Today, Texas-based Portnox, a cloud-native Network Access Control (NAC) provider, closed a $22 million series A funding round. The organization intends to use the investment to expand its team and increase market penetration among mid-market organizations.

Portnox provides enterprises with an end-to-end NAC cloud solution with a suite of security services including authentication, access control, risk mitigation, and compliance enforcement as part of a single platform. 

The announcement comes amid a wider trend of companies struggling to secure decentralized cloud environments against increasingly diverse modern threats, with 36% of organizations suffering a serious cloud security data leak from 2020-2021. 

Portnox hopes to address the challenge of security cloud environments by granting decision makers and security teams end-to-end visibility to network access so they can preemptively defend against malicious entities. 

Reducing the Complexity of Decentralized Networks 

One of the main reasons modern organizations struggle to secure the cloud is a lack of staffing. There is a substantial cyber skills gap of 2.72 million cybersecurity professionals that makes it difficult for security teams to effectively configure and maintain their defenses against advanced threat actors. 

Portnox attempts to address the cyber skills gap head-on by providing end-to-end visibility over the cloud environment so that a small security team can authenticate users and mitigate risks quickly and cost-efficiently. 

Portnox’s CEO Denny LeCompte told VentureBeat that the organization “delivers cloud-native network and endpoint security essentials that enable agile, resource-constrained IT teams to proactively address today’s most pressing security challenges, the rapid expansion and increased complexity of enterprise networks, the proliferation of connected device types, and the increased sophistication of cyberattacks.” 

The mission to be the top loud network access control solution 

Portnox is part of the NAC market, worth $1.5 billion in 2020 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of over 25% between 2021 and 2027, due to the rise in adoption of BYOD policies and enterprises looking for network security management solutions that offer a holistic view to provide secure access to the network.

One of Portnox’s main competitors is TwinGate, a provider that offers a zero-trust,remote access products for enterprises used by organizations including HI-Rez Studios, Bitpanda, Blend, Melio, and Komodo. 

Another is Forescout, which offers users zero-trust NACcapabilities and was recently recognized as a Gartner Customers’ Choice solution, that’s used by enterprises including HubSpot, Acciona, and AFLAC. 

However, LeCompte believes that Portnox’s simplicity has advantages over most NAC solutions that offer perpetual licensing models, complex configurations, and ongoing maintenance. 

“By eliminating the need for any on-premises footprint common among traditional NAC systems, Portnox allows companies — no matter their size, geo-distribution, or networking architecture— to deploy, scale, enforce, and maintain powerful network security policies with unprecedented ease,” LeCompte said. 

The funding round was led by Elsewhere Partners.