These start-ups are focusing on security in cloud services and mobile devices
Going into 2014, a whirlwind of security start-ups are looking to have an impact
on the enterprise world. Most of these new ventures are focused on securing data
in the cloud and on mobile devices. Santa Clara, Calif.-based Illumio, for
example, founded earlier this year, is only hinting about what it will be doing
in cloud security. But already it's the darling of Silicon Valley investors,
pulling in over $42 million from backer Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst,
Formation 8 and others.
The cloud’s lure is easy to see. More businesses continue to adopt a wide range
of cloud services -- whether software-as-service, infrastructure-as-a-service or
platform-as-a-service. That means the enterprise IT department needs more
visibility, monitoring and security controls for what employees are doing and
evidence their data is safe. In addition, employees today increasingly use
smartphones and tablets they personally own for work in “Bring Your Own Device”
mode, leading to other management and security questions. When there are
perceived security “gaps,” start-ups see opportunities, as the 12 firms we
identify here do.
Security is increasingly delivered not as on premises software or hardware but
at least partly if not wholly as a cloud-based service. Gartner is predicting
security-as-a-service will grow from about $2.13 billion now to $3.17 billion in
2015.
Gartner: Cloud-based security as a service set to take off
With all of that in mind, here’s our slate of security start-ups worth watching
in the near future:
Adallom is based in Menlo Park, Calif., but has its research and development
roots in Israel, where its three co-founders, Assaf Rappaport, vice president of
R&D Roy Reznik and CTO Ami Luttwak have backgrounds in the Israel cyber-defense
forces. Adallom — a word which means “last line of defense” in Hebrew — is
taking on the problem in monitoring user actions related to
software-as-a-service (SaaS) usage. The firm’s proxy-based technology announced
this month is offered to the enterprise either as a security service in the
cloud or server-based software for on premises.
The goal is to provide real-time analysis and a clear audit trail and reporting
related to SaaS-based application usage by the enterprise. The monitoring can
allows options for automating or manually terminating sessions or blocking
content download. Though not wholly similar, its closest competitors could be
considered to be two other start-ups, SkyHigh Networks and Netskope. The venture
has gotten $4.5 million in funding from Sequoia Capital.
AlephCloud hasn’t yet made its software and service called AlephCloud Content
Canopy generally available, but its purpose is to provide controlled encryption
and decryption of documents transmitted business-to-business via cloud-based
file synchronization and sharing services such as Dropbox, SkyDrive and Amazon
S3. The company was founded in 2011by CEO Jieming Zhu and CTO Roy D’Souza. Zhu
says Content Canopy works by means of the “federated key management” process
AlephCloud developed that can use existing enterprise public-key infrastructures
used in identity management. For the end user, though, who is permitted to
retrieve and decrypt the encrypted document via Dropbox or SkyDrive, it’s all
transparent. AlephCloud says its “zero-knowledge” encryption process means the
company never holds the private encryption key. AlephCloud will first be
supporting PCs, Macs, and Apple iOS devices, and Android next year, and specific
file-sharing services. Zhu says the underlying technology can be expanded
further to other applications as well. AlephCloud has received $9.5 million in
venture-capital funding, including $7.5 million from Handbag LLC and the
remainder from angel investors.
BitSight Technologies has a simple proposition. It’s not uncommon for companies
to want to try and evaluate the IT security of another business before entering
into an e-commerce arrangement where networks may be interconnected in some way.
BitSight, co-founded in 2011 by CTO Stephen Boyer and COO Nagarjuna Venna, has a
security “rating” service to do this, though there are limits on how far it can
go at this point. The BitSight approach, says vice president of marketing Sonali
Shah, relies on an analysis of Internet traffic by BitSight sensors on the
Internet to detect if the company’s IT assets, such as computers, server or
network, have been commandeered by threats such as botnets or denial-of-service
attacks. But she acknowledges there’s not yet a way for BitSight to determine
what security issues might arise in a company’s use of cloud services.
Cambridge, Mass.-based BitSight has received $24 million in venture-capital
funding from investors that include Menlo Ventures, Globespan Capital Partners,
Commonwealth Capital and Flybridge Capital partners.
Defense.net is focusing on stopping denial-of-service attacks aimed by attackers
at both enterprises and cloud service providers. Founded by its CTO Barrett
Lyon, who started another anti-distributed denial-of-service firm called
Prolexic in 2003, Defense.net relies on a cloud service without the need for an
appliance to mitigate against large-scale DDoS assaults. Many in the industry
say DDoS attacks are growing worse in scale and number. For his part, Lyon says
he thinks the average DDoS attack is probably 16 times larger and “significantly
more sophisticated than it was a year earlier.” Defense.net has received $9.5
million in funding from Bessemer Venture Partners.
Illumio, founded by its CEO Andrew Rubin earlier this year, is still in stealth
mode, maintaining a discrete silence about its intentions. But the little hints
sprinkled across its website indicate the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company’s
focus is likely to be tackling cloud-based security with an emphasis on
virtualization. Illumio has brought in former VMware techies and execs. As for
Rubin himself, he was formerly CEO at Cymtec Systems, a security firm providing
the means for visibility, protection and control by the enterprise of Web
content and mobile devices, plus a means for intrusion-detection analysis.
Illumio has received more than $42 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz,
General Catalyst, Formation 8 and others.
Lacoon Mobile Security has come up with a sandboxing approach to detect zero-day
malware targeting Android and Apple iOS devices by means of a small lightweight
agent that examines mobile applications through behavior analysis and a process
tied to the Lacoon cloud gateway. The start-up was founded by CEO Michael
Shaulov, vice president of research and development Ohad Bobrov, and Emanuel
Avner, the CFO. The company has its R&D arm in Israel and its headquarters in
San Francisco. It’s backed by $8 million in venture-capital funding led by Index
Ventures, plus $2.7 million in angel investing, including from Shlomo Kramer,
CEO at Imperva.
Malcovery Security, based in Pittsburgh, was basically spun out in 2012 from
research on phishing done at the University of Alabama in Birmingham, according
to its CTO Greg Coticchia. Targeted phishing attacks can have disastrous
outcomes when devices are targeted to infiltrate organizations and steal data.
Coticchia says the Malcovery technologies offered to businesses include ways to
identify phishing websites and a service that can detect phishing e-mail. The
company’s founders include Gary Warner, director of research in cyber forensics
at the University of Alabama, and the start-up has received about $3 million in
funding from the university.
Netskope wants to help businesses monitor how their employees are using
cloud-based applications and apply security controls to it, such as giving IT
managers the ability to block data transfers or receive alerts. The Netskope
service can apply security controls to about 3,000 different cloud-based
applications, whether they be SaaS, PaaS or Iaas. The Netskope service is meant
to let IT divisions get a grip on cloud usage and avoid the “shadow IT” issue of
business people initiating cloud services without informing IT at all. The Los
Altos, Calif.-based start-up was founded in 2012 by CEO Sanjay Beri along with
chief architect Ravi Ithal, chief scientist Krishna Narayanaswami, and Lebin
Chang, head of application engineering teams, all who bring tech industry
experience ranging from Juniper to Palo Alto Networks to VMware. Netskope has
amassed $21 million in venture funding from Social+Capital Partnership and
Lightspeed Venture Partners.
PrivateCore is a crypto-based security play, focusing on making use of the
central processing unit (CPU) as the trusted component to encrypt data in use.
PrivateCore has come up with what it calls its vCage software that relies on the
Intel Xeon Sandy Bridge CPU for secure processing through means of Intel Sandy
Bridge-based servers in cloud environments, first off in IaaS. The challenge in
processing encrypted data is “the problem with having to decrypt to do
processing,” says Oded Horovitz, CEO of the Palo Alto, Calif.-based start-up he
co-founded with Steve Weis, CTO, and Cal Waldspurger as adviser. The vCage
approach, based on Intel CPU Sandy Bridge, makes use of the Intel Trusted
Execution Technologies and Advanced Encryption Standard algorithm to perform the
processing in RAM. This can be done with Intel Sandy Bridge because there’s now
about 20MB of cache available, he points out, enough to get the job done. The
data in question is only unencrypted in the CPU. This encryption approach is
being tested now by IaaS providers and some enterprises, and PrivateCore expects
to have its first product in general release early next year. The start-up has
received $2.4 million in venture capital from Foundation Capital.
Skycure is all about mobile-device security, with its initial focus on Apple iOS
iPhones and iPads. It recently introduced what’s described as an
intrusion-detection and prevention package for mobile devices, which Skycure’s
co-founder and CTO Yair Amit says relies on the Skycure cloud service for
security purposes. He says the goal is to prevent and mitigate any impact from
attackers exploiting configuration profiles on mobile devices. Skycure, based in
Tel Aviv, Israel, was co-founded by CEO Adi Sharabani and the company has
received about $3 million in venture-capital funding from Pitango Venture
Capital and angel investors.
Synack was founded by two former National Security Agency (NSA) computer network
operations analysts, CEO Jay Kaplan and CTO Mark Kuhr. According to them, the
Menlo Park, Calif.-based start-up is bringing together security experts with
expertise in finding zero-day bugs in software, particularly in websites and
applications of Synack customers. “We pay researchers for vulnerabilities
found,” explained Kaplan last August as Synack officially debuted. He says bug
bounty rates typically run a minimum of $500 to several thousand for serious
vulnerabilities in databases, for example. Synack says it has cultivated
relationships with several bug hunters around the world, including at the NSA,
who would be available to take on specific assignments. Synack has received $1.5
million in venture-capital funding from a combination of investors that include
Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Greylock Partners, Wing Venture Partners,
Allegis Capital and Derek Smith, CEO of start-up Shape Security.
Threat Stack, founded by CEO Dustin Webber with Jennifer Andre, wants to give
enterprises a way to know if hackers are breaking into Linux-based servers that
they may use in their cloud services. To monitor for hacker activity, the
start-up’s Cloud Sight agent software for Linux needs to be installed on the
Linux server under administrative control in the cloud environment, says Webber.
“We look for the behavior of the hacker,” he points out, noting the enterprise
will get an alert if a hacker break-in is underway and a measure of forensics
about incidents can be obtained if needed. Cloud Sight could also be potentially
used by cloud service providers as well but the initial focus is on monitoring
for the enterprise, he says. Threat Stack, founded in Cambridge, Mass., in 2012,
has obtained $1.2 million in funding from Atlas Venture and .406 Ventures. The
start-up is yet another example of why there’s new energy directed toward
finding ways to provide visibility, monitoring and security for businesses
adopting cloud services.
