ScaleFT Closes $2 Million Seed Funding Round; Launches “Zero Trust” Solution to Help Modernize Cloud Security

SAN FRANCISCO, July 19, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- ScaleFT, the “Zero Trust” security company, today announced the close of a $2 million seed funding round and the pre-release availability of the ScaleFT Access Fabric, a new component of the ScaleFT Platform that allows enterprises to emulate security practices pioneered by Google. Participating in the round were Fathom Capital, Spectrum 28, Fuel Capital and Graham Weston, the founder of Rackspace. With the release of ScaleFT Access Fabric, customers can now rely on a cloud-native access management platform that better protects company resources without the need for VPNs by making intelligent access decisions in real-time based on dynamic user and device conditions.

“We launched ScaleFT in 2015 based on the thesis that perimeter-based security methods are broken. Google’s BeyondCorp has proven that to be true. We’ve since been taking the lead in building a business, community, and ecosystem around the principles of the Zero Trust security model,” said Jason Luce, CEO and ScaleFT co-founder. “The cloud has changed everything, and enterprises need a new security paradigm to keep up with the changing threat landscape. Our Zero Trust solutions have been deployed in production at a number of companies, protecting millions of resources across AWS, Azure, GCP, and on-premises. With this new architecture, we’re disrupting a $50 billion VPN market with solutions that just work and are actually embraced by employees.”

In the wake of the 2009 Aurora nation-state attacks on its global networks, Google developed BeyondCorp, a zero trust security framework that shifts access controls from the perimeter of an enterprise to individual devices and users. The ScaleFT Platform is built on the principles of BeyondCorp and offers much higher levels of security to enterprises than traditional perimeter defenses, letting employees work securely from any location without the need for a VPN.

“Virtually every company today uses firewalls to enforce perimeter security,” wrote Rory Ward and Betsy Bayer of Google. “However, this security model is problematic because, when that perimeter is breached, an attacker has relatively easy access to a company’s privileged intranet. As companies adopt mobile and cloud technologies, the perimeter is becoming increasingly difficult to enforce.”

The global cloud services market is poised to skyrocket from $114 billion in 2016 to $236 billion by 2020, according to market research firm Forrester*. Its rapid growth is driving the market for cloud security tools, which will increase from $1 billion in 2016 to $3.5 billion in 2021. Forrester found the cloud security market will grow 28% each year from 2016 to 2021 as the cloud grows in complexity and more security is needed.

“Zero trust is a fundamentally better way of doing security. The fact that this is based on Google and how they run their own security is the best validation you can get,” said Brad Silverberg of Fuel Capital. “We believe the zero trust approach will redefine how security is done.”

ScaleFT's Zero Trust solutions for managing access to company web apps and servers assume that no traffic within an enterprise’s network is any more trustworthy by default than traffic entering from outside the firewall. Unlike the traditional security model, ScaleFT’s Zero Trust model dispels the notion of network segmentation as the primary mechanism for granting access. Instead, all internal applications are deployed to the public Internet, but only accessible through a managed user and device-centric authentication and authorization model.

“At Rackspace, our Passport feature leverages ScaleFT to give Rackspace employees and customers secure access control to their AWS environments. This capability is a key part of our value to customers,” said Erik Carlin, Vice President, Fanatical AWS Product and Engineering at Rackspace.

Launching today as a key component of the ScaleFT Platform, the ScaleFT Access Fabric is a globally distributed, cloud native environment that enables lightning fast dynamic authentication and authorization. It integrates out of the box with an enterprise’s choice of identity governance solutions, including Active Directory, Okta, Google and more. It is ideal for organizations that want to offer employees BYOD flexibility but don’t want to deal with the cost, complexity, operating overhead and performance deprecations of enterprise VPNs.

For employees, ScaleFT makes it easy to log in to any company web app or server from any location using a single sign-on service with explicit instructions on how to correct access if ever denied (i.e., device not in inventory, operating system not current, etc…). Administrators can safely expose web resources through a fully integrated access management solution and specify controls through easy-to-understand policies. Managers can view reports of all employee login history via a dashboard and see at any moment who in the company has access to what resources.

Benefits:

The ScaleFT Platform offers many other immediate benefits, including:

• Much improved overall security posture;
• Entirely eliminates static credentials;
• Device to resource visibility;
• Improved personal security practices;
• Easy and secure BYOD rollout;
• Hassle-free immediate employee adoption;
• Eliminates the need for VPNs and their setup and endpoint installation problems.

For more information:

1. Sign up for the ScaleFT Access Fabric pre-release program. Please apply online here: https://www.scaleft.com/access-fabric
2. Visit us at Black Hat. Come by the ScaleFT booth #IC24 in the Innovation Center to talk all things BeyondCorp and Zero Trust and try hands-on demos of new server and new Web access solutions inspired by Google's BeyondCorp framework.
3. Learn about the Zero Trust security model. Download a free chapter from O’Reilly’s definitive book, “Zero Trust Networks,” authored by leading network security experts Evan Gilman and Doug Barth.

About ScaleFT
ScaleFT helps companies protect sensitive resources through a Zero Trust security platform that makes intelligent, context-aware access decisions in real time and eliminates the need for enterprise VPNs. Founded by startup veterans from The Apache Software Foundation, Cloudkick, Iron.io, JBoss, MongoDB and Rackspace, the company is venture-backed with offices in San Francisco and Austin. Learn more at: www.scaleft.com or follow us on Twitter @ScaleFT.

*Forrester: “Cloud Security Solutions Forecast,” June 8, 2017

Editorial Contact
Lonn Johnston for ScaleFT
[email protected]
+1.650.219.7764