Data moves across on-premises, cloud, hybrid & multi-cloud environments, but its “security posture doesn’t move with it”: for e.g. if data is encrypted in one environment & duplicated to a lower environment, it might be unencrypted now; another issue (with data movement) is that sensitive data gets abandoned & forgotten, creating vulnerable “shadow data”. Data & engineering teams are the ones moving this data around, “security should enable their work, not slow it down”. In comes Israel-based Sentra. The startup allows companies to find/ know where all of their sensitive data is (i.e. “no more shadow data”) & makes sure it always has the right security setting; if the data moves & security e.g. PII is affected, it lets the right people know instantly through “data access graphs” who, when, how (& kicks off remediation steps if necessary). Sentra falls in the category of “Data Security Posture Management” (DSPM) (within the wider Data Security Platform market), as outlined by Gartner in the Hype Cycle for Data Security 2022 & here. It’s a growing sector – by 2025, 95% of new digital workloads will be deployed on cloud-native platforms, up from 30% in 2020 – & 53% of IT professionals say compliance in the cloud has become “too difficult” (93% of them also worry human error could cause accidental exposure). At the same, cloud-friendly data-protection controls are critical for ensuring data usability (think AI). Sentra’s ~competitors include e.g. Laminar (IL) (<€100m), Dig Security (IL) (€45m), Securiti (US) (<€150m), Baffle (US) (€35m) & Normalyze (US) (€27m). Sentra was founded in 2021 by Yoav Regev (CEO), Asaf Kochan (COO), Ron Reiter (CTO) & Yair Cohen (VP Product) – all former members of the Israel Defense Force elite intelligence unit. The new funding will go towards expanding in the US (where the firm has an office) & adding “a couple of dozens” staff to its 40-employee workforce. <Source: venturebeat.com, blog.sentra.io, yahoo.com>
