data security
It seems like every week there's some new high profile data breach. Credit card numbers, addresses, nude photos, Democratic National Committee emails—you name it, hackers have stolen it.
Amit Saha, the CEO of Saviynt Inc, the El Segundo-based security vendor, said the problem has only gotten worse during the pandemic, with so many people working from home and using their personal computers to access corporate networks.
For Saha and his company's 750 employees, that's created a lot of work—and an opportunity. Saviynt announced Monday that they've secured $130 million in capital financing from HPS Investment Partners and PNC Bank to expand their cybersecurity SaaS technology. It's a big bet that the pandemic-fueled demand can help them build a more global company.
The principle behind the tech: trust no one. "Whenever someone is presenting an identity—claiming who they are—we do not trust the credentials they provide," said Saha. "Rather, we factor in all the different attributes. Where are they logging in from? How frequently are they accessing? What are they trying to access? Based on all those factors we decide what is the right level of trust we need to impart."
This concept of verifying identities and controlling who has access to what is paramount to maintaining network security.
Data breaches can start, he said, with something as simple as a contract HVAC worker clicking on a suspicious link and inadvertently installing ransomware on his home computer. Suddenly, hackers have a portal to a corporate network.
"That contractor's access got compromised and that compromise, in turn, leads to compromise on some other access," said Saha. "The hackers are able to hop from one system to another until they got to the right set of resources, which in turn leads to breach of sensitive data or in some cases breach of your IP. The IP could be a movie…without naming names," he said in what seemed to be a nod to the infamous 2014 hack of Sony Pictures.
Saha said the funs will help the company expand to new geographic markets. The company has a strong presence in North America and India, and much of the new cash is earmarked to help them build up a presence in other countries.
Additionally, some of the funds will be used to invest in system integration partners like Deloitte, who help to install Saviynt's technology on corporate networks, many of which are cloud-based and require extremely fast response times and greater degrees of scalability than traditional on-premise networks.
The rest of the money will go towards research and development as the company seeks to bring new products to market that allow the company to verify human and machine identities across networks.
If the company has its way, their "Zero Trust" philosophy could help companies like Sony, or Facebook, or LinkedIn, or Yahoo, or Alibaba, or Marriott, or AdultFriend Finder, or Adobe, avoid another embarrassing breach.
"We are all about, 'how do we secure the person's access?'" Saha said. "How do we assure that people accessing that resource are the right people and that they're behaving the right way?'"
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Cloud computing company Fastly announced plans to acquire Culver City-based Signal Sciences for $775 million on Thursday. It's the largest enterprise exit in L.A., according to Andrew Peterson, the CEO of Signal Sciences.
Signal, founded in 2014, protects web applications from attacks and data breaches for clients like Duo Security, Under Armor and DoorDash. With breaches costing an average $3.86 million, preventing them has become imperative for many businesses.
"The main reason why folks are adopting us is because all of them are going through this type of digital transformation movement," Peterson said. "They're building more software and trying to build it faster. That's what we empower them to do."
Fastly provides content delivery services to websites and apps with customers such as TikTok, Vimeo, Pinterest and The New York Times. The addition of Signal will help boost its security portfolio.
"We've been really big fans of their technology from the beginning," said Peterson, who before creating Signal Sciences used Fastly to build security technology for Etsy.
"Their story is very similar to ours in the sense that their founding team was also practitioners before," he said. "They also saw firsthand some of the problems of trying to modernize technology stacks and focused on empowering developers and development technology teams in the process of building critical infrastructure."
Signal Sciences has seen a boost in demand recently as in-person retail dropped during the pandemic and companies that had put off plans to build a web presence decided they couldn't wait any longer.
Signal Science's last funding round came in February of 2019 when the company brought in $35 million, led by Lead Edge Capital. They currently employ over 150 and are looking to hire more.
Fastly is based in San Francisco-based but half of its employees work from around the world, and many are in L.A., Peterson said.
Under the terms of the agreement, Fastly will acquire Signal Sciences for $200 million in cash and approximately $575 million worth of Class A Common Stock, according to a statement.
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Cloud-based data security platform Open Raven announced Tuesday that it raised a $15 million Series A round four months after it emerged from stealth to announce seed funding.
The round was led by Kleiner Perkins as well as existing investors like Upfront Ventures, bringing its total capital raised to $19.1 million.
Open Raven is also backed by former Goldman Sachs Chief Information Risk Officer Phil Venables, who is also on the company's board of directors; RSA's former chief strategy officer Niloo Razi Howe; and another cybersecurity firm, Signal Sciences, whose CEO Andrew Peterson also calls L.A. home.
The company said in a news release that the new capital will be used to accelerate Open Raven's growth by expanding key functions in engineering, customer support, sales and marketing. The company also announced that Bucky Moore, a partner at Kleiner Perkins, also joined the Open Raven board of directors.
"The transition to the cloud and out of physical data centers means that data stores change more quickly than ever before – leaving numerous unanswered questions," said Dave Cole, co-founder and CEO of Open Raven, in a statement. "Security and cloud infrastructure teams are wondering, 'what AWS accounts don't we know about?' 'Is there any data at risk right now?'"
Cole was a former chief product officer for Crowdstrike and Tenable Network Security. His co-founder is Mark Curphey, who founded SourceClear and previously worked at Microsoft.
Cole told dot.LA in February that the company aims to combat the ever increasing number of data breaches that have sucked up consumer data with open source tools.
The platform maps all cloud data stores, identifies the data within them, pinpoints significant exposures and lets teams fix them before they become security incidents, according to Open Raven. It also allows for real-time monitoring.
Their security product is free — though users can opt to pay for a higher-powered version — and created to be friendly for those who aren't trained in data security, Cole said. Open Raven uses a 3D map that helps visualize their systems so users can clearly see where data is and whether it's secured.
"We're giving organizations the ability to take charge of their data and explore their environments from any angle in order to truly understand their risk of cloud data breaches," Cole said in a statement Tuesday.
A Gartner Inc. report found that by 2022, 75% of all databases will be on a cloud platform. The sprawl of data across cloud environments is not the scenario that more traditional data loss and breach prevention tools were designed to control.
"Today's data security problem bears little resemblance to the historical challenges that drove the creation of the last generation of products," said Moore. "Unlike legacy solutions...Open Raven solves for modern complexity with a platform purpose-built for the massive data exposure issue."
The company said Tuesday that its "Open Raven Community Edition" is now generally available and delivers real-time data leak monitoring to proactively uncover cloud data that's exposed before they become security incidents.
The platform shows every Amazon Web Services account and asset, for example, from every angle in a global 3D map that makes it easy for security teams to maintain compliance and prevent data mishaps, Open Raven said.
Open Raven's "preview edition" of its platform has been deployed since February at "numerous global organizations" in industries including automotive, gaming, financial technology and software, the company said.
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Do you have a story that needs to be told? My DMs are open on Twitter @latams. You can also email me at tami(at)dot.la, or ask for my Signal.- Open Raven Raises $15M to Keep Data Secure in the Cloud - dot.LA ›
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