Identity-based approach to microsegmentation
speeds adoption in OT, IoT and hybrid environments such as
healthcare and critical infrastructure, and applies AI to deflect
emerging cyber threats
Elisity, the pioneer in identity-based microsegmentation, today
announced it has raised $37 million in Series B funding from global
software investor Insight Partners. Elisity will use the new funds
to extend its platform’s artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities,
fully leveraging organizations’ device identity data to anticipate
and pre-empt emerging cyber threats and establish unprecedented
control over IT, OT, IoT and hybrid environments.
Microsegmentation is essential to containing attackers’ lateral
movement within compromised networks, making it fundamental to
cyber defense and foundational to building zero trust
architectures. Gartner predicts that by 2026, 60% of enterprises
working toward zero trust architecture will use more than one
deployment form of microsegmentation, which is up from less than 5%
in 2023. Unsurprisingly, Exactitude Consultancy predicts the global
microsegmentation market will grow from $2.63 billion in 2023 to
$12.47 billion by 2030.
“Elisity is addressing a critical segmentation need within our
customers’ infrastructure, but our identity-based approach and
continued AI investments will ensure we can leverage our ‘single
source of truth’ on network assets to redefine network security
with more real-time, adaptable security policies,” said James
Winebrenner, CEO of Elisity. “Traditional segmentation efforts
often pitted performance and availability focused networking teams
against security teams inserting control choke points. By
abstracting segmentation from network operations, Elisity removes
traditional project friction, costs and delays, allowing zero trust
projects to quickly proceed and enabling new network security
capabilities as needs evolve tomorrow.”
Elisity’s identity-based approach to microsegmentation
represents a major market shift by centralizing the security policy
management process within Elisity IndentityGraph. This allows
networking teams to gain unprecedented visibility and focus on
enhancing performance and availability while security teams assert
more granular control over users, devices and workloads based on
their contextual attributes. In this way, Elisity addresses the
long-time challenge of easily and quickly deploying
microsegmentation and streamlines efforts to deploy zero trust and
other critical capabilities.
“As a former CISO, I had completely dismissed microsegmentation
until I talked to Elisity’s customers,” said Stephen Ward, Managing
Director at Insight Partners. “More than a decade as a former
operator taught me that these projects are notoriously difficult
due to a lack of viable, scalable technical approaches to
implementing essential controls exactly where and how they're
needed. Due diligence and conversations with customers convinced me
that Elisity could be quickly and effectively implemented and
scaled to address a fast-growing need across thousands of IT and OT
environments.”
Healthcare Market Opportunity
Recent attacks on the U.S. healthcare sector by ransomware group
ALPHV-Blackcat and others have utilized the tactic of compromising
networks and then moving laterally within them to attack more
valuable assets. Elisity’s ability to abstract policy management
from networks allows healthcare and other organizations to easily
implement granular controls in hybrid environments merging
information technology (IT) and internet of things (IoT)
assets.
Elisity has successfully partnered with healthcare organizations
facing not only cyber threats, but also regulatory requirements
demanding tight controls over patient data and access to
life-supporting medical devices.
“Elisity’s identity-based microsegmentation brings tremendous
capabilities to our security stack as a critical control point for
containing ransomware, blocking malicious lateral network traffic
and minimizing incident blast radius,” Aaron Weismann, CISO at Main
Line Health. “The platform has already proven valuable in technical
network representations for meeting cyber insurance and compliance
requirements. Elisity features prominently for our present and
forward-looking security posture, allowing us to easily adjust to
new regulatory as well as threat landscape developments.”
Critical Infrastructure Market Opportunity
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)
recommends critical infrastructure providers implement network
segmentation as a key step in their cyber resilience strategies.
Elisity's agentless, identity-based platform also provides
tremendous advantages to the OT environments of industrial control
systems (ICS) powering critical infrastructure. Identity-based
controls are particularly critical in these environments given a
wide range of devices are legacy systems that cannot be protected
with agent-based endpoint security solutions common in IT
environments.
Elisity supports a number of critical infrastructure providers’
efforts to protect OT systems lacking security features, prevent
expensive operational disruptions, address compliance requirements,
manage supply chain risks, converge IT-OT networks, and facilitate
cyber incident response.
“Elisity has surpassed all our expectations,” said Max Everett,
CISO at Shaw Industries and former White House CIO. “We deployed it
at two of our sites in less than an hour, and by the next day, we
were confidently implementing policies. This unprecedented speed
and effectiveness soon made Elisity an indispensable part of our
network security strategy across our manufacturing sites,
protecting thousands of managed IT assets as well as our growing
number of unmanaged IoT and OT assets.”
Insight Partners joins AllegisCyber Capital and Two Bear
Capital—who co-led the Series A and participated in the Series
B—along with seed investor Atlantic Bridge, to take Elisity’s total
funding to more than $72 million.
About Elisity
Elisity revolutionizes network security, implementing dynamic,
context-aware policies that adapt to modern cyber threats, offering
a fresh take on safeguarding network resources.
About Insight Partners
Insight Partners is a global software investor partnering with
high-growth technology, software, and Internet startup and ScaleUp
companies that are driving transformative change in their
industries. As of December 31, 2023, the firm has over $80B in
regulatory assets under management. Insight Partners has invested
in more than 800 companies worldwide and has seen over 55 portfolio
companies achieve an IPO. Headquartered in New York City, Insight
has offices in London, Tel Aviv, and the Bay Area. Insight’s
mission is to find, fund, and work successfully with visionary
executives, providing them with tailored, hands-on software
expertise along their growth journey, from their first investment
to IPO. For more information on Insight and all its investments,
visit insightpartners.com or follow us on X @insightpartners.
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Gartner, Market Guide for Microsegmentation, Adam Hils, Rajpreet
Kaur, Jeremy D'Hoinne, 12 June 2023
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version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240430716197/en/
Leslie Kesselring Kesselring Communications for Elisity
leslie@kesscomm.com