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With data breaches in large companies continually in the news—never mind all the smaller companies and individuals who have been hit—it’s no surprise that a spate of new security companies is coming to the fore.
One of them, Illumio, which does workload-centric security, announced April 14 it has landed some serious venture capital backing. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company said it has closed a $100 million Series C financing round.
The new funding brings the security company’s total investment to more than $142 million in the past 27 months. Participating in the round are new investors BlackRock Funds and Accel Partners, joined by existing venture investors Formation 8, Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst.
Perhaps even more impressive is the list of well-known and respected individuals who are writing checks: Microsoft Chairman John W. Thompson, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang are three of them.
Co-founder and CEO Andrew Rubin said Illumio will use the new funding to meet increasing demand for its Adaptive Security Platform, invest in R&D to drive additional platform expansion, grow its sales and marketing efforts and fuel international expansion.
Illumio emerged from stealth mode last October with the promise of enabling a new policy-driven future for IT workloads.
Illumio claims its Adaptive Security Platform (ASP) provides the first continuous delivery system for security. The product programs the correct security policy and manages enforcement across applications, workloads and processes as they are provisioned, operated and moved in any data center or private and public cloud infrastructure.
CTO and co-founder P.J. Kirner told eWEEK’s Sean Michael Kerner that he saw a gap in the market between how security works in static and distributed data center environments. In modern distributed data centers, workloads move around and scale up and down on a regular basis, he said. As such, there is a need for security to be just as agile as the workloads, which is where the Illumio ASP comes into play.
The ASP is made up of several components, including the Virtual Enforcement Node, which is a piece of software that runs on the data center workload. The Virtual Enforcement Node has the deployment context of the workload, including both server and network elements.
“Understanding the context of what is happening inside of workloads is not something you can get at from just the network point of view,” Kirner said.
Morgan Stanley, Plantronics, NTT and Creative Artists Agency (CAA) are among the enterprises now using ASP, the company said.
“Perimeter security solutions leave 80 percent of the data center and cloud exposed and vulnerable to attacks that often lead to costly data breaches,” Rubin said. “Our market traction demonstrates that Illumio ASP is delivering security across all computing resources, infrastructures and applications.”