Israeli startups vie for slice of cloud data protection market

• Author: Ofir Dor
• Published date: 01 December 2022
• Publication title: Globes (Rishon LeZion, Israel)

The field of Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) is an extreme example of this. Over the past two years, seven DSPM Israeli startups have been founded, raising a combined $220 million. The financing has come from some of the best investors in the market including Israeli venture capital funds specializing in cybersecurity to the best known international venture capital funds

The best known Israeli entrepreneur engaged in cloud data protection is Asaf Kochan, the commander of the IDF's 8200 intelligence unit until last year and today cofounder and president of Sentra, which was founded in July 2021, and has since raise $23 million. However, other startups in this field also have notable founders, including graduates of the 8200 and Talpiot units, defense prize winners and serial entrepreneurs who have already achieved exits.

Organizations have shadow information

The first thing that DSPM software does is to connect to the cloud account of the customer and identify where they locate their data. Then the software sorts the data according to categories and marks where the critical data for the organization is located, such as personal and financial information of customers or commercial secrets. In order to do this, the software is required to learn to distinguish between ID numbers and other sequences of digits and between a document with a medical diagnosis and an organizational procurement document. Finally the DSPM software warns about risks regarding critical data, such as places where it is not protected or encrypted as required or is open to immediate broad access both inside and outside the organization.

DSPM turns processes that are currently undertaken manually in organizations into automatic ones - first of all identifying where significant information is stored in the cloud. "To this day, organizations go one by one through the managers of the various systems and question them about what information they keep in the cloud and exactly where. The result is an inventory list that is saved in Excel, and is never accurate and sufficiently up-to-date," explains Cyera CEO Yotam Segev, which has raised $61 million dollar since it was funded in December 2020.

According to Rona Segev, a partner at venture capital fund TLV Partners, which has invested in cloud data protection startup Laminar, manual solutions are no longer adequate today. Laminar was founded in August 2020 and has raised $67 million to date.

She says, "Many changes have taken place in...