Copyright TechCrunch
For any company using software, there is often a difficult balance between patching systems as quickly as possible to prevent cyberattacks, while also making sure the updates don’t break how those systems work. That’s where the startup CyDeploy wants to help. The company’s founder, Tina Williams-Koroma, explained to TechCrunch that the idea of CyDeploy is to use machine learning to observe and record the most important systems that a company runs, create a replica of them, and let the company using CyDeploy run tests on what she called a “digital twin” before deploying them on the real live systems. “We record how users are using applications and systems on a regular day-to-day basis,” said Williams-Koroma, who explained that CyDeploy can record and labels what happens on a computer’s screen and the machine learning comes in to “learn to interpret and automatically label.” And, to make sure there aren’t any hallucinations, there is still a human in the loop, a customer’s system administrator, who, as she put it, “has the expertise to know what they’re looking at or expecting” and checks that the machine learning labeling is correct. Williams-Koroma spoke to TechCrunch ahead of the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, where CyDeploy is a Top 20 finalist in Startup Battlefield. The advantage CyDeploy provides is that it can help write test scripts more quickly, she said. “You deploy it into your digital twin environment, have the sysadmins run these functional test scripts that reflect normal day-to-day uses,” Williams-Koroma said. “And then they can see from there what the issues might be.” Company customers can choose to use CyDeploy’s large language model that runs within the company’s environment to prevent proprietary from leaving its servers, or use OpenAI’s model, in which case information would go outside of the company’s systems or cloud. Williams-Koroma said for most customers, the systems they’d want to use CyDeploy on would be so-called servers and critical machines, rather than users’ workstations, “Tier 1 applications where changes need to be made quickly because of security reasons, but not too quickly because of operational reasons.”
