network management
Auto Added by WPeMatico
Cybersecurity startup Panaseer raises $26.5M Series B led by AllegisCyber Capital
Panaseer, which takes a data science approach to cybersecurity, has raised $26.5 million in a Series B funding led by AllegisCyber Capital. Existing investors, including Evolution Equity Partners, Notion Capital, AlbionVC, Cisco Investments and Paladin Capital Group, as well as new investor National Grid Partners, also participated. Panaseer has now raised $43 million to date.
Panaseer’s special sauce and sales pitch amount to what it calls “Continuous Controls Monitoring” (CCM). In plainer English that means correlating a great deal of data from all available security tools to check assets, control gaps, you name it.
As a result, the company says it can identify zero-day and other exposures faster, or exposure to, say, FireEye or SolarWinds vulnerabilities.
Jonathan Gill, CEO, Panaseer said: “Most enterprises have the tools and capability to theoretically prevent a breach from occurring. However, one of the key reasons that breaches occur is that there is no technology to monitor and react to failed controls. CCM continuously validates and measures levels of protection and provides notifications of failures. Ultimately, CCM enables these failures to be fixed before they become security incidents.”
Speaking to me on a call he added: “The investment, allows us to scale our organization to meet those demands of customers with a team of people to implement the platform and help them get tremendous value and to evolve the product. To add more and more capability to that technology to support more and more use cases. So they’re the two main directions, and there’s a market we think of tens of thousands of organizations of a certain size, who are regulated or they have assets worth protecting and a level of complexity that makes it difficult to solve the problem themselves. And our Advisory Board and the customers I’ve spoken with think maybe there are barely 20 companies in the world who can solve this problem. And everybody else gets stuck on the fact that it’s a really difficult data science problem to solve. So we want to scale that and take that to more organizations.”
And why did they pick these investors: “I think we picked them and they picked us, we’ve been on that journey together. It takes months to find the best combination. The dollars are all the same when it comes to investors, but I think they can help improve as an organization and grow just like the existing investors do. They give us access and reach into parts of the market and help make us better as organizations as well.”
Bob Ackerman, founder and managing director of AllegisCyber Capital, and co-founder of DataTribe said: “The emergence of Continuous Controls Monitoring as a new cybersecurity category demonstrates a ‘coming of age’ for cybersecurity. Cyber is the existential threat to the global digital economy. All levels of the enterprise, from the CISO, to Chief Risk Officer, to the Board of Directors are demanding comprehensive visibility, transparency and hard metrics to assess cyber situational awareness.”
Powered by WPeMatico
Microsoft updates its Endpoint Manager with improved macOS support and more
At its Ignite conference today, Microsoft announced a number of new features for the Microsoft Endpoint Manager, the company’s unified platform for managing and securing devices in an enterprise environment. The service, which combines the features of the Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager with the cloud-based tools of Intune, launched just under a year ago. Today’s updates build on the foundation the team created at the time and add improved macOS and iPad support, as well as new tools for connecting mobile devices to on-premises apps and additional productivity tools based on the date the company gathers from the service. The company is also making it easier for corporate IT departments to provision devices for employees remotely.
If anything, the pandemic has only accelerated both the growth of this business for Microsoft and the need for companies to manage their remote devices.
“It really is about bringing this cloud and all the intelligence that we had in Intune together with Config Manager and making it act as one,” Brad Anderson, Microsoft corporate VP for the Commercial Management Experiences team, told me. “And it’s been so fascinating to see how the pandemic accelerated people wanting and needing to use that. When the pandemic first hit — and as I go back to March 8th or 10th, in the U.S., the calls that I was having almost every day with CIOs centered around, ‘my VPN is overwhelmed. How am I going to keep all my systems updated?’ ”
Today’s announcements build on the work Microsoft has done on this service over the course of the last year. After launching support for scripting on macOS earlier this year, for example, the company today announced a new “first-class management experience on macOS” that brings deploy scripts, but also improved enrollment experiences and app lifecycle management feature, to the platform.
Endpoint Manager now also supports Apple’s Shared iPad for Business functionality, and will help businesses deploy iPads to their users and allow them to log in with Azure Active Directory accounts. This gives users two separate portions on the device: one for work and one for everything else.
Another new feature is Microsoft Tunnel. This gives businesses a VPN that can cover the entire device or single apps to ensure that their employees’ devices are secure and compliant with their internal policy to access their networks.
“The key thing [with Microsoft Tunnel] is that this is all integrated into our conditional access,” Anderson explained. “And so when that VPN comes up, before access is granted to the data or to the apps, the conditional access engine that we’ve built inside of Microsoft 365 has that point of view on the trust of the identity and the trust of the device. That really is the key differentiator on that. I’ll tell you, between you and I, that one feature is probably the single feature that customers who are running another MDM and then the Microsoft Endpoint Manager — that’s the one they’re waiting for.”
Endpoint Manager now also supports the Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) environment. That’s been a massive growth area for the company — one that has only been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. As Anderson told me, the company saw 10x growth for WVD through the pandemic. “Now, Windows Virtual Desktop is that first-class citizen inside Microsoft Endpoint Manager. So you can manage your virtual endpoints just like you manage your physical endpoints. All your policies are applicable, all your apps are clickable. And it just makes it easier to be able to use that as one of the tools you have to empower your users,” he said.
Another area of Endpoint Manager, which may only seem tangentially related at first, is Microsoft’s Productivity Score. There are two aspects to this service, though: employee experience and technology experience. Productivity Score is meant to help businesses better understand how their employees are working — and identify areas where companies can improve. On the technology side, that also means understanding which apps crash, for example, or why laptops slow down.
“Here’s one of the key scenarios,” said Anderson. “We’ll get a call every once in a while that says, like, ‘hey, my users are all having a great experience with Office 365 but I’ve got a handful of users for whom it’s slow.’ More often than not, that’s a networking issue. And so every time a user, for example, opens a file or saves a file, opens an attachment, we get telemetry back that helps us understand the operations of that. We probably know when an ISP in the south of France sneezes, because Office 365 is so ubiquitous now.”
The other new feature here is what Microsoft calls Endpoint Analytics. With this, Microsoft can now provide businesses with detailed information about when apps on their employees’ devices crash — no matter whether that’s an internal app, a third-party service — or a Microsoft app.
In addition to these technology scores, Productivity Score is also getting new categories like meetings, so managers can see how many meetings their employees have, as well as a new teamwork category.
Powered by WPeMatico
Unpacking the Sumo Logic S-1 filing
Setting our dive into Palantir’s gross margins aside for another day, Sumo Logic filed to go public this morning. The Redwood City-based, former startup raised around $340 million while private, according to Crunchbase data.
The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. You can read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.
Sumo Logic parses information collected from its customers’ enterprise apps and integrations to help them pinpoint operational and security issues and lets them dashboard additional elements as they wish. The company claims in its S-1 that its code is “continuous intelligence,” which it brands as “a new category of software.”
Our own Ron Miller summarized Sumo Logic as a “cloud data analytics and log analysis company” when it raised a $110 million Series G last May. At the time, it was valued at north of $1 billion, making it a unicorn.
Sumo Logic’s IPO has been in its plans for some time. We can see this in a 2017 TechCrunch headline noting that Sumo had then raised $75 million, and was “on path” to a public offering. So, how healthy is the company, and what have its investors bought with about a third of a billion dollars in capital? Let’s find out.
Sumo Logic’s financial performance
Up top: Sumo Logic operates on a fiscal calendar that ends January 31 of each calendar year. This is super standard for SaaS companies as it allows the firm to not wrap its year during the holiday period. This is good for sales teams and so forth.
Powered by WPeMatico
No pan-EU Huawei ban as Commission endorses 5G risk mitigation plan
The European Commission has endorsed a risk mitigation approach to managing 5G rollouts across the bloc — meaning there will be no pan-EU ban on Huawei. Rather it’s calling for Member States to coordinate and implement a package of “mitigating measures” in a 5G toolbox it announced last October and has endorsed today.
“Through the toolbox, the Member States are committing to move forward in a joint manner based on an objective assessment of identified risks and proportionate mitigating measures,” it writes in a press release.
It adds that Member States have agreed to “strengthen security requirements, to assess the risk profiles of suppliers, to apply relevant restrictions for suppliers considered to be high risk including necessary exclusions for key assets considered as critical and sensitive (such as the core network functions), and to have strategies in place to ensure the diversification of vendors”.
The move is another blow for the Trump administration — after the UK government announced yesterday that it would not be banning so-called “high risk” providers from supplying 5G networks.
Instead the UK said it will place restrictions on such suppliers — barring their kit from the “sensitive” ‘core’ of 5G networks, as well as from certain strategic sites (such as military locations), and placing a 35% cap on such kit supplying the access network.
However the US has been amping up pressure on the international community to shut the door entirely on the Chinese tech giant, claiming there’s inherent strategic risk in allowing Huawei to be involved in supplying such critical infrastructure — with the Trump administration seeking to demolish trust in Chinese-made technology.
Next-gen 5G is expected to support a new breed of responsive applications — such as self-driving cars and personalized telemedicine — where risks, should there be any network failure, are likely to scale too.
But the Commission take the view that such risks can be collectively managed.
The approach to 5G security continues to leave decisions on “specific security” measures as the responsibility of Member States. So there’s a possibility of individual countries making their own decisions to shut out Huawei. But in Europe the momentum appears to be against such moves.
“The collective work on the toolbox demonstrates a strong determination to jointly respond to the security challenges of 5G networks,” the EU writes. “This is essential for a successful and credible EU approach to 5G security and to ensure the continued openness of the internal market provided risk-based EU security requirements are respected.”
The next deadline for the 5G toolbox is April 2020, when the Commission expects Member States to have implemented the recommended measures. A joint report on their implementation will follow later this year.
Key actions being endorsed in the toolbox include:
- Strengthen security requirements for mobile network operators (e.g. strict access controls, rules on secure operation and monitoring, limitations on outsourcing of specific functions, etc.);
- Assess the risk profile of suppliers; as a consequence, apply relevant restrictions for suppliers considered to be high risk – including necessary exclusions to effectively mitigate risks – for key assets defined as critical and sensitive in the EU-wide coordinated risk assessment (e.g. core network functions, network management and orchestration functions, and access network functions);
- Ensure that each operator has an appropriate multi-vendor strategy to avoid or limit any major dependency on a single supplier (or suppliers with a similar risk profile), ensure an adequate balance of suppliers at national level and avoid dependency on suppliers considered to be high risk; this also requires avoiding any situations of lock-in with a single supplier, including by promoting greater interoperability of equipment;
The Commission also recommends that Member States should contribute towards increasing diversification and sustainability in the 5G supply chain and co-ordinate on standardization around security objectives and on developing EU-wide certification schemes.
Powered by WPeMatico
Clumio raises $135M Series C for its backup as a service platform
Clumio, a 100-people startup that offers a SaaS-like service for enterprise backup, today announced that it has raised a $135 million Series C round, led by existing investor Sutter Hill Ventures and new investor Altimeter Captial. The announcement comes shortly after the company’s disclosure in August that it had quietly raised a total of $51 million in Series A and B rounds in 2017 and 2018. The company says it plans to use this new funding to “accelerate its vision to deliver a globally consolidated data protection service in and for the public cloud.”
Given the amount of money invested in the company, chances are Clumio is getting close to a $1 billion valuation, but the company is not disclosing its valuation at this point.
The overall mission of Clumio is to build a platform on public clouds that gives enterprises a single data protection service that can handle backups of their data in on-premises, cloud and SaaS applications. When it came out of stealth, the company’s focus was on VMware on premises. Since then, the team has expanded this to include VMware running on public clouds.
“When somebody moves to the cloud, they don’t want to be in the business of managing software or infrastructure and all that, because the whole reason to move to the cloud was essentially to get away from the mundane,” explained Clumio CEO and co-founder Poojan Kumar.
The next step in this process, as the company also announced today, is to make it easier for enterprises to protect the cloud-native applications they are building now. The company today launched this service for AWS and will likely expand it to other clouds like Microsoft Azure, soon.
The market for enterprise backup is only going to expand in the coming years. We’ve now reached a point, after all, where it’s not unheard of to talk about enterprises that run thousands of different applications. For them, Clumio wants to become the one-stop-shop for all things data protection — and its investors are obviously buying into the company’s vision and momentum.
“When there’s a foundational change, like the move to the cloud, which is as foundational a change, at least, as the move from mainframe to open systems in the 80s and 90s,” said Mike Speiser, Managing Director at Sutter Hill Ventures . “When there’s a change like that, you have to re-envision, you have to refactor and think of the world — the new world — in a new way and start from scratch. If you don’t, what’s gonna end up happening is people make decisions that are short term decisions that seem like they will work but end up being architectural dead ends. And those companies never ever end up winning. They just never end up winning and that’s the opportunity right now on this big transition across many markets, including the backup market for Clumio.”
Speiser also noted that SaaS allows for a dramatically larger market opportunity for companies like Clumio. “What SaaS is doing, is it’s not only allowing us to go after the traditional Silicon Valley, high end, direct selling, expensive markets that were previously buying high-end systems and data centers. But what we’re seeing — and we’re seeing this with Snowflake and […] we will see it with Clumio — is there’s an opportunity to go after a much broader market opportunity.”
Starting next year, Clumio will expand that market by adding support for data protection for a first SaaS app, with more to follow, as well as support for backup in more regions and clouds. Right now, the service’s public cloud tool focuses on AWS — and only in the United States. Next year, it plans to support international regions as well.
Kumar stressed that he wants to build Clumio for the long run, with an IPO as part of that roadmap. His investors probably wouldn’t mind that, either.
Powered by WPeMatico
Microsoft launched Endpoint Manager to modernize device management
Ever since the days of Windows NT, the Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (better known as ConfigMgr) has allowed companies to manage the increasingly large number of devices they issue to their employees. Then, back in 2011, the company also launched Intune, its cloud-based endpoint management system for corporate and BYOD devices. These days, most enterprises that use Microsoft’s tools use ConfigMgr to manage their PCs and then opt for Intune for mobile devices — and that’s a complex system to manage, even for sophisticated IT departments. So today, at its annual Ignite conference for IT professionals, Microsoft is announcing a way forward for these users to modernize their systems with the launch of the unified Microsoft Endpoint Manager.
As Brad Anderson, Microsoft’s corporate VP for Microsoft 365, told me, he takes some blame for this. “A lot of this falls on my shoulders because we just allowed everything to get complex. So we’re just simplifying everything,” he said. “So really at the core, what we think modern management is that modern management is it’s management that is driven by cloud intelligence.”
The general idea here, Anderson explained, is that in earlier eras of IT management, Microsoft and its partners didn’t have the tools to collect and analyze all of the signals it received from these management tools. That’s obviously not a problem anymore today and the company can use the telemetry it gets from a company’s PC deployments, for example, to figure out where there are problems.
“One of the things that we’re able to do is be learned as cloud-scale as we can help organizations improve their end-user experience,” Anderson noted. Common issues with that experience could be extremely long boot times, which slow down and frustrate employees, or issues with the delivery of important security patches. Today, all of this is often still managed by spreadsheets and complex security policies that are administrated manually — and Anderson argues that these days, you always have to think about security and management together anyway.
To quantify this user experience, Microsoft is also introducing what it calls the Microsoft Productivity Score, which looks at both how employees are working and using their tools, as well as how their technology is enabling them (or not) to do so. “The Productivity Score is all about helping an organization understand the experience their users are having — and then giving them the insights and the actions on what they can do to improve that,” explained Anderson.
Over the course of the last few months, Microsoft actually worked with some large customers and took over the management of their Windows and Office deployments, meaning those machines ran nothing but Microsoft 365 agents (and a control group that was managed in a more traditional way). The devices with the modern management system saw an 85% reduction in boot time and an 85% reduction in crashes and a doubling of battery life. Unsurprisingly, the employees that used the devices were also far happier.
As far as the device management experience goes, the new Endpoint Manager and the licensing changes that come with that are meant to not just simplify the branding but also the experience. And Microsoft definitely wants people to move to this modern system, so it’s giving everybody who has ConfigMgr licenses Intune licenses, too, so that they can co-manage their PCs with both tools and get access to the cloud-based features of Intune. The Microsoft Endpoint Manager console will show a single view of all devices managed by either product. “It’s all about simplifying — and we’re taking that simplifying deep and broad from a branding, licensing and product perspective,” said Anderson.
Today, ConfigMgr and Intune manage well over 190 million Windows, iOS and Android devices. Yet Microsoft knows that not every company is ready to move to this modern device management system just yet. That’s why it’s making these licensing changes to help get people on board, but also leaving the existing systems in place and giving them an onramp to move to provisioning new machines to be cloud-managed, for example.
Powered by WPeMatico
Humio raises $9M Series A for its real-time log analysis platform
Humio, a startup that provides a real-time log analysis platform for on-premises and cloud infrastructures, today announced that it has raised a $9 million Series A round led by Accel. It previously raised its seed round from WestHill and Trifork.
The company, which has offices in San Francisco, the U.K. and Denmark, tells me that it saw a 13x increase in its annual revenue in 2018. Current customers include Bloomberg, Microsoft and Netlify .
“We are experiencing a fundamental shift in how companies build, manage and run their systems,” said Humio CEO Geeta Schmidt. “This shift is driven by the urgency to adopt cloud-based and microservice-driven application architectures for faster development cycles, and dealing with sophisticated security threats. These customer requirements demand a next-generation logging solution that can provide live system observability and efficiently store the massive amounts of log data they are generating.”
To offer them this solution, Humio raised this round with an eye toward fulfilling the demand for its service, expanding its research and development teams and moving into more markets across the globe.
As Schmidt also noted, many organizations are rather frustrated by the log management and analytics solutions they currently have in place. “Common frustrations we hear are that legacy tools are too slow — on ingestion, searches and visualizations — with complex and costly licensing models,” she said. “Ops teams want to focus on operations — not building, running and maintaining their log management platform.”
To build this next-generation analysis tool, Humio built its own time series database engine to ingest the data, with open-source tools like Scala, Elm and Kafka in the backend. As data enters the pipeline, it’s pushed through live searches and then stored for later queries. As Humio VP of Engineering Christian Hvitved tells me, though, running ad-hoc queries is the exception, and most users only do so when they encounter bugs or a DDoS attack.
The query language used for the live filters is also pretty straightforward. That was a conscious decision, Hvitved said. “If it’s too hard, then users don’t ask the question,” he said. “We’re inspired by the Unix philosophy of using pipes, so in Humio, larger searches are built by combining smaller searches with pipes. This is very familiar to developers and operations people since it is how they are used to using their terminal.”
Humio charges its customers based on how much data they want to ingest and for how long they want to store it. Pricing starts at $200 per month for 30 days of data retention and 2 GB of ingested data.
Powered by WPeMatico
Nyansa lands $15 million led by Intel Capital to grow user performance management
Companies like New Relic and AppDynamics have been offering applications performance management solutions to help operations teams track external performance issues for years. Nyansa (pronounced ‘knee-ans-sah’) is bringing that kind of performance management to internal networks. Today, the company announced a $15 million Series B investment. The round was led by Intel Capital… Read More
Powered by WPeMatico