TECHNOLOGY

Sweet Security lands $12 million in seed funding to enhance cloud security

Published

9 months ago

August 16, 2023

Sweet Security today announced $12 million in seed funding and the launch of its Cloud Runtime Security Suite.

The round was led by Glilot Capital Partners with participation from CyberArk Ventures and angel investors including Gerhard Eschelbeck, former CISO at Google and Travis McPeak, who led product security at Databricks.

Sweet was founded by retired Brigadier General, Dror Kashti, former CISO of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), retired Colonel, Eyal Fisher, former head of the Cyber Department at Unit 8200 and Orel Ben-Ishay, former Head of the Cybersecurity R&D center at Unit 81. With a clear vision on how to best raise the bar for cloud defense, they built a cloud-native runtime security suite that enables security teams to stop cloud workload attacks, quickly and with surgical precision.

While leading the IDF’s digital transformation effort, Sweet CEO and co-founder Dror Kashti found that even though securing development environments is essential, current cloud runtime security solutions are insufficient for preparing a company for a breach. As critical as it is for companies to shift their cloud security left, attacks only unfold in runtime. Companies require technological “boots on the ground” to detect them. Existing detection tools either provide very limited functionality or aren’t optimised for the cloud. Defenders need cloud-native runtime protections that provide a full narrative for understanding and stopping attacks as they unfold.

Sweet’s Cloud Runtime Security Suite enables CISOs and security teams to level up their cloud security from partial to complete defense. Providing robust defenses across all stages of an attack, its feature set includes Detection & Response, Discovery and Prevention – all in runtime. Sweet’s runtime sensor takes under five minutes to deploy, immediately providing cloud-native cluster visibility. It streams key application data and business logic to its servers, using an innovative framework to profile workload behavior anomalies and contextualize them with traditional TTPs.

Sweet’s modern attack detection model and patent-pending auto learning technology enable immediate delivery of critical, comprehensive attack findings that allow mitigation before, during and after attacks occur. As a result, Sweet provides CISOs with the technical underpinnings needed to be accountable for cloud security. It also enables them to refresh corporate SOC and IR processes for cloud native environments, enabling the organization to ease into cloud adoption and digital transformation.

For security teams, Sweet provides a powerhouse set of runtime “must-haves”, providing a fully contextualized, at-a-glance attack narrative, backed up with extensive response capabilities, a detailed runtime topology and the ability to prioritize DevSecOps remediation efforts.

Michael Shaulov, co-founder and CEO, Fireblocks, said: “As a large, cloud-first company, our business relies on our ability to protect our customers’ digital assets. We needed a runtime security suite that matched our scale, speed, and technology.

“Sweet’s technology provides real-time security detection & prevention capabilities to our cloud workloads and, importantly, with minimal business interruption. Its insights on connectivity, visibility to our cloud’s topology, and automatic classification of real-time threats is a force multiplier to our Security Operation Center and our DevSecOps teams.”

Srinath Kuruvadi, MD, head of cloud security, JPMorgan Chase & Co, said: “Sweet’s vision for cloud runtime security is spot on, with a deep understanding of how cloud attacks unfold, and critically, enables defenders to be much more effective at containing them.

“Attacks against cloud workloads are only going to increase in frequency and sophistication. The industry needs comprehensive security solutions to face them and Sweet is driving this shift with its extraordinary vision and expertise.”

Kobi Samboursly, Founding Partner, Glilot Capital Partners, said: “Investing in Sweet Security was a no-brainer. First, it’s addressing an increasingly problematic cloud security gap – cloud runtime defense. Second, Dror, Eyal and Orel bring superpowers to the table: the depth and breadth of their cloud security expertise and their ability to build and mentor talented, high performing teams. Sweet is off to a great start and we look forward to supporting its success.”

Dror Kashti, co-founder and CEO, Sweet Security, said: “‘Cybersecurity’ and ‘delightful’ are not words that normally go hand in hand, but we want our customers to use them in the same sentence when talking about our solution.

“We feel our timing is right to make that happen. If SOC and IR teams don’t have to constantly tune their security products or sift through mountains of alerts, they’ll execute at a higher level, and they’ll be happier. Cloud detection and response may be complex, but it doesn’t have to be painful.”

Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

Duncan is an award-winning editor with more than 20 years experience in journalism. Having launched his tech journalism career as editor of Arabian Computer News in Dubai, he has since edited an array of tech and digital marketing publications, including Computer Business Review, TechWeekEurope, Figaro Digital, Digit and Marketing Gazette.
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Related Topics:Cloud Enhance Funding lands Million Security Seed sweet technology

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TECHNOLOGY

Next-gen chips, Amazon Q, and speedy S3

Published

5 months ago

December 1, 2023

Max

AWS re:Invent, which has been taking place from November 27 and runs to December 1, has had its usual plethora of announcements: a total of 21 at time of print.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given the huge potential impact of generative AI – ChatGPT officially turns one year old today – a lot of focus has been on the AI side for AWS’ announcements, including a major partnership inked with NVIDIA across infrastructure, software, and services.

Yet there has been plenty more announced at the Las Vegas jamboree besides. Here, CloudTech rounds up the best of the rest:

Next-generation chips

This was the other major AI-focused announcement at re:Invent: the launch of two new chips, AWS Graviton4 and AWS Trainium2, for training and running AI and machine learning (ML) models, among other customer workloads. Graviton4 shapes up against its predecessor with 30% better compute performance, 50% more cores and 75% more memory bandwidth, while Trainium2 delivers up to four times faster training than before and will be able to be deployed in EC2 UltraClusters of up to 100,000 chips.

The EC2 UltraClusters are designed to ‘deliver the highest performance, most energy efficient AI model training infrastructure in the cloud’, as AWS puts it. With it, customers will be able to train large language models in ‘a fraction of the time’, as well as double energy efficiency.

As ever, AWS offers customers who are already utilising these tools. Databricks, Epic and SAP are among the companies cited as using the new AWS-designed chips.

Zero-ETL integrations

AWS announced new Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Relational Database Services (Amazon RDS) for MySQL integrations with Amazon Redshift, AWS’ cloud data warehouse. The zero-ETL integrations – eliminating the need to build ETL (extract, transform, load) data pipelines – make it easier to connect and analyse transactional data across various relational and non-relational databases in Amazon Redshift.

A simple example of how zero-ETL functions can be seen is in a hypothetical company which stores transactional data – time of transaction, items bought, where the transaction occurred – in a relational database, but use another analytics tool to analyse data in a non-relational database. To connect it all up, companies would previously have to construct ETL data pipelines which are a time and money sink.

The latest integrations “build on AWS’s zero-ETL foundation… so customers can quickly and easily connect all of their data, no matter where it lives,” the company said.

Amazon S3 Express One Zone

AWS announced the general availability of Amazon S3 Express One Zone, a new storage class purpose-built for customers’ most frequently-accessed data. Data access speed is up to 10 times faster and request costs up to 50% lower than standard S3. Companies can also opt to collocate their Amazon S3 Express One Zone data in the same availability zone as their compute resources.

Companies and partners who are using Amazon S3 Express One Zone include ChaosSearch, Cloudera, and Pinterest.

Amazon Q

A new product, and an interesting pivot, again with generative AI at its core. Amazon Q was announced as a ‘new type of generative AI-powered assistant’ which can be tailored to a customer’s business. “Customers can get fast, relevant answers to pressing questions, generate content, and take actions – all informed by a customer’s information repositories, code, and enterprise systems,” AWS added. The service also can assist companies building on AWS, as well as companies using AWS applications for business intelligence, contact centres, and supply chain management.

Customers cited as early adopters include Accenture, BMW and Wunderkind.

TECHNOLOGY

HCLTech and Cisco create collaborative hybrid workplaces

Published

5 months ago

November 29, 2023

Max

Digital comms specialist Cisco and global tech firm HCLTech have teamed up to launch Meeting-Rooms-as-a-Service (MRaaS).

Available on a subscription model, this solution modernises legacy meeting rooms and enables users to join meetings from any meeting solution provider using Webex devices.

The MRaaS solution helps enterprises simplify the design, implementation and maintenance of integrated meeting rooms, enabling seamless collaboration for their globally distributed hybrid workforces.

Rakshit Ghura, senior VP and Global head of digital workplace services, HCLTech, said: “MRaaS combines our consulting and managed services expertise with Cisco’s proficiency in Webex devices to change the way employees conceptualise, organise and interact in a collaborative environment for a modern hybrid work model.

“The common vision of our partnership is to elevate the collaboration experience at work and drive productivity through modern meeting rooms.”

Alexandra Zagury, VP of partner managed and as-a-Service Sales at Cisco, said: “Our partnership with HCLTech helps our clients transform their offices through cost-effective managed services that support the ongoing evolution of workspaces.

“As we reimagine the modern office, we are making it easier to support collaboration and productivity among workers, whether they are in the office or elsewhere.”

Cisco’s Webex collaboration devices harness the power of artificial intelligence to offer intuitive, seamless collaboration experiences, enabling meeting rooms with smart features such as meeting zones, intelligent people framing, optimised attendee audio and background noise removal, among others.

Tags: Cisco, collaboration, HCLTech, Hybrid, meetings

TECHNOLOGY

Canonical releases low-touch private cloud MicroCloud

Published

5 months ago

November 28, 2023

Max

Canonical has announced the general availability of MicroCloud, a low-touch, open source cloud solution. MicroCloud is part of Canonical’s growing cloud infrastructure portfolio.

It is purpose-built for scalable clusters and edge deployments for all types of enterprises. It is designed with simplicity, security and automation in mind, minimising the time and effort to both deploy and maintain it. Conveniently, enterprise support for MicroCloud is offered as part of Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro subscription, with several support tiers available, and priced per node.

MicroClouds are optimised for repeatable and reliable remote deployments. A single command initiates the orchestration and clustering of various components with minimal involvement by the user, resulting in a fully functional cloud within minutes. This simplified deployment process significantly reduces the barrier to entry, putting a production-grade cloud at everyone’s fingertips.

Juan Manuel Ventura, head of architectures & technologies at Spindox, said: “Cloud computing is not only about technology, it’s the beating heart of any modern industrial transformation, driving agility and innovation. Our mission is to provide our customers with the most effective ways to innovate and bring value; having a complexity-free cloud infrastructure is one important piece of that puzzle. With MicroCloud, the focus shifts away from struggling with cloud operations to solving real business challenges” says

In addition to seamless deployment, MicroCloud prioritises security and ease of maintenance. All MicroCloud components are built with strict confinement for increased security, with over-the-air transactional updates that preserve data and roll back on errors automatically. Upgrades to newer versions are handled automatically and without downtime, with the mechanisms to hold or schedule them as needed.

With this approach, MicroCloud caters to both on-premise clouds but also edge deployments at remote locations, allowing organisations to use the same infrastructure primitives and services wherever they are needed. It is suitable for business-in-branch office locations or industrial use inside a factory, as well as distributed locations where the focus is on replicability and unattended operations.

Cedric Gegout, VP of product at Canonical, said: “As data becomes more distributed, the infrastructure has to follow. Cloud computing is now distributed, spanning across data centres, far and near edge computing appliances. MicroCloud is our answer to that.

“By packaging known infrastructure primitives in a portable and unattended way, we are delivering a simpler, more prescriptive cloud experience that makes zero-ops a reality for many Industries.“

MicroCloud’s lightweight architecture makes it usable on both commodity and high-end hardware, with several ways to further reduce its footprint depending on your workload needs. In addition to the standard Ubuntu Server or Desktop, MicroClouds can be run on Ubuntu Core – a lightweight OS optimised for the edge. With Ubuntu Core, MicroClouds are a perfect solution for far-edge locations with limited computing capabilities. Users can choose to run their workloads using Kubernetes or via system containers. System containers based on LXD behave similarly to traditional VMs but consume fewer resources while providing bare-metal performance.

Coupled with Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro + Support subscription, MicroCloud users can benefit from an enterprise-grade open source cloud solution that is fully supported and with better economics. An Ubuntu Pro subscription offers security maintenance for the broadest collection of open-source software available from a single vendor today. It covers over 30k packages with a consistent security maintenance commitment, and additional features such as kernel livepatch, systems management at scale, certified compliance and hardening profiles enabling easy adoption for enterprises. With per-node pricing and no hidden fees, customers can rest assured that their environment is secure and supported without the expensive price tag typically associated with cloud solutions.

Tags: automation, Canonical, MicroCloud, private cloud