Infrastructure-as-code platform Oak9 raises $5.9M

Oak9, a startup launching an “infrastructure-as-code” safety platform, today announced that it raised $5.9 million in a seed round led by Menlo Ventures. The enterprise says that it’ll place the funding toward expanding its platform and workforce as it appears to accelerate its go-to-marketplace efforts.

In a 2017 Deloitte survey, only 42% of respondents deemed their institutions to be “extremely” or “very” helpful at managing cybersecurity danger. The pandemic has surely carried out practically nothing to alleviate these issues. Despite improved IT safety investments firms made in 2020 to deal with distributed IT and work-from-home challenges, practically 80% of senior IT workers and IT safety leaders think their organizations lack enough defenses against cyberattacks, according to IDG.

Oak9 aims to assistance the delivery of cloud-native apps when supplying safety, integrating with the software program development lifecycle and analyzing infrastructure-as-code. The platform’s continuous monitoring aids to sustain safety across cloud ecosystems, when prebuilt safety-as-code blueprints verify for evolving specifications and prospective information drift.

“The company’s three founders — Raj Datta, Om Vyas, and Aakash Shah — have known each other for 20 years and all live within blocks of each other in the Chicago area,” a spokesperson told VentureBeat by way of e-mail. “Aakash and Om began working on a platform that would improve collaboration between development and security to enable the business to deliver with velocity and agility. Their aim was to enable development teams to take advantage of the 100 time gains in velocity that infrastructure as code made possible, while also making sure cloud-native applications were comprehensively secure by design. Raj was advising them at the time and as they looked to commercialize the platform, he was the ideal fit to build a well rounded founding team, and Oak9 was born.”

Infrastructure as code

Infrastructure as code is the method of managing datacenters by means of machine-readable definition files, rather than hardware configurations. It grew as a response to the challenges posed by utility computing — the believed of modeling infrastructure with code and getting the capability to style, implement, and deploy app infrastructure appealed to each software program developers and IT infrastructure administrators. The capability to treat infrastructure like code and use the very same tools as any other software program project would enable developers to swiftly deploy applications, the considering went.

With Oak9, which focuses on organizations that use infrastructure-as-code to deploy their cloud-native apps, the company’s “hundreds” of customers can pick from an array of integration choices to safe their apps and visually depict their infrastructure as code and make safety style modifications with a drag-and-drop interface. Security teams get alerts as safety-relevant modifications are made to their apps.

“Oak9 natively understands infrastructure as code to intelligently learn what the application architecture is and how it changes from release to release. Every time a developer makes changes to the infrastructure as code, Oak9 dynamically applies the right security requirements to the application, based on an understanding of the business use case, the application’s compliance and regulatory needs, and the customer’s best practices,” the spokesperson continued. “Oak9 automatically updates the infrastructure as code to remediate security design gaps to ensure that every application release is secure and compliant by design.”

According to Markets and Markets, the safety orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) segment is anticipated to attain $1.68 billion this year, driven by a rise in safety breaches and incidents and the fast development and deployment of cloud-based options. Risk Based Security located that information breaches exposed 4.1 billion records in the very first half of 2019. That might be why 68% of business enterprise leaders in a recent Accenture survey stated they really feel their cybersecurity dangers are growing.

“The best way to secure cloud-native applications is to design security into the application. By intelligently learning the application architecture and its need for security, Oak9 builds security into the application to ensure that what gets delivered is secure and compliant by design,” Datta told VentureBeat in an interview. “And if there are any security gaps, the development team is immediately notified so they can be remediated. And it’s not just about individual configurations. Oak9 keeps an eye on the entire application architecture starting in the design phase and continuously assesses risk to manage potential drift.”

Hyde Park Angels and Uncorrelated Ventures also participated in 38-employee Oak9’s funding round.

Originally appeared on: TheSpuzz