9 Promising Cloud Security Startups To Watch
The future belongs to cloud computing, but only with the help of strong security. Here are 9 cloud security startups IT managers may want to consider.
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Funding for cyber-security companies is either slowing down or speeding up, or it's doing both at the same time.
According to CB Insights, the deals and the dollars are flowing less freely than they did in 2015. The research firm anticipates some $3 billion being invested across more than 300 deals this year, but that's less than the $3.75 billion poured into 336 deals in 2015.
Companies focused on enterprise data and network security continue to attract investor interest. Also, companies that offer predictive intelligence and smartphone security continue to get funded. The most significant cybersecurity funding so far this year has gone to Cylance ($100 million), Mobi Magic ($100 million), and LogicMonitor ($130 million), the research firm said in July.
Yet in May, Lux Research said venture funding for cyber-security will reach $400 million in 2016, up from $228 million in 2015.
These figures aren't necessarily contradictory, however. Lux Research is looking at "cyberphysical security startups," a different slice of the pie than CB Insights considers. Lux Research is focused more on pervasive computing and IoT.
[See 7 Ways Cloud Computing Propels IT Security.]
While funding priorities may be shifting, market demand for cyber-security overall appears to be on the rise.
Gartner said the worldwide market for information security reached $75 billion in 2015, a 14% increase from the year before. The firm anticipates further growth in areas such as IoT security.
A Feb. 2016 report from The SANS Institute found that, where security spending as a percentage of overall annual IT budgets was above the lowest range (0% to 3%), security budgets are growing over the 2014 to 2016 period.
The SANS Institute findings indicate that financial services firms expect security to get 10% to 12% of the IT budget in 2016, up from 7% to 9%. It found that government organizations expect to see security account for 7% to 9% of the IT budget this year, up from 4% to 6% in 2015. In other sectors, security spending is expected to remain flat, apart from education, where it is projected to decline this year.
Spending on cloud infrastructure should increase by 15.5% in 2016 to reach $37.1 billion, according to IDC. It stands to reason that some of that will be invested in security.
According to Morgan Stanley, cloud security spending accounts for only a small portion ($4 billion) of overall cyber-security spending. But the firm sees cloud security growing much faster than on-premises solutions in the years ahead, moving from 12% of security spending in 2015 to 20% of security spending in 2019.
There are well over 100 cloud security startups hoping for a piece of the IT budget. Here are a few IT managers may wish to consider.
Founded in 2013, Illumio provides adaptive security that spans data centers and cloud environments. The company's Adaptive Security Platform allows customers to map application dependencies to help understand risk, to segment workloads for compliance, to accelerate application migration, and to manage user access, among other capabilities.
Threat Stack offers cloud-based or on-premises monitoring to provide customers with visibility into their network. It presents a dashboard that displays data on workloads, infrastructure, vulnerability management, threat data, and compliance reporting.
SecureDB, a two-year-old company based in Herndon, Va., offers encryption-as-a-service. It provides developers with a set of APIs that allow them to implement encrypted identity management for web, mobile, and IoT applications. Breaches happen to the best of companies. But the risk can be mitigated through data encryption.
Cymmetria, a two-year-old company headquartered in Tel Aviv, provides security through deception. Its MazeRunner system, which can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud, allows IT personnel to create breadcrumbs -- as in fake data, like credentials -- that lead to decoy virtual machines designed to gather forensic data about threats in order to immunize the rest of the network.
Harvest.ai, founded in 2014 and led by former NSA personnel, applies artificial intelligence to data loss prevention. The company's MACIE Analytics platform integrates with on-premises or cloud systems to watch for anomalous behavior patterns during logins, remote network access, and document access. It augments the information made available through SIEM systems by providing additional contextual detail based on machine learning.
CloudMask, founded in 2013, protects user data in cloud applications like Gmail and Dropbox. When a user creates data, Cloud Mask encrypts the data and sends it to the application. The application provider thus cannot access the data. Authorized users can decrypt the data, by using a private key, to collaborate or simply access a file.
Three-year-old Evident.io offers vulnerability and risk management for applications running on Amazon Web Services. Its software looks for misconfigured security settings and provides assistance with remediation. The Evident Security Platform can also be integrated with popular DevOps tools like Splunk.
Bitglass, founded in 2013 and based in Campbell, CA, provides data protection for cloud services and mobile devices, along with identity and network management capabilities. It also offers breach discovery capabilities and insight into shadow IT.
Rather than bothering with signature-based detection or behavioral heuristics to weed good software from bad, Fireglass, an Israeli startup that emerged from stealth this year, assumes everything is malicious. It virtualizes the web browser and renders webpages as images rather than HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. The result is a much more secure environment.
Rather than bothering with signature-based detection or behavioral heuristics to weed good software from bad, Fireglass, an Israeli startup that emerged from stealth this year, assumes everything is malicious. It virtualizes the web browser and renders webpages as images rather than HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. The result is a much more secure environment.
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