Adobe, for example, is they're not a spring chicken. They're a mature company. There's a lot of tech debt. And even managing that environment took a lot of automation. It took a lot of AI agent analysis to understand where were the misconfigurations, how do we solve them rapidly and bring this into the boundary?
Dave Vellante
>> So that ties into the business model. So you've got an ongoing service that-
Irina Denisenko
>> That's exactly right....
Dave Vellante
>> people can subscribe to. How do you price that? Is it a consumption based model? Is it a...
Irina Denisenko
>> Great question. So we price very, very transparently and very flat fee. So we, as I said, are a managed cloud. We take on all of the compliance, all of the hosting of your federal boundary. So that comes out to 350K a year for a company to deploy with Knox. We pass through all of the hosting costs. So it doesn't matter if your hosting cost is a buck a month or $10 million a month, that's all passed through back to you. And for the cost of two DevOps engineers sitting in the US, you're getting a full federal run program, both FedRAMP and DISA.
Dave Vellante
>> And it complies with the whole continuous monitoring initiative.
Irina Denisenko
>> That's exactly right.
Dave Vellante
>> That's awesome. Irina, thanks so much. Congratulations.
Irina Denisenko
>> Thank you so much.
Dave Vellante
>> Really great to have you on.
Irina Denisenko
>> Thank you.
Dave Vellante
>> All right. We'll see you soon. All right. Keep it right there, everybody. This is Dave Vellante. John Furrier is also here. This is theCUBE After Dark with the NYSE Wired and Open Policy. We'll be right back right after this short break.
