Aembit – a Workload Identity and Access Management (IAM) company – recently announced an investment by CrowdStrike via its strategic investment vehicle, the CrowdStrike Falcon Fund. CrowdStrike’s investment closes Aembit’s previously announced seed funding round from Ballistic Ventures, Ten Eleven Ventures, and Okta Ventures.
As part of the funding round, Aembit and CrowdStrike will partner on technical integration with go-to-market alignment. This partnership will help provide customers with a comprehensive Zero Trust strategy by assessing the identity and health of workloads before permitting access to sensitive resources.
Enterprise applications are becoming more distributed, including software the enterprise develops, databases, and APIs from customers and partners. But despite this complexity, many companies rely on secrets and secret managers for workload-to-workload access, which are brittle, challenging to manage, and do not allow for the creation, enforcement, and auditing of workload access policies. Plus, while workloads have identities and continually changing security postures as users do, the technical means and workflows to manage them radically differ.
To solve this, Aembit pioneered one of the first cloud services for workload identity and access management (IAM). And Aembit cryptographically identifies workloads based on various characteristics, including attestation, assesses their security posture, and defines conditional access policies that determine workload access rights. Plus, Aembit also eliminates static workload identity secrets, removes the need for developers to code workload-to-workload authorization, and makes it easy to centralize visibility and control. With Aembit, enterprises manage access, not secrets.
CrowdStrike’s Falcon Fund is a cross-stage investment fund and the largest corporate venture arm in the cybersecurity industry. And the program is designed to build an ecosystem of next-generation security leaders that share a common mission through a combination of investment and deep technical integrations with the CrowdStrike Falcon platform, giving CrowdStrike customers access to cutting-edge third-party capabilities.
KEY QUOTES:
“Zero Trust principles are beginning to influence workload-to-workload deployments, similar to how they influence user access to resources. The combination of workload identity, risk assessment, and policy-based access allows enterprises to provide sophisticated identity security across their applications without burdening their development and operations teams. We are excited to be partnering with CrowdStrike to bring Aembit’s Workload IAM approach to the enterprise.”
— David Goldschlag, CEO and co-founder of Aembit
“Identity is a critical pillar to securing the modern enterprise at each layer of the stack. As cloud adoption has proliferated, the complexity associated with managing federated workloads at each layer has become daunting and resulted in significant exposure. Aembit enables enterprises to take control of their machine identity access management and scale their security programs within their rapidly expanding cloud estate. We are excited to partner with the Aembit team to bring joint solutions to our customers.”
— Gur Talpaz, vice president of corporate development at CrowdStrike and head of Falcon Fund
