Neon Tech Case Study
In a fast-evolving cloud security
landscape, Panoptica helps Neon
maximize engineering velocity and
secure its cloud at scale.
Cloud-native is at the core of who
Neon is and how they provide their
fully managed serverless Postgres
capabilities. Their unique architecture
separating storage and compute
underpins their ability to improve
developer experience and save costs.
Neon needed a cloud security
platform partner they could trust to
help uphold their mission and provide
security at hyper-scale for their 10+
Kubernetes clusters.
© 2023 Panoptica Neon Tech Case Study | 1
The Challenge
In the fast-evolving landscape of Industry: SaaS Technology
cybersecurity, the need for a comprehensive
Neon is an open-source, fully-managed
solution that covers technologies like
Postgres as a service backed by an
Kubernetes while supporting SOC2 Type 2 impressive list of top-tier investors,
compliance is crucial. Neon was on including GGV Capital, Khosla Ventures,
the hunt for a comprehensive tool that could General Catalyst, and Founders Fund. By
effectively cover their requirements separating storage from compute, Neon
within their AWS Cloud Environment and offers autoscaling, database branching,
one-click start, and bottomless storage
kubernetes infrastructure and do so, at
to give developers a simple, reliable, and
scale. Neon is a developer-first company powerful experience. With a generous free
and needed a cloud security partner tier, developers can quickly start
that was similarly focused on bringing and efficiently scale at will.
the maximum value to developer and
security engineering teams with minimal
effort required. Panoptica, Cisco’s Cloud
Application Security tool, met the complex
requirements of Neon’s search.
“
As the only security engineer at Neon, I wanted to check for any
issues that could make our systems vulnerable. As a hacker with 8
years of pentest and bug-bounty background, I was curious about
finding a tool like Panoptica that would help me see if there were any
weak spots for an attacker to exploit. When I first saw the Panoptica
demo, I was really impressed. It looked
great, with the attack path analysis to
visualize possible attack scenarios.
The tool is very simple to use and quite Busra
comprehensive. That’s been a huge Demir
help for us in understanding and fixing
security vulnerabilities.”
© 2023 Panoptica Neon Tech Case Study | 2
The Solution
Choosing Panoptica for Neon was initially largely driven by the organization’s need for
SOC 2 Type 2 compliance, with an impending audit just around the corner. The tool
emerged as a reliable vulnerability management solution, aligning seamlessly with the
requirements of the upcoming audit and coverage across their AWS infrastructure.
Neon was also able to get up and running within minutes, and Panoptica’s accuracy
in identifying vulnerabilities, citing the background information on attacker behavior,
provided invaluable insights. Panoptica’s dashboard enables the identification of
misconfigurations that might be otherwise overlooked.
Busra Demir, who is the Security Engineer at Neon, loves some of the key features
that Panoptica has to offer, including the visual representation of attack factors
through graphs, which provides a clear understanding of critical and interconnected
risks and appreciates the root cause analysis capabilities. Busra commented that
the tool effectively addresses dozens of vulnerabilities, including dependencies and
misconfigurations, offering a valuable perspective on how attack paths operate.
Moreover, Busra noted the rarity of false positives, underscoring the tool’s reliability.
For Neon, one of Panoptica’s core
strengths also lies in its ability to
provide out of the box remediation
Guardrails which Busra and her team
The Results
can use and modify, simplifying
the process of otherwise manually
• 90% noise reduction
building remediation for of hundreds • 90% improvement in MTTR
of disparate issues and expanding
the team’s efficiency and efficacy in • 100% K8 coverage
remediation efforts.
“Panoptica provides efficiency Panoptica has proven to be a game-changer
by fixing a single root cause that in securing Neon’s Kubernetes infrastructure.
triggers an ability to address multiple From providing insightful attack path analysis
vulnerabilities connected to this to simplifying root cause analysis and
core issue. This approach not only supporting compliance initiatives, the tool
streamlines the resolution process has exceeded expectations. Panoptica has
but also enhances the overall security been able to address complex cybersecurity
posture,” says Busra. challenges for Neon, making it an invaluable
asset in their security tool arsenal.
© 2023 Panoptica Neon Tech Case Study | 3
