Cloudessa, Inc.

Joe Ryan, CEO and Co-Founder

Joe drives Cloudessa’s overall business direction, strategy, and execution.

Joe has 20+ years of executive management and leadership experience at public and start-up companies in the security software business.

Prior to co-founding Cloudessa, Joe was general manager of the Identity & Policy Software Business Unit at Juniper Networks (JNPR); he had also been Vice President, Advanced Technology Sales, for Juniper.

Previously, Joe was Vice President at Funk Software, Inc., a leading provider of network access security products until its acquisition by Juniper Networks. Joe holds a Bachelor of Science Degree from Syracuse University, Whitman School of Management.

Stan Kladko, CTO and Co-Founder

Stan is a cryptography and IT security expert, and a seasoned entrepreneur.

Prior to founding Cloudessa, Stan was a founder of Aspect Labs, a security lab affiliated with NIST Cryptographic Module Validation Program and International Common Criteria Arrangement for IT Security and NSA, where he spent 7 years analyzing and consulting on the security of commercial products.

Before that he was an early engineer at Ingrian Networks (acquired by Safenet), and was an early member of Java VM team at Sun Microsystems. Stan did research at Stanford University and Los Alamos National Lab. He holds a Ph.D. in Physics from Max Planck Institute, Germany, and received the Otto-Hahn Medal of the Max Planck Society.

Paul Funk, Technical Advisor

Paul is the founder of Funk Software, a company that was well-known in the 1980s for its popular spreadsheet printing products Sideways and Allways.

In the mid-1990s, Funk Software created Steel-Belted RADIUS, a market-leading AAA server; in the early 2000s, the company introduced Odyssey, one of the first WiFi clients to implement emerging security standards such as 802.1X and 802.11i.

Paul is the co-author of the EAP-TTLS authentication protocol, which has been widely implemented by major WLAN vendors.

In 2005, Funk Software was acquired by Juniper Networks, where Paul held the title of Chief Security Officer until he left the company in 2007.
He has a Bachelor of Science in Humanities from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and did graduate work in English Literature at the University of Chicago.