Main Highlights
- StrongDM reported that it has received $54 million in a Series B round headed by Tiger Global.
- strongDM provides your technical personnel with frictionless and auditable access to anything they require across your whole stack in a single location.
- strongDM standardizes access to backend infrastructure for teams, independent of protocol or location.
- strongDM emulates several forms of infrastructure, as well as identifies the changes made, the order in which they were made, and the pace at which those changes were produced.
StrongDM reported today that it has received $54 million in a Series B round headed by Tiger Global, with participation from GV, Sequoia Capital, True Ventures, HearstLab, Bloomberg Beta, and Godfrey Sullivan. The profits, according to co-founder and CEO Elizabeth Zalman, would be used to support “all aspects” of strongDM’s go-to-market strategy in the coming months.
The cloud’s growth increases the complexity of infrastructure access control. DevOps teams are entrusted with meeting the needs of growing operations while also adhering to security and regulatory regulations. Certain protocols are covered by platforms, however, they might worsen rather than solve the problem. Not all infrastructure access management solutions were created for today’s diverse settings.
Benefits of using strongDM
strongDM is an Infrastructure Access Platform. It provides your technical personnel with frictionless and auditable access to anything they require across your whole stack in a single location. strongDM is a proxy that manages and audits database, server, cluster, and web application access.
A local client, gateway intermediate, and configuration layer comprise the strongDM network. They were founded in 2015 to assist businesses of all sizes in managing and auditing access to their databases, servers, clusters, and online applications.
The solution from strongDM is a program that controls and audits access to servers, databases, data centers, and other systems. The Burlingame, a California-based firm, provides infrastructure access controls across legacy and multi-cloud systems by combining authentication, authorization, networking, and observability into a single solution.
Elizabeth Joy Zalman, Schuyler Brown, and Justin McCarthy created strongDM in 2015. Brown and Zalman were inspired by a personal encounter at their previous workplace. The employer suffered a data breach when a hacker gained access and revealed 100 million MAC addresses, forcing the company out of business.
“As organizations shifted infrastructure from boxes in a rack to the cloud, and exponentially more people required access to more resources in more places, this complexity caused a gap,” Zalman explained. He went on to say that there are three major gaps in the market: a solution that works for any stack (whether Oracle or Kafka), one that is intrinsically safe and meets compliance standards, and a solution that end users really want to use. If you lose any of those, you’re back to old-school mayhem and subpar controls.
Access controls
strongDM standardizes access to backend infrastructure for teams, independent of protocol or location. Companies may use it to implement secure access restrictions and automatically record and log detailed details of what happens in sessions, therefore centralizing audit evidence.
According to Zalman, Strong DM enables developers to approach access “as code” — just like infrastructure. They may guarantee access is locked down from instance spin-up to tear-down by installing and expanding the platform’s infrastructure access controls across hybrid, physical, and multi-cloud environments.
“Infrastructure began off simple: flat networks, monolithic databases, and a few privileged administrators. Because just a few people needed access to Oracle, it was simple to grant and revoke access, and they utilized Active Directory and the corporate network to facilitate it,” Zalman explained. He went on to say that as a result, their biggest competitors are the point products, bespoke processes, and manual scripts that teams have created to access the many systems they require.
Although strongDM does not have an internal machine learning pipeline, Zalman claims that the business has a dataset meant to be beneficial in model training – especially, models that detect behavioral abnormalities.
strongDM emulates several forms of infrastructure such that it can “see” requests and sessions to a database or server cluster, as well as identify the changes made, the order in which they were made, and the pace at which those changes were produced. The inputs are utilized to describe typical behavior profiles, which are then used to identify and report abnormalities.
“The epidemic accelerated remote work, which is here to stay. It is no longer a concept for CTOs to explore; it is an executive requirement, according to Zalman. The epidemic boosted strongDM’s growth, with every prospect asking for a comprehensive zero trust and zero-trust network access solution.
Customers of strongDM include Peloton, SoFi, Chime, Yext, Squarespace, and Olive AI. To now, the firm has raised $77 million, and it intends to expand its staff from 75 to 90 people by the end of the year.
