A Control Plane for Living Infrastructure

As an R&D leader, you live through change. Organizational change. Product change. Technology change. Over the years I kept coming back to a quote that always felt uncomfortably true, because it frames change as the default state, not the exception:

"People don't change" it drives scientists crazy. Because change is literally the only constant in all of science. Energy, matter, it's always changing. Morphing. Merging. Growing. Dying. It's the way people try not to change that's unnatural. The way we cling to what things were instead of letting them be what they are. The way we cling to old memories instead of forming new ones. The way we insist on believing, despite every scientific indication, that anything in this lifetime is permanent. Change is constant. How we experience change, that's up to us.”
 

Meredith Grey, Grey’s Anatomy, Season 7, Episode 1

It’s a bit ironic, but this is exactly how I think about modern cloud environments. 

They are living infrastructure. Constantly changing, continuously accumulating. Services evolve. Teams refactor. New paths appear. Ownership shifts. The environment grows, not in one dramatic moment, but through thousands of small changes each week.  

And those changes are concrete. A PR merged. A Terraform plan applied. A new image pushed. A Helm chart updated. A permission granted. A policy tweaked. A network path opened. 

Security has to live within that reality. Not concentrated in one place, not bolted on after the fact. Woven into the system, present at every stratum, reinforcing what sits above and below. Independent yet connected. 

 Layer by layer, structure becomes trust. That is why I’m building Native. Native is the control plane for living infrastructure. 

The Cloud Already Has the Building Blocks 

Cloud providers already offer powerful security capabilities, but they are complex, fragmented, provider specific, and constantly changing. Most enterprises cannot fully harness them, especially once they operate in more than one cloud. 

Clouds ship with plenty of security primitives. What’s missing is the connective tissue that turns scattered controls into a consistent, maintained security architecture. 

This is the gap Native exists to close. 

Not by replacing what companies already use, and not by pretending one lever solves everything. Native is a control plane that helps teams get more from what is already native in their clouds. 

Secure by Design Is a Living Infrastructure Problem

Secure by design is often talked about like a destination. Implement the guardrails, check the box, move on.

But real environments don’t stay still. Policies are living things. Clouds change daily. Providers introduce new services and new defaults that create new paths, sometimes better, sometimes riskier. Secure-by-design isn’t overhead. It’s the work. It’s how you keep the system legible as it grows, and how you keep intent intact while everything evolves.  

I joined Dome9 in 2014, early in the cloud security era. I saw firsthand how quickly cloud shifts from “a project” to the company’s computing substrate. In 2018, Dome9 was acquired by Check Point. After the acquisition, I led cloud security products at Check Point, helping scale CloudGuard as cloud became the enterprise default. 

Across those years, one lesson kept repeating. 

Security succeeds when it becomes part of how infrastructure is built and operated. Not because a tool tells you what happened. Not because someone heroically triages a queue. Because the environment itself is shaped so the safe path is the natural path. That is the heart of secure by design. It’s not about building walls. It’s about building form. 

What Native Is 

Native is the cloud security control plane for the enterprise: unifying and operationalizing built-in security controls across AWS, Azure, GCP, and OCI to enable secure-by-design, multi-cloud architectures through a single, policy driven platform.

That sentence matters because it says what we are, and what we are not.

Native is about action and operationalization, but it is not about automating everything or blocking everything. Living infrastructure demands judgment. Some controls should be strict. Some should guide. Some should monitor. Some should roll out gradually as confidence grows. 

Native exists because this next phase is ready to be built. 

Born Into a New Era

When I started at Dome9, everyone talked about “born in the cloud” companies. Today, we’re being born into something else entirely: the AI era, where the way you build, ship, and operate software is changing as fast as the infrastructure beneath it. 

For me, this is not abstract. At Native we’ve felt the difference firsthand. Things that used to take weeks can now move from idea, to prototype, to something real in days. But the deeper shift isn’t speed, it’s leverage. AI is becoming part of the production system: how you explore a problem space, shape an architecture, pressure test assumptions, generate options, and validate them with customers. The bottleneck moves from syntax to judgment. From keystrokes to taste. From “can we implement this” to “should we build this.” 

That also changes roles, and collapses the distance between them. Product and R&D stop handing work back and forth and start operating as one loop: customer truth, architecture, implementation, learning, repeat. Engineers aren’t just executing tickets, they’re making product calls because they hold the constraints and the possibilities. Product isn’t just writing requirements, it’s embedded in the build, shaping abstractions, defaults, and rollout paths. And in a company like ours, where the product touches the real shape of cloud infrastructure, that fusion isn’t optional. It’s how you move fast without breaking reality. 

I’m personally committed to building this way. We’re going to adopt these changes aggressively, because this is how you compound advantage: you learn faster than the environment changes, you turn insight into working systems, and you keep raising the bar on what “good” looks like. The best engineers today deserve a place that evolves with the craft instead of trying to preserve how things used to be. 

A Note of Thanks

I also want to end with gratitude. To our early design partners and first customers, thank you for trusting us early and for pushing the product with real world problems and unfiltered feedback.  

To YL Ventures, General Catalyst, Merlin and Ballistic, thank you for believing in what we are building and backing us to go build it.  

To my co-founders Amit Megiddo and Gal Ordo, thank you for the partnership and the standard we hold ourselves to every day.  

Thanks to Zohar Alon for connecting me with Amit and Gal and helped us get started, And to our team, thank you for the craft, the urgency, and the care.  

Finally, to my wife and kids, thank you for the patience, the perspective, and the love that makes all of this possible.