A short pause along the path to celebrate being on the Forbes Cloud 100
For fifteen years, the cloud has been gaining steam. Over that time, AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud have come to dominate the market. These mega scale providers all offer a host of services for builders to create with.
As this market has matured, one question has remained. How do you—the builder—make sure that what you’re building does what you intend, and only what you intend?
That’s one of those questions that appears simple at first glance. Digging deeper though, you can easily get lost trying to find an answer.
What we know
We know that security isn’t just about stopping cybercriminals and hackers from getting into your systems. Security tools and processes also ensure your configurations don’t leave unnecessary gaps or vulnerabilities–leaving your data needlessly exposed.
In short, a security practice is constantly trying to provide assurances that your systems are operating as expected (and only as expected) and that any risks have been identified and addressed.
This can be a daunting task in any environment. Let alone a dynamic environment like the cloud.
One thing we’ve learned over a decade and a half of cloud usage, is that the better an organization gets at leveraging the cloud, the more complexity gets deployed.
It’s that complexity that makes cloud security challenging.
A data problem
Keeping things simple seems like a reasonable response to growing complexity and while that would be a wonderful solution, it’s not a realistic one.
Businesses are embracing cloud with good reason. As cloud maturity increases, innovation and business success tend to follow.
Security has to keep up. The most likely path to success is by shifting how we view the security problem space.
To secure your environment, you need to understand it. You need to quickly analyze all of the available data, compare what’s happened to what’s expected, and take action when necessary.
At its core, security is a data problem.
Milestones
This is the central belief that Lacework® was founded on seven years ago. Since then, we’ve continued to drive innovation in our platform and help our customers change their approach to cloud security, hitting many milestones along the way. It’s important to pause and celebrate these milestones as progress toward our ultimate destination, which is to change security forever. Today is one of those times when we pause to recognize a milestone. We’re happy to announce that we’ve been listed on the Forbes Cloud 100.
This is an annual list of the top 100 privately held companies in cloud. We’re honored to be named alongside other game changing companies like Stripe, Databricks, Airtable, Plaid, and Klaviyo.
The trail
At moments like these, it’s important to reflect on the trail to here. It’s never just one thing but a series of small steps that add up to major accomplishments. We’ve come a long way since our co-founder Vikram Kapoor got the ball rolling in 2015.
In January of 2021, on the heels of $525M in funding, David “Hat” Hatfield came on board as our Chairman and CEO. Hat brought a mountain of experience to the company and his arrival marked a new chapter in Lacework’s journey. Legendary technologist Ulfar Erlingsson joined as Chief Architect to elevate our technical leadership team.
This set the tone for what was an incredible few months.
Lacework expanded into EMEA, bringing on Jesper Frederickson to lead our foray into International. We formalized our partnership with Google Cloud and then brought in Brian Lanigan as part of a renewed push supporting our partners.
Behind the scenes, Ulfar and the engineering team set to work rebuilding our systems in order to reach new heights of scaling and performance. The combined efforts of hundreds of top engineers and product managers started to reshape the Polygraph® Data Platform to meet the needs of our customers today and in the future.
So much happened that by July, we realized that it was time to expand the leadership team even further. This is when Jay Parikh joined as Co-CEO, with Arash Nikkar coming on board soon thereafter to build a world class engineering organization.
More funding came in but more importantly, innovation kept rolling out to production.
During the last couple of months alone, we launched;
- Container and workload security for AWS Fargate
- Continued improvements to our Linux agent
- Kubernetes audit log analysis
- Windows workload security with a new agent
- Acquired and integrated Lacework IaC Security
- Added visibility & reach with agentless scanning
- And today we released a new time series model and an enhanced alerting experience to make it easy for organizations to address more threats in the cloud while enabling faster investigations
…and that doesn’t even cover the long list of technical improvements we’ve made behind the scenes. Nor does it cover the work we’ve done with our partners and teams around the world to continue our best in class growth.
There are just a few pieces that underpin our platform approach. Our platform allows you to rapidly scan massive infrastructures to shine a light on the latest vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and other issues.
It’s hard enough to run your security practice, you don’t need to be overwhelmed by alerts that you can’t do anything with. The Polygraph Data Platform is designed from the ground up to deliver actionable insights to all of your teams working in the cloud andthe goal is to help you solve security problems at scale.
We’ve worked tirelessly to make sure that our technology seamlessly connects to your environment. This focus on operational efficiency helps our customers maximize the efforts of their security practice from build time to runtime.
Again, these are all markers along a much larger path.
Our goal
We are laser focused on helping our customers innovate with speed and safety in the cloud and are on a path to change security forever with data and automation. With an ambitious goal like that, it’s critical to focus on what really matters.
Here’s a great example of that. Take a listen to the impact we’ve had on the day-to-day operations of our customer, LendingTree.
They went from two hundred noisy alerts a day to just five alerts which mattered. That freed up their team to focus on improving their security posture, not just trying to keep up with wave after wave of noise.
We are honored to be included on the Forbes Cloud 100 list and pledge to continue innovating our offerings and scaling our business to help more customers like John. We’re grateful to our customers and partners who choose us and will continue to focus on building and shipping innovations that make their lives easier. And of course, we wouldn’t be able to do what we do without our incredible employees. A heartfelt thank you is due to every Lacer who shows up every day to not only make our product better, but who works to make Lacework the company that it is–pushing the boundaries of cloud security innovation… we’re just getting started!