Serverless application security firm Protego Labs announced Wednesday that it has raised $2 million seed funding from a group of investors led by Ron Gula of Gula Tech Adventures, Glilot Capital Partners, and the MetroSITE Group of security industry pioneers, including former RSA CTO, Tim Belcher.
The serverless approach — where the server being used is managed by a cloud provider rather than the application owner — offers great advantages in speed, simplicity and cost-savings. Gula believes it is a transformative step in leveraging the full potential of the public cloud.
“But,” he adds, “but it also presents a host of new threats and security challenges that traditional application security cannot handle. Protego offers a security solution designed specifically with serverless in mind, putting it at the forefront of this major technology shift.”
Protego summarizes the security problem in a blog published in March 2018. “Not owning the platform means not being able to leverage the platform for security in ways you might have in the past. You’re at the mercy of whatever security mechanisms the cloud provider puts in place for you, and those rarely provide the level and granularity of protection you’d like.”
The Protego platform operates by continuously scanning the serverless infrastructure, including functions, logs, and databases. It uses machine-based analysis and deep learning algorithms to build a model of normal behavior to find threats by anomaly detection as they initiate and begin to propagate. It does this in real time allowing the minimal effective protection dose in the right place — maximizing security while minimizing costs.
Protego has offices in Baltimore, MD, and Israel. It was founded by Tsion (TJ) Gonen, Hillel Solow, Shali Mor, Itay Harush and Benny Zemmour. In January 2018 it won the Startup Competition for the most innovative cyber initiative at the Cybertech Tel Aviv 2018 Conference.
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Kevin Townsend is a Senior Contributor at SecurityWeek. He has been writing about high tech issues since before the birth of Microsoft. For the last 15 years he has specialized in information security; and has had many thousands of articles published in dozens of different magazines – from The Times and the Financial Times to current and long-gone computer magazines.
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