CipherCloud, started in 2010, announced that it has secured $30 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz. The same venture capitalist firm has also The company plans to use the new funding to accelerate its global go-to-market strategy with expanded sales and marketing, to further develop its cloud information protection offerings and to advance its technology leadership. John M. Jack, board partner at Andreessen Horowitz and former CEO of Fortify Software, will join the company’s board of directors.
CipherCloud specializes in providing data security in the cloud. Its technology is unique in the sense it provides control on the hands of the organization using it by providing the keys to decrypt the data to the organization. The company claims to have rapidly grown its customer base, protecting 1.2 million cloud application users and 100 million customer records for more than 40 enterprise clients across eight countries. Customers include top firms in banking, insurance, healthcare and technology, as well as government agencies.
The company’s cloud encryption and tokenization gateways empower enterprises to securely adopt cloud applications by eliminating concerns about data privacy, residency, security and regulatory compliance. The groundbreaking technology secures sensitive information in real time, before it's sent to the cloud, with no impact to usability or performance, or change to the cloud application.
Ben Horowitz, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, said in his blog that CipherCloud encryption software resides within a customer’s network to secure sensitive cloud application data in real-time, while retaining all the native functionality of the application. The information that is encrypted is determined by the customer including, for example, sensitive fields in a database, text of email messages, documents attached to email messages or perhaps only data items occurring in messages that have a certain specific format such as social security and credit card numbers.
A security visionary, CipherCloud Founder and CEO Pravin Kothari was previously co-founder and vice president of engineering at ArcSight, which was acquired by HP for more than $1.5 billion.
The CipherCloud product portfolio supports popular cloud applications including Salesforce, Force.com, Chatter, Google Gmail, Microsoft Office 365, and Amazon AWS. A demo of the product can be accessed here, which gives a general outlook of its ability to protect sensitive customer data in various applications.
