People have secrets, and we’ve all got to keep them somewhere. In the past, people may have relegated their classified information buried under yards of earth and stone in an underground vault or clasped within a locket resting lightly above their décolletage.
Nowadays, most folks just use a falsely labeled folder on their hard drive. But SaaS-based secrets-management platform Akeyless has offered a hi-tech alternative for companies wishing to secure their DevOps and IT workloads safely and effectively.
This week, the Israel-based platform closed a $65 million series B funding round, bringing its total funding to date to $80m. The round was led by NGP Capital, with participation from existing investors Team8 Capital and Jerusalem Venture Partners.
In addition, the company announced that Mike Christenson, the former COO and president of New Relic and CA Technologies, has joined as an investor and board member.
Put simply, Akeyless locks down confidential development operations information tightly. The need for the platform comes amid millions of security breaches and leaks occurring each year.
“Existing secrets management solutions don’t meet the current needs of enterprises,” said Oded Hareven, CEO and co-founder of Akeyless. “Organizations are looking for an alternative to open-source secret vaults, which are far from free when you consider the extensive maintenance requirements, and commercial solutions with high licensing costs that are difficult to deploy and use. Secrets management should reduce the attack surface, but existing solutions only increase it by creating additional infrastructure for teams to secure and maintain.”
What is special about Akeyless?
Akeyless touts itself as the only platform to offer a true zero-knowledge secrets management as a service solution. It centralizes the management and security of secrets across multi-cloud and DevOps environments, supporting enterprise-grade capabilities such as disaster recovery, high availability and global scale.
Akeyless stores customer secrets, keeping them inaccessible to anyone else – Akeyless included. The company’s use of zero-knowledge technology enables the performance of cryptographic operations using fragments of an encryption key, without ever combining the fragments.
Companies moving to Akeyless from existing secrets-management solutions see an average cost reduction of 70%. This has driven 350% growth in revenue over the past year, with Akeyless now being trusted to safeguard the secrets of leading companies across a wide range of industries, including Wix.com, Cimpress-VistaPrint, Outbrain and Stash.
“Akeyless’s platform approach, superb technology and service excellence made it easy for us to decide to rip and replace our existing secrets-management solution,” said Daniel Fabbo, senior manager of information security at Cimpress-VistaPrint. “We immediately saw a massive reduction in costs, but the biggest returns came from lowering maintenance to virtually zero.”