A Big Day for Cyolo and Identity-Based Access
That’s not a typo! Today Cyolo announced a $60 million Series B round, and I am excited for many reasons. First, the size of the round: it’s a Series C size number for our B round. Second, the funding was led by National Grid Partners, the venture investing and innovation arm of National Grid, with the full participation of our existing investors: Glilot Capital Partners, Flint Capital, Differential Ventures, and Merlin Ventures. These great organizations all believe in our vision enough to invest even more as we expand further. Finally, the new funding gives us the runway we need to accelerate our go-to-market strategy just as the rest of the market is tapping the breaks while they wait to see if the US, and potentially the world, is entering a recession.
How It All Began
Before starting Cyolo, I spent years as a security leader, first leading the cyber unit for the Israeli Navy and then as a CISO in high tech. While in these roles I searched for a secure access platform that would enable my team to connect to the resources they needed to do their jobs from anywhere, while also providing me with a high level of confidence that our corporate assets were safe. I experienced first-hand the shortcomings of the available solutions from both the security and usability perspectives. I saw users give up when the process was too long or too complicated, and assets remained vulnerable. While many other aspects of security began to evolve, secure access was stuck in the past.
In my frustration, I decided to create the secure access solution I wanted and needed. This was the beginning of Cyolo. I partnered with two ethical hackers, Eran Shmuely and Dedi Yarkoni, to build the functionality I wanted with the security capabilities to keep out the most sophisticated attackers. What we created was a new generation of access platform, capable and ready to support the digital age – the Cyolo identity-based access solution, ZTNA 2.0.
Securing Digital Transformation is an Identity Problem
All organizations in the world have at least one critical asset that is accessible without strong identification, and most have far more than one. Meanwhile, digital transformation is underway across a growing number of companies. I believe that at its core, securing digital transformation is an identity problem. Organizations taking on digital transformation initiatives must ensure they are building the foundations right, first by establishing strong digital identities for all users and then by enforcing access to all assets based on strong identities.
When it comes to choosing the ideal identity-based access solution, security and IT teams need visibility as well the ability to define access policies for widely distributed users and digital assets. This is no easy ask for a solution, as it must provide the required functionality and also be secure, user-friendly, flexible, and easy to support.
Identity-Based Connectivity Starts with Identity-Based Access
Think of it this way: Applications and other digital assets should be accessible only if they can identify who you are. Without a successful identification, no access is possible – not through a door or a window or any other opening an attacker could use to sneak in. Thus, identity truly is the new key for access.
To help ensure that organizations have the easiest and most secure access to their assets, Cyolo takes part in the entire journey to secure all users. This journey begins by ensuring the creation and enforcement of strong identities and then prioritizes secure access for high-risk and third-party users. Then we secure remote workers, and then we finally conclude with the full implementation of identity-based access across all users, apps and assets – on-site and remote.
Cyolo Builds Better Brakes So You Can Drive Fast
In just 2 years Cyolo has created a solution that not only provides the fast, secure and flexible on-ramp digital organizations require, but we’ve done it in a way that allows administrators to quickly apply the brakes when needed.
Easy implementation: Our solution does NOT require any network or firewall changes, agents, and can be installed in mere minutes.
Fully adaptable: It runs in all environments – cloud, on-prem or in a hybrid model and can add MFA and SSO capabilities to offline and legacy systems.
Frictionless user experience: It does NOT require the encryption or decryption of traffic at multiple points in the network, and therefore runs faster than other solutions.
Best-of-class security: It’s built on a “trustless” architecture that keeps all assets and access keys with the customer at all times and gives no visibility to our team.
Compliance-ready: It provides session recording, supervised access and full visibility into who accessed where and what was happening for reporting and compliance.
The Future of Connectivity is Here
There is no question that organizations will continue to connect more and more devices to their networks. Today, we empower people to connect to systems, and in the future we will connect devices to other devices as well. Cyolo is the perfect solution for IT and OT right now, but that isn't stopping us from thinking even bigger.
Our vision of modernizing access and making it easier, faster, and more secure is coming to life, and we’re thrilled but not surprised to see the market loves it. This is that ultimate reason why I’m so excited about today’s announcement, which allows us to scale faster and bring our solution to more organizations all around the world.
