The 20 Coolest Cloud Security Vendors Of The 2019 Cloud 100

Security Superstars

Cloud infrastructure has become increasingly popular thanks to benefits such as on-demand services, scalability, flexibility and cost- effectiveness. But as cloud adoption reaches new heights, security concerns for both cloud users and vendors have also mushroomed.

The demand for cloud security offerings is expected to increase in the coming years thanks to a slew of high-profile data breaches as well as an increased threat from cybercrime and targeted attacks. The increasing use of Internet of Things devices as well as a greater number of mobile devices at the workplace has made cloud security increasingly important as well.

The cloud security market is expected to hit approximately $13 billion by 2022, according to Market Research Future, with North America expected to dominate the scene due to its glut of highly trained professionals with strong technical knowledge to work on cloud computing and deal with the security issues associated with utilizing on-cloud databases.

As part of CRN's annual Cloud 100 list, here's a look at 20 cloud security vendors that have leveraged containers, infrastructure and more to keep their customers secure.

Armor

Mark Woodward, CEO

Armor founder and former CEO Chris Drake in July stepped into the CTO role to focus more on building strategic partnerships, creating business opportunities, and advancing Armor’s long-term product vision. Four months later, the company integrated with the AWS Security Hub to deliver security insights and context by feeding vulnerability scan and malware detection information into the data repository.

BetterCloud

David Politis, Founder and CEO

BetterCloud in April closed a $60 million Series E round led by Bain Capital Ventures to scale sales and marketing and accelerate product innovation for the company's SaaS operations management platform. Seven months later, the company debuted a partnership with Dropbox to help joint customers define, execute and manage policies to meet day-to-day operational management and security requirements.

Check Point Software Technologies

Gil Shwed, Founder and CEO

Check Point in October purchased Dome9 for $175 million to help customers secure multi-cloud deployments across Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. Three months later, the company landed VMware Americas channel leader Frank Rauch to serve as global channel chief, where he plans to combine big investments in channel programs and tools with strategic teaming agreements.

ClearDATA

Darin Brannan, President, CEO and Co-Founder

ClearData in July launched a health-care-compliant cloud offering on Microsoft Azure to help companies innovate and scale while maintaining compliance with laws and regulations affecting privacy and data collection of protected health information. Four months later, the company closed a $26 million funding round to expand product innovation, enhance customer success and continue its high growth trajectory.

CyberArk

Udi Mokady, Founder, Chairman & CEO

CyberArk in March purchased certain assets of Vaultive to boost proactive cloud security controls and streamline the user experience for privileged accounts and cloud administrators. A month later, the company redoubled its efforts around MSSPs with multi-tenant and consumption-based pricing initiatives intended to grow the company's base of business with midsize customers.

Forcepoint

Matthew Moynahan, CEO

Forcepoint Web Security in March added additional cloud access security broker [CASB] functionality to reduce security blind spots through real-time, inline visibility and control of sanctioned enterprise cloud applications. A month later, Forcepoint Dynamic Data Protection was unveiled to continuously assess risk and automatically provide proportional enforcement that can be dialed up or down.

Fortinet

Ken Xie Founder, Chairman of the Board, and CEO

Fortinet in June extended segmentation and security to the edge of the enterprise network through its $17 million purchase of access control vendor Bradford Networks. Six months later, the company announced plans to integrate its Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) capabilities into Symantec's cloud-delivered Web Security Service (WSS) to provide robust cloud-delivered threat prevention.

Illumio

Andrew Rubin, CEO and Founder

Illumio in April integrated its offering with Qualys to enable organizations to visualize vulnerabilities and threat data across data centers and clouds through a real-time global vulnerability map. Nine months later, the company debuted its Policy Compute Engine (PCE) Supercluster, which is designed for enterprise-scale real-time application dependency mapping and micro-segmentation deployments.

Imperva

Christopher Hylen, President and CEO

Imperva in June unveiled plans to buy Prevoty for $140 million to enable customers using agile development to natively build security into their applications residing on-premise or in the cloud. Four months later, Thoma Bravo unveiled plans to acquire the company for $2.1 billion, which CEO Chris Hylen said would provide Imperva with greater flexibility to focus on executing its long-term strategy.

McAfee

Chris Young, CEO

McAfee in July re-emerged as a mobile security player and introduced new endpoint, automation and orchestration offerings that scale to meet the needs of larger businesses. Three months later, the company debuted MVision EDR (endpoint detection and response), which takes context and data present at the endpoint and moves it up to the cloud to allow for the use of analytics and automation.

Mimecast

Peter Bauer, CEO

Mimecast in July acquired cybersecurity training startup Ataata to offer customers a cloud platform engineered to mitigate risk and reduce employee security errors. Later that month, the company bought security software developer Solebit, whose technology is designed to help customers find advanced threats by recognizing when there is malicious code embedded within active content and data files.

Netskope

Sanjay Beri, CEO

Netskope in March has introduced a web security tool that makes it possible for organizations to manage and protect SaaS, IaaS and web from a single platform so that that enterprises don't have to grapple with multiple interfaces. Eight months later, the company hauled in $168.7 million to enable more cutting-edge research and development and drive large-scale global data center expansion.

Palo Alto Networks

Nikesh Arora, CEO and Chairman

Palo Alto Networks in March agreed to purchase Evident.io for $300 million to make it easier for enterprise cloud users to keep their deployments compliant and secure. Three months later, the company selected Nikesh Arora—who helped grow Google's search business from $2 billion to $60 billion—to be its next CEO, replacing Mark McLaughlin, who led the company for nearly seven years.

Proofpoint

Gary Steele, CEO and Chairman Of The Board

Proofpoint in April unveiled four new offerings across cloud applications, email fraud prevention, and social media that enhanced visibility and stopped advanced threats that target the information workers create and access. Three months later, the company launched a cloud account defense offering that enables organizations to detect, investigate, and remediate Microsoft Office 365 credential theft.

Qualys

Philippe Courtot, Chairman and CEO

Qualys in June agreed to buy federal solution provider Second Front Systems to gain more domain expertise around building and delivering cybersecurity offerings tailored for the defense, intelligence, and law enforcement communities. Four months later, the company purchased Layered Insight to improve its ability to lock down workloads running inside containerized and serverless environments.

Sophos

Kris Hagerman, CEO

Sophos in October introduced endpoint detection and response to its Intercept X endpoint protection offering to make threat tracking accessible to businesses with more limited resources. Three months later, the company purchased emerging cloud infrastructure vendor Avid Secure to provide end-to-end protection around public cloud services such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google.

Symantec

Greg Clark, CEO

Symantec in April introduced Targeted Attack Analytics, which looks at all the machines in an enterprise and collates the telemetry with the endpoints to verify if there's an active attack taking place inside the network. Six months later, the company unveiled Managed Cloud Defense, which detects, protects, and responds to cloud issues by correlating cloud-based attack activity with its Global Intelligence Network.

Sysdig

Suresh Vasudevan, CEO

Sysdig in June added vulnerability management, more than 200 compliance checks, and security analytics to its cloud-native intelligence platform, giving users a robust view of their health and risk profiles. Two months later, the company closed a $68.5 million Series D round to better enable enterprises to operate reliable and secure containerized infrastructure and cloud-native applications

Trend Micro

Eva Chen, CEO

Trend Micro in April unveiled Writing Style DNA to sound the alarm when emails are suspected of impersonating an executive or other high-profile user as part of a Business Email Compromise (BEC) attack. Six months later, the company debuted Apex One, which enhances automated detection and response and provides actionable insights consistently across SaaS and on-premises deployments.

Zscaler

Jay Chaudhry, CEO, Chairman and Founder

Zscaler in March closed a $220.8 million initial public offering and revealed that channel partners accounted for more than 90 percent of the company's revenue. Five months later, the company purchased the development team and artificial intelligence and machine-learning technology of TrustPath, a security startup focused on enhancing security efficacy and accelerating incident response.