CloudKnox launches Cloud Security Platform to control overprivileged identities
CloudKnox Security launched with $10.75 million in funding led by ClearSky Security with participation from Dell Technologies Capital and Foundation Capital.
The investment comes in conjunction with the launch of the CloudKnox Cloud Security Platform, which is purpose-built to detect, remediate and prevent risks across hybrid-cloud infrastructure. The company will use the funding to grow its engineering, sales and marketing teams.
“Enterprises today are focused on protecting their cloud environments by using tools that provide visibility into anomalous activity and then reacting to it,” said Jay Leek, Managing Director at ClearSky Security and former Blackstone CISO.
“Security leaders should approach the security of their cloud environments differently by getting ahead of the risks. CloudKnox is providing a platform that allows enterprises to do that by addressing the biggest unmanaged risk from the over-provisioning of privileges.”
The CloudKnox Cloud Security Platform provides enterprises with a way to reduce the risks against compromised credentials, accidents and insider threats by utilizing Activity-Based Access Controls.
This enables customers to not only detect identities (service accounts, APIs, bots, contractors or employees) with unused privileges based on actual activities versus static roles, but also remediate by revoking unused privileges with one click.
The CloudKnox platform prevents risks as it learns what activities identities are performing and enables organizations to revoke or grant privileges based on actual needs.
“As we scale our Enterprise infrastructure, it’s becoming clear that having visibility into how many identities can touch the infrastructure, what privileges they have and what they actually do with them is critical,” said Prakash Kota, CIO of Autodesk.
“Managing privileges based on static roles is too complex and tedious and creates the need for a solution that CloudKnox fulfills perfectly. Without the need to write a single line of script or understand multiple private and public cloud authorization models, CloudKnox uniquely and simply enables us to effectively enforce the principle of least privilege at the infrastructure level within our environment.”
CloudKnox’s platform centralizes identity privilege authorization across all private and public clouds, such as VMware vSphere, Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
The platform also integrates with existing IT service workflow management tools for approval workflows. It can also run in read-only mode while still providing all the remediation benefits by creating scripts and policies that administrators can apply manually.
“Today’s dynamic infrastructure demands a different approach to manage risks,” said Balaji Parimi, CEO and founder of CloudKnox Security.
“One key stroke can deploy thousands of cloud workloads and can also destroy thousands of workloads and take down a business. Our approach is built on our belief that enterprises need a single cloud security platform that goes beyond visibility and provides a simple and flexible way to remediate and prevent risks without impacting productivity and trust. We look forward to working with our customers to accelerate adoption of the CloudKnox Cloud Security Platform.”