Anurag Kahol, Chief Technology Officer, Bitglass

San Francisco-based Okta and San Jose, Calif.-based Zscaler are the two best-performing cloud security startups, Kahol said. Zscaler has done a really good job of taking market share from on-premise security providers by centralizing the secure web gateway functions in the cloud and making it possible for security policies to be updated in one central place, according to Kahol.

Zscaler handles scale very well, Kahol said, and is capable of processing large volumes of traffic in real-time while still applying extensive policies around malware or other types of threat protection. Having a truly multi-tenant solution rather than just moving an existing on-premise box to the cloud has allowed Zscaler to effective scale as traffic increases, according to Kahol.

Okta, meanwhile, has made identity management and single sign-on very easy for businesses working with multiple different cloud services thanks to pre-existing integrations with many different apps, Kahol said. Having different identity management tools for each cloud services makes password management, provisioning new accounts, and providing multi-factor authentication difficult, he said.