Cyber-security firm Cylance has had a busy week, announcing a $120 million funding round on June 19, an alliance with KPMG on June 20 and new products including CylanceHYBRID and CylanceON-PREM on June 21.
The new funding comes as Cylance seeks to expand its market presence, as competition in the cyber-security sector continues to grow. Rival firm CrowdStrike announced that it raised a $200 million round the same day Cylance announced its funding. The new products and partnership with KPMG also seek to extend Cylance’s reach.
At the core of Cylance’s product portfolio is its CylancePROTECT platform, which provides endpoint security capabilities. CylanceHYBRID and CylanceON-PREM provide organizations with new deployment options for CylancePROTECT’s capabilities.
“CylanceHYBRID deploys as a virtual appliance to a customer-sourced server,” Steve Salinas, product strategist at Cylance, told eWEEK. “Once installed, it receives and distributes security data and policy changes from the cloud.”
CylanceHYBRID allows a closed network to remain closed, while opening only a single connection from CylanceHYBRID to the cloud, Salinas said. He noted that administration is still performed by the Cylance Cloud Management Console.
CylanceHYBRID facilitates security-related communication between the cloud and local infrastructure without exposing the local network to the wider internet, according to Salinas. He added that the standard configuration of CylancePROTECT requires endpoints to individually communicate with the cloud for updates. CylanceHYBRID requires only a single connection to the cloud as it downloads the endpoint updates once, then distributes them over the internal network.
In contrast, CylanceON-PREM is a stand-alone deployment and management console for the CylancePROTECT security product.
“This is intended for isolated or air-gapped networks and allows security admins to manually update agents without compromising their network by connecting to the internet or cloud services,” Salinas said.
Cylance technology has been used in air-gapped deployments in the past. In July 2017, Dell announced a new version of its Endpoint Security Suite that is able to protect air gap environments. That suite included a version of Cylance’s endpoint protection.
“The Cylance technology that is part of Dell’s solution is the CylancePROTECT product and provides AI-driven malware prevention,” Salinas said. “The Cylance ON-PREM solution is a management and deployment solution for CylancePROTECT that is deployed and managed on-premises. ”
CylancePROTECT
The core CylancePROTECT platform has been improved over the course of 2018 with multiple new capabilities. Among the features added is a script management capability that Salinas said provides protection from malicious scripts running on devices. The script management updates help to improve Cylance’s capabilities for fileless malware attacks, he said. Cylance has also improved its memory exploit prevention capabilities in 2018.
“Improvements to this capability enable CylancePROTECT to protect an endpoint from a threat that takes advantage of memory exploits and prevent malicious payload from being loaded into memory,” Salinas said.
KPMG Partnership
In addition to growing the deployment options for its technology, Cylance announced a new alliance with consulting firm KPMG. Salinas said KPMG is using Cylance technology and services to enhance KPMG’s practice areas.
Additional global alliance partners are also building out unique Cylance-based offerings, he said. Those alliances include Unisys, Fujitsu, Verizon and HCL, with others soon to follow.
“These alliances also provide third-party validation of the Cylance solution to our mutual customers and prospects,” Salinas said.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.