Cloud Identity Startup Permiso Launches With $10M Seed

Permiso, a provider of cloud identity detection and response for cloud infrastructures, emerged from stealth with $10 million in seed funding. The Palo Alto-based startup is the latest entrant in the cloud security space, which is becoming a top priority for organizations after they rapidly ramped up cloud adoption to support employees working remotely.

Permiso’s founders, former FireEye executives Paul Nguyen and Jason Martin, are pegging the future of cloud security on effectively managing and tracking identities. That includes being able to identify who is using the cloud environment as well as monitoring all activity associated with those identities. Permiso says its platform will identify and track human, machine, vendor, and service provider identities in infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service environments.

“With engineering and infrastructure teams aggressively adopting public cloud, security teams are drowning under the millions of activities and changes made daily by human and machine identities,” Nguyen and Martin write on the company blog.

Permiso says it will highlight who or what is in the cloud environment, identify what the identity is doing, and assess whether the behavior is expected or potentially malicious. Customers will be able to use Permiso to detect credential abuse and get visibility in how identities are used as part of their incident response activities, the company says.

The co-founders say enterprises can potentially measure the maturity of their cloud security programs by measuring progress towards identity and access management objectives and change management objectives, such as implementing secure access controls and reducing human-driven changes.

In the blog post, Nguyen and Martin quote Jason Chan, who previously led Netflix’s cybersecurity program for 10 years. “Identity is as close to a silver bullet as it gets in the cloud,” Chan says. “If you get it wrong, you face significant risks and challenges in securing your enterprise effectively.”

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