Adaptive Cloud Security Platform Provider Raises $100M

Illumio today announced it has raised an additional $100 million in financing to drive adoption of a cloud service that attaches security policies to application workloads regardless of where they wind up being deployed.

At a time when application workloads frequently move not only in and out of the cloud but between them, Illumio CEO Mark Andrew Rubin said the Illumio Adaptive Security Platform (ASP) deploys in the cloud, but is capable of staying in constant contact with application workloads deployed on premise or in a public cloud.

Earlier in the week Illumio also extended the reach of Illumio ASP to include the ability to manage security policies attached to load balancers from F5 Networks and NGINX.

Rubin said Illumio ASP works by injecting a virtual enforcement agent into the operating system on which the application workload runs. Every time that workload moves the virtual enforcement agent travels with it. The end result, says Rubin, is a giant brain in the cloud that among other things can apply an adaptive whitelisting model and encryption to any given application workload.

Next up, Rubin says Illumio will leverage a variety of application programming interfaces (APIs) to integrate Ilumio with a number of third-party threat intelligence services to enable security policies in the face of new forms of malware to be updated in as timely a manner possible.

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In general, Rubin notes that one of the biggest challenges with cloud computing is that it significantly increases the attack surface that IT organizations have to defend. With workloads now routinely running inside and out of the cloud, that attack surface the IT organizations need to defend has expanded greatly. Rather than thinking in terms of defending isolated sets of IT infrastructure that IT organizations have limited control over, Illumio is making the case for attaching policies that travel with the application workload wherever it goes.

That approach, adds Rubin, enables IT organizations to maximize the limited IT security resources they currently have at a time when hiring additional people with IT security expertise is nearly impossible given the amount of demand there is versus actual available supply of trained IT security professionals.

As the focal point for managing IT security continues to shift to the cloud the way solution providers deliver security services is clearly about to become both more sophisticated and automated.

All told, Ilumio has now raised $147 million. Rubin says that beyond additional investments in product development, a large portion of the additional funding the company has raised will be applied to expanding its global sales and marketing efforts which undoubtedly will include a new generation of virtual security services offerings delivered by managed security service providers (MSSPs) on behalf of any number of customers.