Akeero

Security architecture audits

Akeero is a cloud security platform and a virtual security auditor for app and network architectures. Founded in 2020 by security and financial engineers from world-leading tech corporations, this Ireland-based project raised $1.2M in a pre-seed funding round just within a year.

Using the auditor, a developer draws an app’s scheme (including the database, API gateway, client application, etc.), indicating the properties of each node of the scheme, and the platform provides a report consisting of any detected vulnerabilities. Once a threat has been identified, Akeero presents users with a number of mitigating controls.

Building the MVP ASAP

The Akeero team had conceived an ambitious task—they wanted to build an MVP as early as possible in order to showcase it to investors and potential clients. The team needed a convenient and attractive professional interface and unique features for collaborative work.

The application would also need to work in the browser and we assumed a high level of information density. So Evil Martians suggested a visual diagram composer with optimistic UI and real-time features.

The Akeero project has become one of our most outstanding customer projects for our team in terms of design and frontend. Instead of building typical “forms,” we created an intelligent and complex custom interface with posh, glassy elements featured in the design, and utilized cutting-edge CSS technologies as part of the frontend development.

Diagram composer: the full picture of an app’s architecture

How to describe a complex architecture with hundreds of interlinked elements? The easiest way is to draw it as a diagram.

Back in the day, security specialists drew such diagrams using graphical tools (like draw.io, for instance). But such tools were created for pure visualization and were not fit for linked structures. So, for example, illustrations of arrows going from one node in a scheme to another are just that—illustrations of arrows; if you export the whole scheme, you don’t end up with a formally connected graph of nodes that Akeero’s algorithm is able to work with.