Data protection startup Gambit Security Ltd. launched today with $61 million in funding from Spark Capital, Kleiner Perkins and Cyberstarts.

The company raised the capital over two rounds that closed in the past 12 months. It will use the funds to hire more go-to-market professionals and speed up product development.

Recovering application data after an outage is a multistep process. First, administrators must locate the most recent standby copy of the affected records in their company’s backup archive. They must then load the copy into the application that went offline. Depending on the scope of the outage, it may also be necessary to spin up a fresh copy of the application and its underlying infrastructure.

There are many technical issues that can disrupt recovery workflows. Israel-based Gambit Security offers an artificial intelligence platform that automatically finds such issues before they lead to data loss. It identifies problems by analyzing data from a company’s infrastructure, backup tools and cybersecurity software.

The first prerequisite to recovering from an outage is having a fresh copy of the affected data. If the last time a company backed up a record was three months before the outage, important information could get lost. Gambit Security’s platform identifies workloads that aren’t backed up frequently enough and notifies administrators.

The platform also checks whether a company’s backup files are immutable. Some ransomware strands encrypt not only production data but also archived copies, which makes restoration impossible. Immutable backups can’t be deleted or encrypted by ransomware.

Administrators use automation workflows called IaC scripts to speed up the recovery process. If a server outage takes an application offline, an IaC script can spin up a fresh copy of the workload on a new machine. Gambit Security scans companies’ IaC workflows to ensure that they will work as intended in the event of an outage. The platform can identify, among others, drift, or situations where an IaC script should be updated because the application it’s designed to restore has changed.

Gambit Security displays the issues that it finds in a dashboard alongside remediation suggestions. For added measure, the software distills its findings into a so-called resilience score that gives administrators a high-level view of how they can improve their backup procedures.

The platform doubles as a cost reduction tool. While scanning for issues in a company’s data protection stack, Gambit Security finds duplicate and outdated backups that should be deleted. The company says the platform usually reduces cloud storage costs by 10% for customers.

Gambit’s launch comes four months after fellow data protection startup Eon.io Inc. raised $300 million in funding. It also ships cost optimization features as part of its platform. Eon moves backup data to the low-cost tiers of cloud providers’ storage infrastructure, avoids saving duplicate records and can run queries without incurring bandwidth expenses.

Photo: Gambit Security