Cloud security firm Illumio raises $125m to expand 'adaptive segmentation' platform
Illumio founders: PJ Kirner and Andrew Rubin
Illumio, which provides cloud security and datacentre services, has announced raising $125 million in a Series D round led by the asset management arm of JPMorgan.
Existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, 8VC, Accel, and DCVC also contributed to the round.
While Illumio declined to comment on its valuation, it was reported that the company joined the unicorn club back in 2015 when it raised $100 million.
The latest round brings the total amount raised by the Sunnyvale, California-based company to $267 million.
Illumio emerged from stealth mode back in 2014 with a mission to protect every datacentre and cloud through "adaptive segmentation" technology, which enforces security policies by filtering traffic, thereby controlling the flow of information between network links.
There are a couple of elements to Illumio's Adaptive Security Platform: The Virtual Enforcement Node (VEN), an agent that attaches to workloads running on physical and virtual machines, be they in on-premises datacentres or in the cloud; and the Policy Compute Engine (PCE), a centralised on-premises or cloud-based server which receives telemetry from the VENs to build a map of the dependencies between classified workloads in multi-tiered applications.
The map can then be used to build application-specific security policies based on explicitly allowed interactions between the constituent workloads.
The Adaptive Security Platform has a number of advantages, according to Illumio: Policies are written in natural language and translated into network actions by the VENs rather than firewall rules; PCE policies are continually and automatically updated as virtual machines and their attached VENs spin up and down; the VEN/PCE combination is agnostic in that it does not matter what network, infrastructure, hypervisor, or cloud provider the workloads are running on; and IPsec connectivity is available on demand between workloads with a click on the dependency map.
The platform competes with the likes of VMware NSX, Cisco ACI/Tetration, vArmour, and CloudPassage.
Illumio's CEO Andrew Rubin previously told ZDNet that traditional perimeter- and network-centric security products are insufficient in a world where applications and workloads need to work dynamically across on-premises datacentres and public cloud services.
Firewalls, intrusion protection systems, and advanced threat protection appliances are widely deployed to secure interactions at the perimeter but these tools offer little protection within enterprise datacentres and in the public cloud where much of today's traffic flow and data resides, according to Illumio.
The company has about 100 customers including Morgan Stanley, NetSuite, Salesforce, and Workday. Illumio said many of its customers have segmented more than 10,000 workloads.
The latest funding will be used to expand business development, R&D, and customer support throughout the globe, the company said.