Global enterprises are aggressively adopting cloud solutions, as seen with the huge success of companies like Workday (NYSE:WDAY) and ServiceNow (NYSE:NOW). But to continue the megatrend, there needs to be heavy investment in security.
And this is the sweet spot for CipherCloud. In fact, the company has announced a funding of $30 million from Andreessen Horowitz.
Founded in 2010, CipherCloud has grown at hyperspeed. The company’s software now protects 1.2 million cloud app users and is available in eight countries.
The mastermind of CipherCloud is Pravin Kothari, who was the co-founder of ArcSight (the company went public and then sold out to HP for $1.5 billion). “From my experience at ArcSight,” he said, “I learned how important it is to remain focused on your strategy and to execute against that strategy. ArcSight was not the first to market in what grew to be a very crowded security space. Yet, as a result of our differentiated technology we succeeded and grew to be a dominant provider.”
OK, so what makes CipherCloud different? According to Pravin: “We offer eight different commercially available products that support the most popular cloud applications in the market: Salesforce, Chatter, Force.com, Google Gmail and Microsoft Office 365, among others. Our customers can use our technology without any changes needed to the cloud application. We preserve search, sort, and reporting operations for users, so there is no loss of productivity or convenience. We let our customers control the keys, so no one can access their data without their involvement. The technology is simple to understand, transparent to the end-users, fast, and easy to deploy.”
Condisder that Andreessen Horowitz has been an early supporter of CipherCloud, having made a seed investment of $1.4 million in the company last year. “When we made the investment, we saw both the market trend of enterprises adopting cloud applications and the increasing requirements for security,” said John Jack, a board partner at Andreessen Horowitz and former CEO of Fortify Software. “The company has made tremendous progress since then. We were delighted with the progress but not surprised given the market requirements.”
Of course, the market potential is enormous. Keep in mind that a report from Gartner predicts that about 25% of enterprises will use some type of cloud information protection technology by 2016.