UPDATED 12:48 EDT / FEBRUARY 17 2021

SECURITY

Startup vArmour bags $58M to find vulnerabilities obscured by hybrid cloud complexity

San Francisco startup vArmour Inc. today said it has picked up an additional $58 million in funding for its security platform, which uses an approach it calls application relationship management to spot weak points in hybrid cloud environments.

Enterprise applications are interconnected in various ways. An analytics tool, for example, might run on Amazon Web Services and analyze customer records from databases deployed in Azure and on-premises. Such application dependencies potentially can be exploited by hackers to move laterally inside the corporate network, using a single compromised component as a springboard for a broader cyberattack.

What makes application dependencies a particularly big source of risk is that they’re difficult to map out thoroughly. In a large enterprise with thousands of workloads, a vulnerable integration between two services can easily go unnoticed and create an attack vector. That’s the challenge vArmour is tackling with its application relationship management platform.

According to vArmour, its platform can map out relationships between a company’s systems in hours instead of the months the task takes manually. The startup’s algorithms identify vulnerabilities such as known security flaws in software libraries. The vArmour platform also spots suspicious user activity inside applications, which, similarly to vulnerable dependencies, is difficult to detect for large enterprises because of the large number of employees who interact with internal workloads.

The market has responded positively to vArmour’s pitch. The startup said today that it has doubled net new annual recurring revenue on a year-over-year basis and expects even stronger growth in 2021, though it didn’t provide specifics.

One of the factors likely contributing vArmour’s apparent sales momentum is that its software is useful not only for cybersecurity teams but also other information technology buyers. Its ability to map out application dependencies lends itself to, among others, assessing the effectiveness of disaster recovery policies. The platform can help identify cases where an application can be recovered in a few minutes after an outage, but the database in which it stores information would take days to bring back online.

Another particularly relevant use case vArmour targets is easing cloud migrations. Its platform allows companies to identify  the on-premises systems on which an application depends to work and, using that information, plan the optimal way to migrate the application to its new off-premises environment.

With its latest $58 million investment, vArmour plans to build out go-to-market teams in Munich, Toronto, Singapore, and Melbourne as well as grow its engineering group in the Bay Area. AllegisCyber Capital and NightDragon led the round with participation from existing investors.

“As applications become more complex, more distributed, and more targeted by attackers, the importance of full visibility into the relationships between applications becomes increasingly important,” said NightDragon founder Dave DeWalt.

The round follows a $44 million investment also led by AllegisCyber Capital and NightDragon that vArmour announced in early 2019. To date, vArmour has raised more than $120 million from investors.

Image: Unsplash

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