The economic ceiling has begun crashing down on us, and tech is starting to feel the pain. More than 500 tech employees in Israel were laid off in a single day on July 24.
Though most of those fired in the last month were reported to be abroad rather than in Israel, industry-wide concerns about what’s to come are real. On the global scale, it’s not just early-stage and mid-sized start-ups in the bubble’s crosshairs, as the likes of Meta and Netflix have also announced hiring freezes or layoffs.
Who is it affecting?
But not all tech fares badly in times of economic uncertainty.
While riskier tech segments like crypto, which has lost more than $2 trillion in value in a matter of months, are guaranteed to stagnate in the coming months, cybersecurity is one of those rare sectors in tech that are seen as simply essential. Tel Aviv-based Sternum’s autonomous security for IoT devices has so far served as a glowing example of that.
The company unveiled a free license last week, giving IoT companies an opportunity to deploy Sternum for free on any OpenWrt device—indefinitely. It’s the first time such a platform is being offered free of charge, though Sternum also provides a premium license for RTOS devices, which the more tech-savvy readers will know as Zephyr, FreeRTOS, VxWorks, and Micrium, as well as all other embedded Linux distributions.
The idea, said Sternum’s CEO and Co-Founder Natali Tshuva, is to let Sternum’s product speak for itself.“Integrating IoT security is perceived to be complicated to deploy and detrimental to the performance of the very devices it aims to protect,” she said. “We decided to open our platform to the OpenWrt community to show that it doesn’t have to be this way. By providing robust no-strings-attached security for home users and small businesses, our goal is to drive a paradigm shift and pave a way for a more standardized, secure, and competent IoT ecosystem.”
"By providing robust no-strings-attached security for home users and small businesses, our goal is to drive a paradigm shift and pave a way for a more standardized, secure, and competent IoT ecosystem."
Sternum’s CEO and Co-Founder Natali Tshuva
The move to launch free OpenWrt security and observability comes on the heels of Sternum’s hiring of security bigwig Amit Serper as security research director. He formerly held the same position at Akamai Technologies, the US-based content delivery network (CDN) giant.
Serper is the man responsible for the famous antidote to the Russian “NotPetya” ransomware attacks in 2017, during which more than 800 Ukrainian companies were infected with the digital virus.
Sternum also added Sam Curry, chief security officer at Cybereason, and Ashish Larivee, formerly VP of product at the same company and CPO at Onapsis Inc., to its advisory board. To top that off, Sternum’s advanced security and observability platform seized the top spot at the industry-leading IOT Solutions World Congress 2022 event.
As the market continues to terrify tech workers across the globe, it will be interesting to see if security tech remains relatively stable compared to other sectors. Hopefully, tech as a whole will make a comeback not many are expecting and we wont have to concern ourselves with that