San Francisco-based AppOmni is a company that is solving cloud data leak visibility and security problems for enterprises that rely on SaaS applications for running their businesses. Recently, AppOmni announced it launched out of stealth and raised $3 million in seed funding led by Costanoa Ventures. Silicon Valley Data Capital and George Hu (COO of Twilio and previous COO of Salesforce) also participated in this round.
In a 2017 SANS survey, 96% of respondents reported their business used applications and data in the cloud. And for most businesses, use of SaaS applications such as Salesforce, Dropbox, Google GSuite, and ServiceNow has outpaced the understanding of security controls — which makes current data security methods obsolete.
The average business routinely leaves private data like social security numbers, financial transactions, passport scans, and invoices accidentally exposed to the public Internet without authorization because they do not realize their cloud application configuration exposes data. Prior to AppOmni, there were no security or access controls that systematically detected or managed these security risks — which leads to potential data leaks.
“We saw an increasing gap in security with the vast majority of business-critical applications now delivered as SaaS. Organizations have no way to effectively manage data leaks in SaaS. Doing so successfully requires an approach built expressly for these mission-critical business applications,” said AppOmni co-founder and CEO Brendan O’Connor.
O’Connor was previously CSO at Salesforce and Security CTO at ServiceNow along with Brian Soby — who was previously the Director of Product Security at Salesforce and Director of Security at Taulia. They founded AppOmni to combine high-quality security engineering and unparalleled expertise in SaaS security to develop a product that can provide immediate visibility and ongoing management to improve security posture in the cloud.
“It’s clear that businesses are not keeping pace with the security issues caused by the shift to the cloud,” added Costanoa Ventures principal John Cowgill. “AppOmni is the first in this space, set on solving this critical problem that will only increase in severity as businesses’ use of cloud applications continues to grow and become more complex.”
AppOmni’s platform continuously monitors SaaS applications via public APIs and evaluates the exposure and data risk against customer-defined security policies to provide warnings and insights. After a problem is detected, AppOmni provides customers with detailed information about the cause and reduces the time to remediation.
