Datacenter, Cloud Security Platform Gets a Boost
Some big numbers are flying around as technology investors sink more venture capital into startups promising to beef up security in datacenters and cloud infrastructure.
The latest example comes from Illumio, the developer of a security platform for datacenters and the cloud that is designed to be independent of network or hypervisor. The company, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., said Tuesday (April 14) it raised an additional $100 million in its latest funding round. In 27 months, the security specialist has raised a whopping $142 million in venture capital, highlighting how cloud security has emerged as a top priority for enterprises.
Separately, the cloud security specialist announced support for extending dynamic policy enforcement to popular enterprise and open source load balancers.
Among the investors in the latest Illumio funding round were Microsoft Chairman John Thompson, Salesforce.com CEO Mark Benioff and Yahoo! founder Jerry Yang. Other new investors included BlackRock Funds and Accel Partners.
Illumio's security platform focuses on what is claimed to be the 80 percent of "perimeter security" approaches that leave datacenter and cloud infrastructure vulnerable to breaches. The company's platform is designed to visualize application traffic and provide dynamic policy and enforcement to bare-metal servers, virtual machines and application containers running in datacenters and public cloud infrastructure.
Among Illumio's customers are Morgan Stanley, NTT and Creative Artists Agency.
The company said it would use the latest cash infusion to meet demand for its security platform as well as investing R&D for platform expansion. The company also plans to expand its international operations.
Investors said Illumio security platform addresses the technology gap faced by enterprises as they seek to secure datacenter and public cloud computing infrastructure. The software platform administers security policies while managing enforcement across applications, workloads and processes as they are provisioned in private and public clouds as well as datacenters.
Meanwhile, Illumio announced a partnership with application delivery specialist F5 Networks to support its security products on the Illumio security platform. The partner agreement announced this week integrates F5's L3/L4 firewall technology and traffic manager with the Illumio platform to automate real-time security across a wider range of applications and workloads, the partners said.
Along with support for F5's datacenter security products, Illumio also said it would support open source NGINX load balancers. The move is intended to allow customers to turn load balancers into an additional policy enforcement tool behind the traditional datacenter security perimeter.
Illumio also said it could now deliver security policies and enforcement down to the process level in workloads, adding that its "nano-segmentation approach" for application isolation and control burrows down to individual processes on a single host machine. Hence, the company claims, if any component of an application changes, the security platform automatically adapts security policies to cover effected workloads or processes.
