News Reports vArmour CEO Eades Nabbed $41 Million Ahead of Trump Presidency
In May, Gartner named 2016 Cool Vendors in several security categories. Given the focus of this column, I was interested in several of the companies chosen for the designation, especially those named in the Cool Vendors in Cloud and Emerging Technology Security 2016 report. Interestingly enough, only vArmour, one of the new-era cloud security and visibility providers, was noted for supporting security in DevOps environments.
In the report, analysts Joerg Fritsch and Brian Lowans wrote:
Supporting the vision of a software-defined data center, all of the capabilities of the vArmour platform are exposed and consumable programmatically via APIs, providing support for highly automated and DevSecOps-type development workflows.
The analysts also noted vArmour enables application-aware microsegmentation anywhere, from the data center to the cloud and all hybrid points in between. They also highlighted its capabilities that extend security to virtualized environments and containers—security anytime and all the time. Pretty cool, indeed.
The report provides deep validation for a message vArmour has been pushing since its emergence from stealth—visibility. While many security vendors have interlaced the keyword into their marketing content, this report makes the claim for vArmour all the more true. According to the report:
vArmour’s distributed security platform combines a scalable fabric with advanced security analytics that offer full visibility from a deep packet inspection engine. This deep visibility enables other cool use cases, such as network-based threat detection and the visualization of workload traffic. This is required in environments where the workload, the network and the security policies are interacting much more closely than we have been used to in traditional environments.
Validation from firms such as Gartner can carry heavy weight among buyers, especially among deep-pocketed enterprise influencers. I’ve had conversations with C-level security execs at numerous mega corporations in the past who have stated point-blank that they won’t approve expenditures for any technologies that aren’t noted in recognized industry reports.
vArmour also announced recently the closing of a $41 million round led by Redline Capital and Telstra. This D round lifts the software-defined security provider’s total investment to $83 million.
In the official company release, vArmour stated it will use the capital for “global expansion and to accelerate worldwide software distribution of its Distributed Security System (DSS) through strategic partners in Asia-Pacific, EMEA and in North America.”
Although the Presidential race wasn’t mentioned in the release, it was reported by CNBC’s Ari Levy that the real reason CEO Tim Eades sought funding now was in anticipation of a Donald Trump presidency. Eades was quoted in the CNBC story as having said:
It really does matter what people think of the U.S. as we lead up to the election,” said Eades, a native of the U.K. who moved to the U.S. 18 years ago. With Trump, “the conversation he’s had around Mexico, trading abroad, his position on immigration — everybody outside America looks in and says, `What’s going to happen?’
Levy continued:
With Trump having closed the gap on Clinton in the polls less than six months before the election, Eades said it’s definitely time for start-ups to be padding their cash positions. He isn’t comforted by the fact that Trump is a businessman himself.
To most reading this, vArmour being named a Cool Vendor and handily raising $41 million likely isn’t coming as a surprise. Starting with Eades, the company has an impressive cybersecurity and business leadership pedigree, especially when it comes to startups that are shaking up security thought and practices around the data center, cloud and DevOps movement. Eades is even viewed as a thought leader—likely one of the reasons why he is an occasional guest on global news shows such as Fox and Bloomberg, where he has been called to provide expert analysis on everything from cyberwar to breaches to investment.
His vision to extend security to the rapidly growing trends of DevOps, cloud, containers and automation is certainly smart, as these are directions most enterprise IT organizations are headed. Said Eades in a company issued release on the funding:
It has been an amazing 18 months since we launched our company. We now have hundreds of customers adopting the vArmour Distributed Security System on a global scale, including some of the world’s largest telecom companies, banks, healthcare, retailers and U.S. government agencies. We believe Gartner’s ‘Cool Vendor’ recognition further validates the positive impact and true value we’re providing our customers. We’re offering them the industry’s simplest, integrated data center and cloud security solution to prevent, detect and remediate advanced persistent threats inside their network.