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Platform Cybersecurity vendor Adaptive Shield gets $30 million led by Insight Partners

Adaptive Shield, a platform cybersecurity software and services company based in Tel Aviv, announced a $30 million Series A equity investment last week. The lead investor is Salesforce-savvy Insight Partners, with additional participation by Okta Ventures and existing investor Vertex Ventures Israel.

“Deep visibility and continuous maintenance of SaaS security hygiene is crucial to keeping the company secure” said Maor Bin, CEO and co-founder of Adaptive Shield. In a press release, the company says Adaptive Shield’s SaaS Security Posture Management Suite (SSPM) removes platform cybersecurity management burden and risk by providing deep visibility and remediation for potential risks caused by misconfigurations and misappropriated privileges.

What is Platform Cybersecurity?

Cloud sprawl is problem that confronts nearly every organization. And a key problem that goes along with cloud sprawl is configuration management. Salesforce, SAP, Dynamics and other application delivery platforms lead the way in terms of setup complexity. Compounding the problem is Increased dependence on authentication systems like Office 365 to grant access to corporate data systems such as Azure and Dynamics.

Making matters worse, IT managers must confront exponential growth in the complexity of SaaS configurations. To coordinate configurations between cloud systems with related permission structures, is now a complex database and analytical task.

Managing tens or hundreds online systems requires a sophisticated configuration management technique. These systems read system configurations, analyze the systems for security issues, and then harden system configurations. Organizing platform configuration management tools and techniques into a management program is what I call platform cybersecurity.

Adaptive Shield performs platform cybersecurity where it manages SaaS security settings and rules with automated tools. The company and its competitors, which includes Salesforce-compatible AppOmni, consolidate the configuration management of multiple SaaS systems using one intelligent database.

Adaptive Shield works by first ingesting system configurations. It then analyzes system configurations to uncover security holes. It goes on to help administrators prioritize and remediate security holes. After remediation, Adaptive Shield then tests the system to verify the security measures are working.

More Platform Cybersecurity Needed

Companies like Adaptive Shield have a large and growing market because IT executives only have to wake up to notice that they need platform cybersecurity. Configuration errors can lead to threat actors gaining access confidential information. This leads to companies being extorted or embarrassed by data leakers every week. In just the last month, major data dumps have come from companies like Twitch, the online streaming service, and Epik, the controversial DNS hosting service.

Nearly all these disclosures occur because of mistakes in online system configuration. Intelligent tools like Adaptive Shield are needed now more than ever just to keep up with configuration complexity.

Insight Partners says enterprise sales and technological innovation spurred this investment in platform cybersecurity. “As SaaS adoption rises and these threats continue to intensify, Adaptive Shield’s Fortune 100 customers have made it clear that with its application-agnostic architecture and ability to rapidly connect to any data object, only one company is capable of securing a business’s evolving SaaS estate,” said Thomas Krane, a principal at Insight Partners.

Adaptive Shield says they will use this Series A equity investment to expand its sales and product development activities.

Stop the FLAs

Hopefully readers of this blog have noticed how much I dislike companies and analysts who invent or latch onto new four-letter acronyms (FLAs). So, my ire has been irked by Adaptive Shield latching onto another one of Gartner’s IT security sector FLA.

Gartner is the most influential international IT analyst and consulting company. It has been dispensing advice to IT buyers and industry executives for decades. And, it is a key source of decision making and thought leadership in the industry. Perhaps it is the size and breadth of Gartner that makes its use of FLAs inevitable.

Take a look at the Gartner “hype cycle” graph to see where the FLA problem comes from. In this infographic Gartner lists the top 50 or so IT technology sectors that it tracks, and Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) is one of them. So, Gartner actually needs to create all these FLAs just to organize its own topics of conversation.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Glomming onto a new Gartner sector has proven to be an effective sales and marketing strategy. But, using a recursive FLA like SSPM as a product description does little to educate IT buyers on what to buy to improve their organization’s cybersecurity posture.

By the way, Adaptive Shield’s SSPM moniker is a synonym of CSPM or cloud security posture management. Gartner introduced the CSPM acronym in 2020. I think you are supposed to already know about CSPM when you see SSPM. So, hopefully you get where I am coming from when I say FLAs are confusing, off-putting, and somewhat haughty.

Use Scarier Words for Platform Cybersecurity

It is past time to amplify the seriousness of products like Adaptive Shield and get people moving to evaluate and implement intelligent platform cybersecurity. Product marketers should not just call it “Cloud Security” or SSPM. Make it frightening by adding the “Cyber” prefix. This is because IT and devops managers should be more frightened because they are all cyberwarriors now. Give IT and devops teams the battle IQ and weapons to keep out the threat actors who want them to fail.

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