“I am highly driven, and my goals are to build excellent technology that solves real challenges and encourage more women to pursue careers in tech to know it’s possible,” This motivational proverb best defines success as well, according to Gal Helemski, Co-founder, CTO & CPO of PlainID, at Tel Aviv, Israel.
Gal’s Career Story
As a member of the Israeli army, Gal began her career. Gal started as a developer and development trainer in the Israeli Defense Force’s prestigious Mamram computing unit in parallel to earning her Bachelor of Science degree in physics and computer science from Bar-Ilan University. During that time, she learned and loved solving tech challenges and teaching in that sector. After six years in the army, Gal joined Memco, one of Israel’s leading security startups. She chose to be in a customer-facing position and combine technology with customer engagement. When Memco was acquired, Gal joined CyberArk, combining technology leadership and a customer-facing position. Cybersecurity, identity, and access management were part of her career. Gal continued consulting and specializing in those areas up until she co-founded PlainID.
A career in technology has allowed Gal to combine her passion for technology with her interest in problem-solving, and her crucial moment was being a tech trainer. Training people requires you to simplify concepts, provide a way for others to understand what you want to teach them, and share knowledge and the approach to understanding. “This is something I love doing and am good at. So, it was a direct path to positions that require training and bridging tech to its usage,” says Gal.
The inspiration behind their business concept
PlainID was co-founded by Gal Helemski and Oren Harel in Israel several years ago. At the time, Oren was the deputy CISO of the largest bank in Israel, and Gal consulted on Cyber security and IAM implementations. They came to understand there is a significant gap in the market, and that is around Authorization management and control. Existing solutions were too challenging to manage and couldn’t provide the necessary coverage. They decided to focus on simplifying Authorization management by leveraging policies that can express the business context of the Authorizations. Authorization policies dictate who can access digital assets, data, applications, services, etc. And by making that process more accessible, organizations and their data can be better protected from internal and external threats.
Triumph over Challenges
According to Gal, one of the fascinating stories is about our seed round. At the time, we were self-funded, and money was running out. We were looking for funding and got our first term sheet. It was so exciting, as the amount exceeded our expectations. So, we flew to Silicon Valley to complete the deal. However, something didn’t feel right. Oren, my co-founder, started saying we needed to drop this. We were in a situation where we needed more money, had already celebrated the term sheet with the team, and were stuck in the airport with no refund options. We chose to drop the deal and changed direction to New York. There was another option there. We were to present to the IT team of one of the largest financial organizations. If we pass, we’ll get the term sheet. All weekend we prepared for the Monday meeting. And it was amazing. We presented to a group of 20 tech professionals on the 43rd floor of their building. When we landed back in Israel, the term sheet was there. Sometimes, you must follow your gut and be ready to make bold decisions.
PlainID: The Authorization Company
PlainID offers a centralized Authorization platform with distributed enforcement capabilities powered by policy-based access control (PBAC). The main objective is to take the difficulty out of Authorization and enable organizations to protect better their data, services, applications, and any digital asset.
The PlainID Authorization Platform offers advanced management capabilities, such as graphical policy-building interfaces, approval workflows, audit and reporting, investigation capabilities, and more. Additionally, the distributed enforcement is enhanced by our Authorizers™ layer, which provides ready-to-use integrations with leading technologies in the areas of Data, such as Snowflake, Denodo, and Google BigQuery. Microservice & APIs, such as Istio, Apigee, AWS API Management, and many more.
Their upcoming releases of the Authorization platform would continue to simplify the consolidation of management of Authorization policies into a single control plane. The platform has ready-to-use authorizers to connect easily with the existing technology stack. This is very exciting for them since they are taking Authorization another step forward to a higher level of management and control, enabling organizations to implement identity-first security and zero-trust all the way through. It will result in higher security controls and much better visibility of who can address what and when which is the fundamental question of Authorization.
As PlainID’s Chief Product Officer, I’m proud to be in a leadership position for a company comprising more than 40% of women. Representation matters and I’m grateful that my work shows that it is possible to succeed as a woman in technology.
Gal: Encouraging women to pursue careers in tech
While integrating Women-in-Technology, Gal says, “there should be no difference between women and men entering entrepreneurship, so I advise everyone to understand what they like to do, where they shine and do their very best. Dare to try, focus, and excel. Specifically, for women, there is no difference between our abilities and men’s; we can do the same on their level. Understand this, and work from here to build your career path. We must dare more and should not be afraid of failing, which is part of the process of succeeding. We grow from a young age with barriers to trying because we can fail. Dare to remove those. I believe this to be the main challenge for the majority of women.”
“I believe the industry is growing to be more inclusive of women pursuing careers in technology, but more can be done. Unfortunately, women only make up 11% of the global cybersecurity industry, with less than 1% of them in C-suite leadership positions,” she continued.
“I believe that women entrepreneurs should speak more, demonstrate what is possible to be in a leadership role, and achieve work-life balance. I did so by stepping away while my children were young and taking less demanding positions. When I felt it could work for my family and me, I chose to pursue what I always wanted and founded PlainID with Oren Harel, my co-founder,” she added.
Future Vision
PlainID will grow significantly in the coming two years as the market will continue to adopt the basics of identity first security and zero trust.
The last decade was owned by Authentication, now is the time for Authorization. The reason is digital transformation, migration to the cloud, and identity-first security initiatives, over the past few years. Organizations have been investing in identity and Authentication. Providing secure access was the key. The challenge now shifts toward Authorization – secure access to what? Authorizations’ role is connecting identities to digital assets, enabling the secured identity to access whatever the organization’s Authorization policies define.
This transformation drives a new paradigm known as “identity-first security,” which focuses on the integrity of the user identity as the core of an organization’s security strategy. This approach is designed to ensure that the individual is authorized as the “right user” throughout the user’s digital journey and granted the right level of access to the appropriate digital assets.
Whether accessed over the cloud or on-premises, identity-first security is now a prerequisite for zero-trust architecture.
“Personally, I see myself as a strong contributor to this growth, together with the excellent team we have at PlainID,” assures Gal.
