Symmetry Systems, a provider of data store and object security (DSOS) solutions, emerged from stealth mode on Tuesday with $3 million in seed funding from ForgePoint Capital and Prefix Capital.
Symmetry Systems was founded by Mohit Tiwari, a former cybersecurity professor at the University of Texas, and Casen Hunger, one of Tiwari’s former students. The company is the result of data security research they conducted over the past decade.
The company’s flagship solution, Symmetry DataGuard, is designed to provide visibility and unified access control over data assets in MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB and AWS S3 storage. It can help security and infrastructure teams by providing them auditing and compliance reports, security alerts for potentially malicious activity and breaches, and IAM and security policies.
Symmetry Systems says its solution was fine-tuned based on feedback from over 50 security practitioners, and it has already been tested by tech, healthcare, manufacturing and fintech organizations.
“Data security is a side-effect of infrastructure and application security — small mistakes there lead to large breaches or ransomware attacks,” Tiwari, who is the company’s CEO, told SecurityWeek. “The difficult thing about data security is that a solution will need to look into data objects and across data stores to learn how user and service identities use data — and then tie it to an organization’s security and compliance targets. DataGuard learns attributes about the data (PII/PCI/PHI, stale, its owners and users, etc…) and uses this visibility to drive compliance, detection-response and guide infrastructure and data-store specific defenses.”
“Security engineers struggle with ground truth visibility into data protection; current solutions provide visibility into network and endpoint-devices but data stores are a blind spot. DataGuard is deployed inside our customer’s private cloud or on premise servers, so we, the developers of Symmetry Systems, don’t have access to customers’ data. They can collaborate with our customers through a separate locked down machine (bastion host) via sanitized DataGuard outputs,” Tiwari added, noting that DataGuard can also be offered as a service hosted by Symmetry itself.
The company says it plans on using the money raised in the seed round to boost product development and customer support.
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