Startup Spun Out of Securosis Secures $2.5 Million Seed Investment

A new startup co-founded by industry veterans from security research firm Securosis has landed $2.5 million in seed funding and today officially launched its security-as-a-service (SaaS) cloud management platform.

DisruptOps, which offers a service that automates the management and security of cloud infrastructures, is the brainchild of Securosis principals Rich Mogull, Mike Rothman, and Adrian Lane. Jody Brazil, former CEO and co-founder of Firemon, is DisruptOps' CEO, and Brandy Peterson, formerly CTO at FishNet, is CTO of the new company, which spun out of a project built by Securosis.

The goal of DisruptOps is to "get a handle on the anarchy" of building, securing, and managing cloud infrastructure, Rothman says. Once organizations begin to add more functions to the cloud, doing so manually becomes onerous, he notes, especially when it comes to security. "When you start enforcing 50 to 60 best practices, it starts to get unwieldy," he said.

DisruptOps' launch comes after more than a year of high-profile companies exposing customer- and other data due to configuration errors in their Amazon Web Services S3 storage buckets. Cloud configuration mistakes by Verizon, Deloitte, Dow Jones, and the US Census Bureau, among other organizations, underscore how even large enterprises aren't properly setting up their cloud services, thus leaving their data at risk.

The new DisruptOps service provides what the firm calls "guardrails" – "a way to continuously assess and enforce best practices across security operations," Rothman says. Those guardrails are basically automatic enforcement of secure best practices and configuration of the cloud environment, he says.

The SaaS-based cloud management platform automates the process of assessing and enforcing security for cloud-based systems and applications. It also automates workflows and integrates with security tools: For example, it can ensure that each Web server in the cloud sits behind a cloud Web application firewall, Rothman notes.

One key feature is that the service both detects and resolves cloud configuration and security issues, he says. "A lot of tools tell you what's broken, that something in the cloud is broken," Rothman says. "One of the key aspects of guardrails is that it's not just about continuously assessing when things are violated or go outside" set parameters, he says. It also remediates those issues it finds.

Among the initial customers of the new service are a healthcare IT company, a cloud-native analytics firm, and some technology companies. The seed round was led by Rally Ventures, along with Gary Fish, CEO of Fishtech Group, and former Sourcefire CFO Todd Headley.

Mobile security vendor Lookout is one of the early adopters of DistruptOps. "We've embraced DevSecOps to ensure both our developers and operational teams integrate security into our applications," said Mike Murray, chief security officer of Chief Security, in a statement. "We can't afford to slow them down by requiring security functions to be built every time, nor can we risk a catastrophic failure caused by human error. DisruptOPS' approach to implementing guardrails around our cloud environment will allow us to move fast while being secure. It's a win-win for us."

DisruptOps is offering a free evaluation of its service. 

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