Lacework raises $525 million to automate cloud security and compliance

Lacework, a four-year-old developer of automated containerized workload defense, intrusion detection, and compliance solutions, today announced that it closed a $525 million funding round valuing the company at over $1 billion. CEO Dan Hubbard said the capital, which comes after a year in which Lacework saw revenue grow 300%, will accelerate Lacework’s product development efforts as it expands go-to-market, partner ecosystem operations, engineering, and R&D teams across the U.S. and Europe.

Roughly 83% of enterprise workloads have moved to the cloud, according to a 2020 survey from LogicMonitor. But the cloud remains vulnerable to cyberattacks. IBM found last year that the average time to identify a breach was 206 days. And Gartner predicts that 50% of companies will unintentionally expose components of their cloud applications and infrastructure to the internet in 2021, up from 25% in 2018.

Lacework’s platform aims to close security gaps across devops and cloud environments by identifying threats targeting cloud servers, containers, and accounts. Its agent provides visibility into running processes and apps, using AI to detect anomalous behavior. Concurrently, the agent monitors for suspicious activities like unauthorized API calls and the use of management consoles and admin accounts, ensuring networks remain secure by limiting access to vulnerable ports and enforcing “least access” privileges.

Events of importance are logged and funneled to Lacework’s cloud backend, regardless of whether they took place on public clouds like Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft’s Azure or private datacenters. There, they’re aggregated and used to create a baseline against which future incidents are measured.

In August, Lacework announced new continuous host vulnerability monitoring, preflight checks, and continuous integration and deployment automation workflows. The new features will allow existing customers to accelerate threat investigation and remediation as well as easily prioritize response to the most critical and active security threats, the company said at the time.

The costly threat of compromise has given rise to a cybersecurity market that’s projected to be worth $300 billion by 2024. Juniper Research pegs the number of digital records that will be stolen in 2023 at 33 billion, compared with the 12 billion stolen in 2018. And analysts elsewhere estimate that the cybercrime economy has grown to $1.5 trillion in annual profits and that damages will reach $6 trillion by 2021.

“Building on cloud is the biggest shift the IT industry has ever witnessed,” Hubbard told VentureBeat via email. “Constant cloud changes require a new approach to security that is critical for our customers for adapting and scaling as fast as cloud innovation. This round will allow us to extend our product differentiation leadership, which is critical in a transformative market driven by both fast moving builders and sophisticated attackers.”

Mountain View, California-based Lacework’s funding round announced today was led by Sutter Hill Ventures and Altimeter Capital with a strategic investment from Snowflake Ventures. It brings the company’s total raised to date to over $600 million following a $42 million tranche in September 2019.

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