Olfeo's four seasons: a retrospective on the year 2024

Following a thousand-year-old tradition whose origins are lost in the mists of time, the beginning of each year is an opportunity to take stock of the year that has just ended and allow ourselves a moment to reflect on what has been accomplished.

InOlfeo's long history, few years have been as pivotal as 2024. We could talk for hours about everything we have achieved this year, but just like the four seasons, we will focus on four major milestones.

1. Road to SSE

While 2023 was the year we officially launched the SaaS version of our web security gateway, after several years of development and beta testing, 2024 was the year of ramp-up and scaling. With many customers migrating from the "On Premise" version to SaaS, we have confirmed our observation of the exponential adoption of cloud-based cyber solutions. The reasons for this are well known: ease of installation and operation, controlled resources (technical and human), etc.

But in a post-COVID context, we could only observe the widespread adoption of remote working. Companies have increasingly adopted cloud-based services, rendering traditional security approaches and enterprise network architectures insufficient.

To address these challenges, our solution needed to evolve in the direction of Security Service Edge. SSE is not necessarily new in absolute terms, especially in the United States, but we have seen rather limited or even non-existent adoption, especially among our partner companies, i.e., mid-sized businesses and public entities. The reason was simple: complexity. Anglo-Saxon SSE solutions, while certainly effective, come with a portfolio of features that are often impossible for medium-sized organizations to ingest and use effectively. It is to meet this need that we have chosen to position our SSE, making advanced security features such as SWG and CASB accessible and easy to use to manage the risks of shadow IT and the loss of sensitive data with DLP.

It is a structure that we are building step by step, while being aware that we must act quickly to align ourselves with the growing security needs of our users.

2. Phishing campaigns

In 2024, phishing remained the number one risk for all organizations and, in most cases, the primary gateway for successful cyberattacks.

With phishing techniques becoming increasingly sophisticated, employee training and awareness are essential to ensuring the sustainability of a business. Indeed, the majority of successful attacks result from human error, whether it be clicking on a fraudulent link or passing on sensitive information to malicious third parties.

Olfeo was already helping its customers with its cyber risk awareness solution, which included a training catalog offering more than 110 customizable, interactive, and fun training modules to educate and train employees using a MOOC approach. Customers were very satisfied but also needed to test and validate what they had learned.

We therefore developed and deployed a phishing campaign module for testing employees.

Through phishing tests and realistic simulations containing concrete examples in video form, users can familiarize themselves with the techniques used by cybercriminals. In this way, they reduce the risk of compromise, in particular by learning to identify the different forms of phishing, malware, ransomware, and identity theft.

3. On-Premise V7

Despite our recent focus on our SaaS solutions, Olfeo On-Premise remains the solid foundation of our success and continues to protect a large proportion of our customers. It was therefore natural to continue investing heavily in its technical and functional development.

Version 7 of Olfeo On-Premise was a major evolution, bringing both functional changes and a profound overhaul "under the hood" in order to position On-Premise for the long term. The result of nearly 24 months of development, this version is the most advanced and secure we have ever offered. With v7, we have made significant improvements in security, ease of installation and use, performance, and maintainability.

• Revised interface: More secure and intuitive, the interface now includes delegation of administrator management and authentication to your directory.
• Full update: All technical components have been reevaluated and updated to their latest available versions to ensure optimal performance.
• Focus on the essentials: We refocused the product on key features while simplifying the code base.
• New delivery format: Version v7.7 is now provided as an .ova virtual machine image, compatible with major hypervisors and installable in just 3 minutes.
• Increased stability: We have streamlined internal services to offer an even more stable and easy-to-maintain system.

And that was just the beginning. The V7 roadmap is packed full, and new features will be arriving soon in 2025...

4. Categorize API for OEMs

For several years, Olfeo has been offering its URL databases and white-label SaaS applications to software publishers who want to leverage the quality, comprehensiveness, and detailed categorization of our databases. Today, publishers of cybersecurity, SD-WAN, and network quality analysis software use our databases.

To give you some key figures, our URL database contains over 22 million domains and IP addresses, and boasts a recognition rate of 99%. As for the SaaS application database, it contains nearly 7,000 applications with their associated categories and hundreds of millions of associated IP addresses.

Until recently, we offered our databases through file integration. However, as adoption grew and data volumes increased, we had to find integration mechanisms that were more scalable, faster, and capable of providing instantly updated content.

Hence the birth of the Categorize API (and its little brother, SDK integration).

Written in Go and built around the protobuf standard, the API and SDK are designed to offer seamless integration with your software to enable new use cases in cybersecurity, network efficiency, or marketing.

These new integration methods enable faster, more efficient, and larger-volume consumption of intelligence from our two databases.

Off-season: Olfeo Saas Lite

And since there are no longer any seasons (at least in Paris), I can naturally add a fifth season or point: Olfeo Saas Lite.

The little sister of Olfeo SaaS, this new solution focuses on DNS filtering in SaaS, offering the best compromise between ease of deployment and administration and filtering quality, while authenticating users and logging actions.

Particularly suited to certain use cases, such as education, Olfeo SaaS Lite integrates seamlessly with existing infrastructures, such as EntraID (formerly Azure Active Directory), while implementing secure access based on the Zero Trust concept. Thanks to its advanced features, such as named log management and SafeSearch filtering, the solution guarantees complete protection, regardless of the size of the organization.

Conclusion

2024 will remain a landmark year in Olfeo's history, a year in which we successfully rose to the challenges of an ever-changing digital landscape. Whether it was the growth of our SaaS solution, the consolidation of our On-Premise offering with version 7, or the creation of new opportunities via the Categorize API and Olfeo SaaS Lite, we pursued a clear goal: to offer our customers high-performance cybersecurity solutions that are accessible and tailored to their needs.

Beyond technology, we are driven by a vision of cybersecurity that doesn't just follow trends, but anticipates them and adapts to meet the real needs of organizations. This ambition drives us to innovate, simplify, and maintain close relationships with our partners and users.

As 2025 approaches, we are determined to continue on this path, strengthening our solutions and responding to the new challenges that lie ahead. At Olfeo, every year is a new opportunity to build a more secure future for our customers, and 2024 has been a decisive step in this mission.

Thank you to our employees, partners, and customers for accompanying us on this journey. Together, let's continue to turn challenges into opportunities.