The Story of Tamnoon: Building the Future of Cloud Security Through Human-Centric Solutions

The name “Tamnoon” started with a child’s fascination with sea creatures. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, co-founder Marina Segal revealed how her young son’s interest in undersea animals helped name a company that would reshape cloud security remediation.

“We described what Tamnoon is going to be,” Marina recounts. “We said that Tamnoon needs to be intelligent, it needs to involve many different processes and solutions, and it needs to be something that can scale.” The answer? An octopus – or “tamnoon” in Hebrew.

From Ukraine to Innovation

Marina’s journey to founding Tamnoon began long before the company’s inception. After immigrating to Israel from Ukraine, she spent her first three years in the IDF, where she served in a specialized role. “I’m coming from a very niche service, serving as an ISO office, training different people in the army service who needed to do an ISO training,” she explains. This early exposure to compliance frameworks would later influence her approach to cloud security.

The path to entrepreneurship took another turn when Marina moved to North America in 2014, first landing in Canada before settling in the United States. The transition brought unexpected challenges, particularly in business communication. “Those people, they don’t share what they think, and I need to figure out in between the lines, and it’s so hard,” Marina recalls of her early days in the U.S. “I actually needed to learn from scratch on how to write emails so I don’t offend anyone with my answers.”

Finding the Gap in Cloud Security

Marina’s experience in risk management and compliance at Deloitte had sparked an enduring interest: “My passion was around taking processes, optimizing them, and bringing technology into day to day tasks of people.” This focus would eventually lead her to identify a critical gap in the cloud security market.

While working at Credit Karma during their infrastructure cloud migration, Marina encountered the problems that would inspire Tamnoon. She observed that while the industry excelled at detection, it struggled with the crucial next step: efficient remediation and prevention.

Building Through Customer Validation

Tamnoon’s early days were marked by an unconventional approach. Rather than following the typical startup playbook of building a product first, they began by providing services. “First three months were very different from the second three months,” Marina shares. This hands-on experience proved invaluable for validating their approach and refining their offering.

The company’s ethos of solving real problems rather than adding to them is reflected in their distinctive branding. In an industry dominated by dark themes and fear-based messaging, Tamnoon chose green colors and positive language. “We are in the greens, we are solving problems. We are not adding any overhead on the companies. We are actually their trusted advisor,” Marina explains.

A Human-Centric Approach to Security

At its core, Tamnoon’s innovation isn’t just technological – it’s philosophical. While many security companies focus solely on automation, Tamnoon recognized the continuing importance of human expertise. “We are bringing managed services to the customers. We don’t believe that technology can be managed on its own. We still need humans to operate it,” Marina emphasizes.

This approach positions them uniquely in the market. “We are on the crossroads between the MDRs and CNAPs,” Marina notes, creating a new category that combines the best of both worlds.

The Road Ahead

Looking to the future, Tamnoon’s vision is clear and ambitious. “Our vision is very simple. We are the MDR for the CNAP space. We are building that remediation and prevention process that can scale the security experts and that is where we are headed,” Marina states.

This vision represents more than just business growth – it’s about fundamentally changing how organizations approach cloud security. By combining advanced technology with human expertise, Tamnoon is working to create a future where security isn’t just about finding problems, but solving them efficiently and preventing their recurrence.

The story of Tamnoon, from its origins in a child’s sea creature fascination to its position at the forefront of cloud security innovation, demonstrates how sometimes the best solutions come from looking at familiar problems from a completely new angle.