UPDATED 08:00 EDT / MAY 12 2022

SECURITY

Governance and administration startup BalkanID launches with $5.75M in funding

Governance and administration solution startup BalkanID Inc. launched out of stealth mode today with $5.75 million in funding to accelerate product and customer development.

The seed round included Uncommon Capital, Afore Capital, Sure Ventures and a number of prominent technology executives. The company was founded by Subbu Rama (pictured), previously co-founder at Bitfusion, Jeremy Patton, former engineering lead at Bitfusion, and Sameer Sait, former chief information security officer at Amazon/Whole Foods Market.

BalkanID enables information technology and security teams to integrate the principle of least privilege into security and IT operations. Least privilege refers to the practice of restricting access rights for users and computing processes to only those resources required to perform authorized activities.

The company argues that although the benefits of software-as-a-service are indisputable, SaaS also has introduced new cybersecurity risks, such as entitlement sprawl. That occurs when a company grants users more access than needed to do their jobs, with no way to see or manage user permissions across multiple SaaS and public cloud environments. These risks are particularly severe for small to medium-sized businesses.

The company’s solution leverages artificial intelligence and workflow automation to provide visibility into risky entitlements and simplify the access review and certification process. BalkanID’s Identity Governance and Administration platform is built for cloud-native environments.

The platform offers what the company claims is first-to-market features to enable security and IT teams to identify and fix risky entitlements across their SaaS and public cloud estate. The solution leverages data science to interrogate cloud environments for inherent and residual entitlement risks.

The AI-powered risk engine automatically identifies risky users and those with excessive permissions or toxic combinations, risky apps, roles and privileges across the organization’s SaaS and public cloud estate. The risk engine automatically updates based on a constantly evolving set of parameters, including role, activity, data attributes and environment, reducing risk and preventing entitlement sprawl.

BalkanID’s platform streamlines upstream activities, such as onboarding of new employees and downstream activities such as change management, separation of duties and offboarding. The platform also automates the access review and certification process by offering risk-based access reviews and compliance campaign workflows, allowing organizations to balance risk with employee productivity while enabling the enforcement of least privilege across third-party SaaS and cloud landscapes.

“Legacy IGA solutions don’t work well in cloud environments, yet security and compliance teams are expected to use them anyway — a scenario that usually ends up introducing more risk than it eliminates,” Rama said in a statement. “Using our customers’ existing pain points, we built our platform by re-engineering how fine-grained entitlements in SaaS and cloud identity stores expose corporate assets. We then designed the platform’s core features so that ultimately, using AI, the associated risk mitigation activities can evolve into a continuous, fully automated process.”

Photo: BalkanID

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