Silicon Valley tech duo Amer Deeba and Ravi Ithal have set out to provide answers for one of the most pressing issues facing public cloud platforms today – cloud data security. The paradigm shift from legacy on-prem systems to cloud-based platforms has brought to the forefront a new computing model that is data-centric. 

“Today’s enterprises find their data scattered throughout their various cloud environments with limited visibility of where sensitive data resides. It’s a massive problem that current cloud security offerings aren’t equipped to handle,” said Amer Deeba, cofounder and CEO at Normalyze.

“Data is eating the cloud due to many trends like AI & ML and the move from on-prem environments to IaaS and PaaS. Existing cloud security solutions are falling short to help companies discover, classify sensitive data and secure it. This is the problem Normalyze is set to solve across all public clouds and at scale,” says Amer Deeba. 

Among the cloud services that enterprises employ to improve their day-to-day operations are Amazon Web Services (News – Alert) (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure, and other Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers. These services have allowed businesses to flourish and prosper. While AWS, Azure, and GCP excel at supporting enterprises in the development of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS (News-Alert)) products, they may not guarantee sufficient security for data stored in the cloud. This has led to CISOs searching far and wide for a holistic solution that provides tools for the classification and security of data. 

Data security has become more complex due to the proliferation of data, an explosion of microservices, rapid cloud adoption, hybrid work environments, compliance, remote work, and more. 

Enterprises now find their data dispersed over several cloud platforms, and they have limited visibility into where their important data lies. Is it possible that developers abandoned shadow data stores? Who has access to all company data stored in various clouds, and are there any excessive privileges? What data is in danger of being compromised and hence losing regulatory compliance? These are the questions that are keeping CISOs awake anticipating the multitude of challenges their enterprises are faced with. 

To keep their data secure, enterprises have been deploying several tools to continuously discover, classify and protect their data. These tools which include data loss and prevention platforms to discover data and attempt to block its leaking, change management databases to track assets and their location, cloud security posture management, and SaaS security posture management programs to try to minimize their attack surface, are not equipped to work together in complete synergy. This leads to a drain of resources and a security policy that is challenging to deploy. 

Normalyze was formed to provide an answer to this challenge, with both founders being staunch believers in how cloud computing is the future. 

“We built Normalyze to classify and secure sensitive data across all public clouds,” Deeba said.

Normalyze assists companies in understanding the full picture of data risks through agentless assessment, data discovery, data categorization, AI-driven vulnerability analysis, risk prioritization, and comprehensive and practical remedial insights. Everything related to applications, infrastructure, settings, vulnerabilities, and the identities and permissions connected with user and system access must be identified and understood. 

The graph contains everything and links all of the components required to discover data and correlate hazards. “Our graph-powered platform is a hub that connects all data with assets, identities, accesses, misconfigurations, and vulnerabilities to help security teams continuously discover sensitive information, determine attack paths and automate remediation efforts to secure it,” said Ravi Ithal, Normalyze co-founder and CTO.

“With the Normalyze one-pass scanner, users can scan structured and unstructured data stores to discover sensitive information based on predefined compliance profiles for PII, GDPR, HIPAA, and more with minimal upfront configuration and cost–while ensuring data never leaves their cloud environments,” Ithal said.

The team working on the startup consists of some of the best and brightest of Silicon Valley.

Ravi Ithal is the co-founder and CTO. He has an extensive background in enterprise and cloud security. Before Normalyze, Ravi was the cofounder and chief architect of Netskope, a leading provider of cloud-native solutions to businesses for data protection and defense against threats in the cloud. Before Netskope, Ravi was one of the founding engineers of Palo Alto Networks (NASDAQ: PANW). Before his time at Palo Alto Networks, Ravi held engineering roles at Juniper (NASDAQ: JNPR) and Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO).

Amer Deeba is the co-founder and CEO. He is a senior go-to-market executive with extensive experience in driving both product, marketing, and sales go-to-market strategies for enterprise and cloud technologies. In his 17 years tenure at Qualys (NASDAQ: QLYS), Amer led all aspects of marketing, business development, strategic alliances, and global enterprise accounts. He also played an instrumental role in taking the company public in 2012.

The company also joined hands with Gautam Kanaparthi, as Head of Product.  At Netskope, Kanaparthi built multiple products from the ground up to help the company address new customer problems including Nextgen Secure Web Gateway, Advanced Analytics, and Malware Scanning. Before Netskope, he was the principal product manager for Symantec Endpoint Security.

Normalyze announced earlier that it’s coming out of stealth with $22.2 million in series A funding. This round brings the company’s total funding to $26.6 million to date. The round of funding led by  Lightspeed Venture Partners and Battery Ventures will be used to expand the engineering and DevOps teams, and roll out the company’s go-to-market and sales strategies. 

“Normalyze has built a powerful platform that gives DevOps specialists, security engineers, and CISOs better visibility into their ‘data sprawl’; the links between infrastructure, applications, and users; and the automation to detect and fix security issues in real-time,” said Dharmesh Thakker from Battery Ventures.

The platform has onboarded several leading tech companies as clients which include Netskope, Corelight, Orkes, and more.

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