Meet Theom: The Cloud Data Bodyguard
Our latest investment is a CISO’s dream come true
When it comes to securing your data in the cloud, there’s no such thing as being overprotective. Ransomware and data breaches doubled from 2020 to 2021. Household names like Holiday Inn, DoorDash, and Capital One get breached seemingly every week. A lack of visibility and organization is flooding companies with vulnerabilities and thousands of unprioritized security alerts.
Thankfully, Theom safeguards cloud data like no other. Today, Ridge is excited to lead Theom’s $16 million seed round and help transform cloud security as we know it.
Breathe easy, CISOs. No need to lose sleep over breaches and the subsequent churn and reputational harm. Your cloud data bodyguard has arrived.
Everything is just breachy
Theom’s emergence dovetails with the ongoing digital transformation push. More and more applications are racing to the cloud like covered wagons to California gold, significantly increasing the amount of data in cloud data stores.
For DevOps teams, managing applications and data in the cloud amid this process is a real migraine. But handling security is even worse — how do you secure such an agile and colossal chunk of data? How do you ensure your most sensitive data doesn’t get lost in the sauce? In today’s breach-du-jour landscape, companies grapple with these challenges on top of defending a widening attack radius from an unprecedented number of bad actors. Not only that, but security teams are under-resourced and lack regular prioritization.
Instead of implementing a holistic strategy, most companies aim to protect their cloud data by solely focusing on access and identity. This birds-eye view of cloud data security is a blueprint for getting breached — and suffering the painful repercussions that await downstream. Standard security controls aren’t nearly as comprehensive enough, and fail to effectively identify and prioritize personal identifiable information (PII), protected health information (PHI), trade secrets, and other high-risk data.
Regulated industries, in particular, benefit from a holistic cloud data security solution like Theom. In the event of a breach or compliance violation, these companies risk serious reputational and financial damage. In many cases an external watchdog is brought on to monitor a breached organization, sometimes for years. Not fun!
Wanted: cloud data bodyguard for hire
Theom’s cloud data bodyguard doesn’t take naps or lunch breaks. As the data moves, it moves, and it discerns the value of the data it’s protecting while plugging security gaps that otherwise might go undetected.
Here are the three ways in which Theom shields companies from breaches:
Seamless inventorying and identification. Theom customers can easily keep track of their data, whether it’s in SaaS stores, APIs, message queues, or other locations in the cloud. High-value data is properly identified.
Knowing the risk, acting accordingly. Once Theom labels data as critical, it prioritizes the data based on its importance to the business and its perceived value on the dark web. Theom also determines a data’s risk as it pertains to access privileges, and can change access settings for data inside cloud stores.
Following the data, wherever it goes. Wherever the data is, Theom’s security, assurance, and compliance controls are right behind it. Theom walks companies through risk mitigation and remediation, including the reconfiguration of any insecure APIs. It also stays up to date with industry best practices and threat intelligence trends so that customers are even more safe from breaches and ransomware attacks.
The Theom Three
They may be light on bodyguard experience, but few are better equipped to protect cloud data than Theom’s hydra of co-founders.
Co-founder and CEO Navindra Yadav worked on the Grand Junction team that was acquired by Cisco, and built the famous Catalyst line of switches. He later moved to Google, where he architected a smart network security solution and created the structure for P4 programmable networks, and later, Insieme Networks, as its founding engineer building out the ACI fabric. After Insieme he founded Tetration Analytics. Tetration would later merge with Cisco and become the company’s trademark cloud workload security product and drive application security via AppD.
Co-founders Supreeth Rao and Ravi Sankuratri were both leaders and engineers at Tetration, and the two also spent six years together at Yahoo building out multiple core planet scale data products and services. Navindra, Supreeth, and Ravi’s six years of collaboration at Tetration illustrate the comradery we love to see in founding teams.
Additionally, the team’s domain expertise is immense. Collectively, Theom’s co-founders and employees comprise more than 50 years of technical experience and over 250 patents.
Leading the cloud data security revolution
Theom’s product is legit. The founding team is battle-tested. And the problems it’s solving? Huge.
The ongoing data sprawl issue isn’t going away any time soon. Data that lives across multiple data stores is incredibly difficult to secure, and the ease of copying data only complicates matters. Theom’s unique ability to follow cloud data wherever it is moved, stored, copied, or transacted provides customers with an invaluable lifeline.
With cybercriminals growing in both number and sophistication, it’s no wonder the global cloud storage market expects to jump from $83 billion to $376 billion by 2029. A massive opportunity lies in front of Theom, and the cloud data bodyguard is ready to answer the call.
Congrats on the funding, Team Theom, and thanks for protecting cloud data and the enterprise at large!
Want to learn more about Theom? Check out open positions here, and read VentureBeat’s coverage of today’s announcement.
