- Altitude Networks — the first cloud collaboration security platform in the industry — announced recently that it raised $9 million and plans to accelerate growth
Altitude Networks — the industry’s first cloud collaboration security platform — recently announced it closed $9 million in Series A funding led by Felicis Ventures with participation from Slack Fund. Previous investor Accomplice also joined the round and Alex Stamos (director of the Stanford Internet Observatory and former Facebook CSO) made a personal investment.
Aydin Senkut — founder and managing director of Felicis — is joining the board and the company. And the capital will be used for company growth and customer acquisition strategies.
“Cloud services will continue to gain market share as organizations look to cut costs while providing the best collaboration tools available to drive the business forward,” said Senkut. “What Altitude has built will enable businesses to embrace cloud tools while mitigating the risk factors with file sharing, data access and data leakage. The market opportunity for Altitude is tremendous as it applies to anyone using SaaS applications who wants control over their data.”
Michael Coates and Amir Kavousian are the co-founders of Altitude Networks. Coates is a 15-year veteran of the security industry and is the former CISO of Twitter, head of security for Mozilla, and chairman of OWASP. Prior to launching Altitude, Kavousian was a lead data scientist at Capital One where he used his machine learning experience to create fraud detection platforms at the financial giant.
“Altitude Networks uniquely fills a control gap faced by most modern companies as we embrace the ease of sharing live documents and increase the risk of a data leak,” added Jeff Bryner — the CISO of Vacasa. “Before using Altitude, the security team was working reactively to mitigate exposures, and tools for this kind of work didn’t exist. Altitude allowed us to adopt a proactive stance, giving us confidence we were seeing the whole picture. Great to see a new player step up to solve this issue!”
As companies are increasingly adopting cloud services that enable employee collaboration and document sharing like G Suite, Box, Office 365, and Slack, companies use an average of 27 different cloud apps and services. However, security and IT professionals have no way of monitoring how sensitive data is moving or when employees become malicious (compromised or simply make mistakes such as changing link sharing settings).
Altitude Networks is addressing this issue by tackling data security in the cloud to protect enterprises against unauthorized data access, accidental or malicious sharing to unintended individuals, and data theft.
“In an era when data protection laws like GDPR are colliding with the move to the cloud, I was intrigued by what Michael, Amir and the team built to help CSOs get a handle on this issue,” explained Stamos. “Creating an easy way to understand permissions to data in disparate SaaS applications and then take action based on highly accurate alerts is a phenomenal step forward in bringing more security to the cloud.”
Beyond personally identifiable information (PII) or payment information, Altitude monitors privileged and sensitive materials for potentially damaging sharing like legal documents, internal financial data, or confidential product roadmaps shared with unauthorized internal or external accounts or even personal Gmail accounts. And the platform is designed to support multiple SaaS applications beginning with G Suite and Box and expanding to Office 365, Slack, Salesforce, and others.
“Mobility and cloud technologies have enabled unprecedented real-time collaboration and file sharing. These innovations have been a catalyst for employee productivity, but unfortunately have also introduced numerous headaches for CISOs who are responsible for data protection,” noted Michael Viscuso — a venture partner at Accomplice and co-founder/Chief Strategy Officer of Carbon Black. “Security teams often lack visibility into what data is being stored, let alone shared, in the cloud. Altitude Networks’ platform was designed from the ground up to allow today’s knowledge workers to leverage cloud collaboration platforms without introducing unnecessary business risk. It gives security teams visibility into how their data is moving across — and out of — their organization. More importantly, it automatically identifies risks and takes action to stop data leakage and theft with little to no human input. With Altitude Networks, CISOs can sleep at night knowing that they are protected against overzealous or malicious file sharing.”
By leveraging the successes of data science for fraud detection, Altitude Networks applies those tenets to cybersecurity and cloud collaboration. And combined with file metadata and relationship analysis, Altitude accurately pinpoints business-critical files that are shared in highly risky ways that could lead to a data breach. For example, Altitude identified highly sensitive financial reports and board decks shared with personal email accounts of employees. for multiple customers.
“To date, companies are blind to file sharing activities in the cloud, visibility of critical risks, or capabilities for remediation across popular cloud collaboration platforms,” Coates commented. “I experienced these challenges first hand as a CISO. We built Altitude so that businesses could say yes to the cloud, and the inherent collaboration benefits, without compromising security best practices around data access control and protection. At the same time, we wanted to provide the highest level of accuracy so that security teams can trust results and have confidence in the platform to automate remediation. By creating a single platform to manage multiple cloud collaboration products we enable companies to fully understand how data is moving across, and out of, their organization. Using Altitude, we empower companies with the visibility and control to fully protect their cloud data.”
Companies that are using Altitude Networks are filling the gap of security in cloud collaboration for multiple threats including protecting intellectual property from theft by offboarding employees, validating ex-contractors don’t have residual access to data through other accounts, preventing sharing of critical internal files to personal accounts, blocking inadvertent internal sharing of sensitive or privileged files to the entire company, and identifying and remediating public access to critical company files.
Altitude Networks’ platform was designed for companies of any size and it seamlessly integrates directly into cloud applications and provides continuous protection without endpoint software agents or network proxy devices. Customers are able to integrate Altitude into their cloud environment in less than 30 minutes with an initial discovery of critical risks in a matter of hours.
