CloudPassage is a company that provides an automation platform, delivered via

software as a service Software as a service (SaaS ) is a cloud computing service model where the provider offers use of application software to a client and manages all needed physical and software resources. SaaS is usually accessed via a web application. Unlike o ...

, that improves security for private, public, and hybrid

cloud computing Cloud computing is "a paradigm for enabling network access to a scalable and elastic pool of shareable physical or virtual resources with self-service provisioning and administration on-demand," according to International Organization for ...

environments. CloudPassage is headquartered in

San Francisco San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...

History

CloudPassage was founded by Carson Sweet, Talli Somekh, and Vitaliy Geraymovych in 2010. The company used cloud computing and

big data Big data primarily refers to data sets that are too large or complex to be dealt with by traditional data processing, data-processing application software, software. Data with many entries (rows) offer greater statistical power, while data with ...

analytics to implement security monitoring and control in a platform called Halo. CloudPassage spent a year in stealth developing the Halo technology, coming out of

stealth mode In business, stealth mode is a company's temporary state of secretiveness, either in total stealth mode when everything about the company is kept secret, or in-company stealth mode which is usually undertaken to avoid alerting competitors to a pen ...

to a closed beta in January 2011. In June 2012, the company launched the commercial product that included configuration security monitoring, network microsegmentation, and two-factor authentication for privileged access management. By 2013, CloudPassage expanded Halo to support large enterprises with advanced security and compliance requirements with a product called Halo Enterprise. The first round of venture funding for the company raised $6.5 million. In April 2012, CloudPassage raised $14 million. The financing round was led by

Tenaya Capital Tenaya Capital is a venture capital firm with offices in Portola Valley, California, and Wellesley, Massachusetts. Founded in 1995 as Lehman Brothers Venture Partners, Tenaya spun out to become an independent firm in 2009 following Lehman's ban ...

. In February 2014, CloudPassage announced that it had raised $25.5 million in funding led by

Shasta Ventures Shasta Ventures is an early-stage venture capital investment firm located in Silicon Valley that invests in enterprise and technology consumer startups. It is located on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park. Funds Shasta's second fund of US$250 milli ...

. In total, the company has invested over $30 million in its technology and raised approximately $88 million in capital.

Product

The CloudPassage platform provides cloud workload security and compliance for systems hosted in public or private cloud infrastructure environments, including hybrid cloud and multi-cloud workload hosting models. The flagship product the company offers is called Halo. Halo secures virtual servers in public, private, and hybrid cloud infrastructures and provides

file integrity monitoring File integrity monitoring (FIM) is an internal control or process that performs the act of validating the integrity of operating system and application software files using a verification method between the current file state and a known, good bas ...

(FIM) while also administering firewall automation, vulnerability monitoring, network access control, security event alerting, and assessment. The Halo platform also provides security applications such as privileged access management, software vulnerability scanning, multifactor authentication, and log-based IDS. In December 2013, CloudPassage set up six servers with

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

and

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

operating systems and combinations of popular programs and invited

hackers A hacker is a person skilled in information technology who achieves goals and solves problems by non-standard means. The term has become associated in popular culture with a security hackersomeone with knowledge of bugs or exploits to break ...

to attempt to hack into the servers. The top prize was $5,000 and the winning hacker was a novice that completed the task in four hours. CloudPassage programmed the servers to use basic default security settings to show how vulnerable cloud computing programs can be to security threats.

Awards and recognition

In May 2011, Gigaom named CloudPassage in its list of the Top 50 Cloud Innovators. That same month, eWeek recognized CloudPassage as one of 16 Hot Startup Companies Flying Under the Radar. ''SC Magazine'' named CloudPassage an Industry Innovator in the Virtualization and Cloud Security category in 2012. Also in 2012, ''The Wall Street Journal'' named CloudPassage a runner-up in the Information Security category of its Technology Innovation Awards. The CloudPassage large-scale security program, Halo, won Best Security Solution in 2014 at the SIIA

Codie award The Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA) is a trade association dedicated to the entertainment, consumer and business software industries. Established in 1984 as the Software Publishers Association (SPA), the SIIA took its new nam ...

References

{{reflist Computer security