Israeli startup Adaptive Shield today emerged from stealth with $4 million in seed funding from Vertex Ventures Israel to automate complete control of SaaS application security. Enterprises depend on SaaS applications but lack resources to correctly configure those apps to prevent cyberattacks, data exfiltration and other risks. Adaptive is addressing this critical problem at the very foundation of the entire $115 billion plus global SaaS market.
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Catastrophic and costly data breaches result from SaaS security configuration errors. The Verizon 2020 Data Breach Investigations Report found that errors are the second largest cause of data breaches, accounting for about one in three breaches. Of those, misconfigurations are by far the most common, often resulting in databases or file system contents being directly exposed on a cloud service. Adaptive’s team has discovered SaaS setting errors that leave companies open to one-click corporate espionage, exposure of their entire cloud and massive amounts of video conferencing data in the new WFH era, as examples.
IT security teams must do more to protect their organizations from risks caused by poorly configured SaaS apps. Adaptive was created to address this problem.
In its latest SaaS Hype Cycle report, published July 30th, Gartner’s analysts refer to this new sector as SaaS Security Posture Management and identified it as one of the technologies that is “On the Rise.” The sector encompasses solutions such as the Adaptive Shield platform that focus on enhancing SaaS app security management.
Gartner forecasts that through 2025, 90% of the organizations that fail to control public cloud use will inappropriately share sensitive data and 99% of cloud security failures will be the customer’s fault. Furthermore, breaches are increasingly costly. According to research from the Ponemon Institute, the cost of a typical U.S. enterprise data breach has reached $8.2 million.
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Adaptive protects against SaaS-related data breaches and security errors by proactively finding and fixing misconfigurations across SaaS platforms for all global settings and user privileges. It solves this problem fast. It deploys in just five minutes and starts delivering value by automating discovery of SaaS app security misconfigurations, helping mitigate problems and automating security operation tasks. Its intuitive and highly visual dashboards minimize learning and administration time. Going forward, it provides continuous monitoring and alerts to protect against any changes that might introduce a risk.
“Every enterprise today is heavily using SaaS services without addressing the associated and ever-changing security risks,” says Emanuel Timor, General Partner at Vertex Ventures Israel. “We are impressed by the vision Adaptive Shield has to elegantly solve this complex problem and by the level of interest and fast adoption of its solution by customers.”
In a short time, Adaptive Shield has many impressive installations including Fortune 500 companies. In addition, the company supports dozens of leading cloud apps including Office 365, Salesforce, Zoom, Slack and others. This achievement is made possible by Adaptive’s innovative technology that automates and accelerates the process for rapidly adding new SaaS apps. New app integrations are being added continuously.
“SaaS security is broken and it’s the customer’s problem,” said Maor Bin, CEO and Co-founder of Adaptive Shield. “Although SaaS platforms all have dozens or even hundreds of built-in security configuration controls, it is the responsibility of the client to set them correctly. Security teams are overwhelmed trying to manage thousands of settings across all their apps. Our mission is to give security teams one common platform to manage all their SaaS app security.”
Adaptive Shield is a comprehensive solution that analyzes, identifies and prioritizes weaknesses in SaaS applications and enables continuous security for all global settings and user privileges. Essential business values include:
- Compliance evaluation and risk scoring — Analyzes and scores SaaS apps against leading compliance frameworks such as NIST, SOC 2, HIPAA and PCI DSS
- Zero disruption to business — Works in the background and is completely non-intrusive
- Stronger policy enforcement — Unifies policies across all SaaS apps for more effective enforcement
- Always-on security — Continuously monitors SaaS apps ensuring they stay fully secure
- Fast and easy implementation — Quickly connect SaaS apps using a self-service wizard; discovery begins immediately and automatically
- Minimal support required by security teams — Clear dashboard and instructions let admins focus on setting and enforcing common security policies
Adaptive Shield is led by co-founders, Maor Bin, CEO, and Jony Shlomoff, CTO. The two met while serving in the Israeli Defense Forces. Bin is the former head of cloud security research for Proofpoint and Shlomoff was most recently co-founder and VP of engineering for Los Altos-based Placer.ai.
Developing channel partnerships with leading IT service providers and resellers is an integral part of Adaptive’s go-to-market strategy.
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