Entro’s platform continuously monitors and protects secrets and programmatic access to cloud services, something that is done today by scanners and vaults, but not very effectively.
Today, Entro Security, a Boston-based cybersecurity startup out of Israel, has announced $6 million in seed funding for their approach to dealing with the security and management of secrets, which are in essence machine authentication credentials. Their platform continuously monitors and protects secrets and programmatic access to cloud services. The seed funding around was led by StageOne Ventures and Hyperwise Ventures. Angel investors include Rakesh Loonkar, founder of Trusteer and Transmit Security, Mickey Boodaei, founder of Imperva, Trusteer and Transmit Security and Amichai Shulman, founder of Imperva and AirEye.
Secrets are in the most simplest terms, programmatic access keys.
“Today, secrets are created without any oversight by security teams and they are scattered everywhere as a result,” said Itzik Alvas, Entro’s CEO. “The lack of a dedicated solution and CISO oversight have been the issues here, and the result is that 19% of breaches are due to compromised secrets.”
Alvas said that there have been solutions on the market to deal with this issue, but that they don’t really work.
The Entro team. Itzik Alvas is seated at the right end, with the big dog
“With cloud services, in order to authenticate them, they need a key,” he said. “Until now, the common solutions for dealing with these secrets have solved only a fraction of the problems. Vaults and traditional storage do not secure the secrets, as we do. They just store them. The other common solution has been scanning the cloud for secrets, which doesn’t work well if the customer doesn’t know what cloud secrets they manage. Scanning doesn’t cover enough, and if you do find a secret using scanning, you will typically not know what to do with it.
“So there are solutions for the problem, but they are older, and only deal with a small portion of the problem,” Alvas said. “In order to manage secrets properly, you must know where they are, be able to monitor them, and be able to remediate a problem if one develops.”
Entro’s holistic secrets security platform detects, safeguards and provides context for secrets stored across vaults, source code, collaboration tools, cloud environments and SaaS platforms. It gives CISOs and security teams full oversight and the ability to govern any secret from a single pane of glass.
“We came to the conclusion that secrets are a top danger, with over six million secrets leaked every year, and that he market needed a new type of solution,” Alvas said. “We are able to answer specific questions of how many there are and where they are. We visualize the map around cloud services, showing everything you need to know in order to make the secrets safe, and visualize them. If they are being misused, we will let the customer know. We also automate remediation – without using excessive permissions.”
Alvas stated that because Entro is the first platform of this type in the market, the analyst firms like Gartner haven’t yet figured out how to classify them.
“Gartner needs to open a new category for secrets security,” he said “We don’t classify anywhere with core Gartner positioning.”
The plus side of being new, and the first and only solution of this type so far, is that Entro has no direct competition.
“We compete against the older tools like scanners, but we are able to do a lot more than them,” Alvas said.
The market for this is fairly broad.
“Because secrets are keys, every company can use us, but we are targeting the enterprise and midmarket now,” Alvas noted.
Ultimately, the channel will be critical both in spreading Entro throughout this market, and eventually expanding it more broadly.
“It’s very clear that channel is important with our kind of cloud security,” Alvas said. “We are integrating with reseller partners, and are already engaged in conversations with them. In order for us to expand, it is very important for us to have a high touch model.”
