Pictured: Hussein Badakhchani from Deutsche Bank and Waratek's Prateep Bandharangshi in San Francisco last night
SAN FRANCISCO – Dublin-headquartered tech company Waratek has won a key deal with Deutsche Bank to deliver security to its legacy IT infrastructure by putting real-time security inside the Java Virtual Machine.
The deal was announced during the Oracle OpenWorld/JavaOne event in San Francisco this week.
Waratek was a start-that emerged from both Australia and Stanford University in California that was lured by Enterprise Ireland to develop as a start-up in Dublin.
The company, which currently employs 35 people in Harcourt Street, took part in the New York and London Fintech accelerator programme that was run by Accenture, Barclays, Deutsche Bank and Morgan Stanley.
The company’s technology has been dubbed RASP (Run-Time Application Self Protection) by analyst firm Gartner. It can detect and block application logic (i.e. SQL Injection), unpatched vulnerability and network layer attacks in Java apps.
Gartner believes this new approach – placing security monitoring and enforcement inside the application – will eventually be commonplace.
Global innovator
Waratek was recently voted Top Global Innovator by the SWIFT member community and senior innovation executives of global financial institutions, as the most promising Innovator likely to shape the development of the financial sector.
Hussein Badakhchani, vice president Lead Domain Architect (Global Technology) at Deutsche Bank explained to Siliconrepublic.com: “We sponsored the Fintech programme and all we had to do was mentor start-ups and give them experience of how we worked. But what we saw with Waratek impressed us greatly and we immediately wanted to take it further.
“We saw that their use of technology was novel and innovative. The core value for Deutsche Bank was that it allowed us to be innovative and secure legacy applications.
“Waratek’s technology means we will be able to deliver mitigate the risks of maintaining legacy IT systems, which can’t be easily done.”
Waratek’s director of Client Security Solutions Prateep Bandharangshi explaind that Waratek’s technology’s purpose is to enable innovation in the Java virtual machine (JVM) and in the case of Deutsche Bank it can secure Java applications, from logic attacks like SQL and injection and code vulnerabilities before patches are available, by placing real-time security monitoring and enforcement in the JVM itself.
“Waratek started in Australia backed by early stage investment in 2009. We were largely building up the patent portfolio when Enterprise Ireland were instrumental in encouraging us to locate and accelerate in Ireland. They made it easy to establish in Ireland and we’ve been going from strength to strength ever since,” Bandharangshi said.
