Eureka, which allows holistic security across cloud stores and is focused initially on mid-sized organizations, plans to begin developing its channel by the end of the 2022 calendar year.

Israeli cloud security management startup Eureka, which has been founded by veterans of Palo Alto Networks, has announced it has secured its $8 million seed round funding. The round was led by YL Ventures with participation from multiple IT leaders. They include Edna Conway, VP, Security & Risk Officer, Azure Hardware Systems & Infrastructure at Microsoft, David Hannigan, the Director of Product Security Assurance at Google Cloud, Andy Ellis, former CSO at Akamai Technologies, Maarten Van Horenbeeck, the CISO at Zendesk, Assaf Rappaport, the CEO of Wiz, and Ben Bernstein, who was CEO at Twistlock, until it was acquired by Palo Alto Networks.

The Palo Alto Networks connection at Eureka includes both co-founders: Liat Hayun, the CEO, who was VP of Product Management at Palo Alto Networks; and Asaf Weiss, the CTO, who was Senior Director of Engineering at Palo Alto Networks.

What Eureka is looking to solve is a disconnect within security in multi-cloud environments, that will provide an organization with control over their entire cloud data security posture and compliance. The problem is created because even as cloud adoption and increased hyperautomation make it easier for businesses to generate and utilize cloud data stores, these increasingly become targets for theft, and the way these data stores are typically managed has major weaknesses.

“What we see today is a disconnect between teams in the organization –  between the teams responsible for how data is encrypted and implemented and the actual policy teams,” CEO Hayun told ChannelBuzz. “There are platforms around privacy and data, but these don’t address what the security teams implement. There are cloud security platforms that look at that, but they do not have the broader context. The result is that the gap gets data lost in translation, which requires someone in the organization combining these into an action plan.” These often rely on Word documents and Excel spreadsheets.

“That has been our Eureka moment, knowing these problems we have to address,” Hayun stated.

Hayun said that the trick is to manage the technology that organizes and protects the data in a way that fits with the rather different way that companies would prefer it to be managed.

“Most organizations now use more than one cloud vendor, and use multiple types of technology to store data,” Hayun stated. “Each of these databases have their own configuration and their own control and you need to configure expertise specifically around them. Organizations, on the other hand, tend to define data management as making it available only to specific users, or wanting it backed up in a certain way. They don’t define it around database technology, but about how data needs to be managed. We take these high-level policies and translate them into technology-specific policies to make sure they stick to compliance policies that are in place.” They also cover all of the public clouds and their cloud stores.

Eureka’s solution repurposes existing technologies, like the way data is classified as Personally Identifiable Information, and their own unique technologies like the translate engine that actually translates the data coming from different cloud accounts, into those technology-specific policies.

The target market for this, once it becomes broadly available, will be mid-size companies rather than large ones, at least at first.

“From a market perspective, this applies to almost every organization that leverages cloud technology,” Hayun said. “Large retailers are likely to experience these kind of challenges we are built to solve, but we also apply to almost all mid-size organizations and above. Very small ones wouldn’t have the multiple data stores leveraging the cloud that we handle. The Go-to-Market strategy out of the gate though is to focus on mid-size organizations that are not as regulated. As we grow, we plan to expand into larger organizations.”

The plan is to bring channel partners into the mix by the end of this year.

“We see the channel as a force multiplier,” Hayun said. “Drawing on our experience from Palo Alto Networks, we saw that partners tend to be more objective in their role of trusted advisors, so will be critical for us. At this point we are selling direct, and the founders are involved in these early deals. We think though that by the end of this calendar year, we will be in a position to extend it to partners.”

This will include MSP and MSSP partners as well.

“Smaller organizations may not see this as a key for them, but it does remove a pane of glass,” Hayun noted. “Being able to leverage it from an MSP or an MSSP will gives a good sense of their overall posture.”