Why we believe in Banyan (aka: why you need to kill your VPN)

Today, I’m so happy to start talking about Banyan, which has been growing rapidly since we made the investment last year. To start with, I’d like to talk about what does Banyan do? In 6 words or less: “Banyan is going to kill VPNs” :)

If you’d like to learn more about our investment in Banyan than can be communicated in more than 6 words, read on…

This investment fits squarely into a theme that my partner, Dr. Xuhui Shao, wrote about earlier: a bet on hybrid cloud environments. This, in turn, is part of a broader enterprise trend: the old rules for how enterprise tech stacks are built and maintained are all being rewritten. This has profound implications for security, authentication, computing and storage and many other parts of the “enterprise stack”.

Banyan was referred to us through Charles Fan, the CEO of another portfolio company (Memverge) that is directly involved in this wave (facilitating the transition towards combined storage and memory), who, like Banyan’ CEO (Jayanth Gummaraju), is a VMWare veteran. [As a side note, VMWare veterans are unusually well-poised to take advantage of this shift.]

In Banyan’ case, they are betting on a vision laid out by Google in 2011, known as “BeyondCorp” (a world of “zero trust” authentication and VPN-less access). The BeyondCorp vision recognizes that our world of work has fundamentally changed. We no longer have a easy-to-define perimeter, with trusted employees working together in a company-controlled building, and the company’s servers all located in a controlled on premise environment. Today, we have a mobile workforce that may be composed of both employees and contractors. We will have vendors and suppliers that need varying levels of access to internal systems. The servers/applications themselves are often either hosted on the public cloud, or are part of a hybrid cloud environment.

Banyan is taking on this last issue: the traditional method of providing secure remote access to employees has been the Virtual Private Network (“VPN”). This model has reached the end of its usable life, as even internal applications have moved to a public cloud, and employees are likely to be working from anywhere (not necessarily within the walls of a company-controlled environment). The VPN model was never great anyway: employees suffered issues with speed, and security and operations teams struggled with visibility and maintenance. No one will mourn its passing.

The BeyondCorp model envisions a shift of security from perimeter/ network controls towards device/ user controls. This will be far more flexible, as trust moves with the user, and far more performant (because connectivity will be direct). Banyan builds and deploys the system to allow companies to deploy the BeyondCorp model.

So… connecting the dots on this investment thesis:

• The architecture of enterprise networks has shifted. It will continue to shift towards hybrid cloud and reliance upon containers and microservices
• Google is right about how to use a service mesh to control access without VPNs in the future
• Most enterprises will want to make this move; many will not be able to accomplish this on their own.
• Banyan is in the lead pack in executing this vision on behalf of enterprises
• There is tremendous value in owning this space — think of it like “service layer virtualization”, like what VMWare did for the compute layer
• The near-term market (access control) is a $10B market; and that is only the beginning: there are multiple adjacent spaces that are equally substantial

Obviously, we love this space. The way that CIOs and CISOs build and maintain their “enterprise stack” is getting dramatically shifted, which will disrupt the traditional set of software vendors. We’re thrilled to be in the middle of this disruption with Banyan.

If you’d like to get rid of your VPN and move into the modern era of identity/ access management, learn more at Banyan :)

As always, we’re interested in hearing from anyone who is also working on enterprise architecture disruption… contact me at eric.rosenblum@tsingyuan.ventures