infoTECH Feature

November 16, 2015

Evident.io Brings Scalable Security to DevOps Teams Using AWS

Tim Prendergast describes himself and Evident.io co-founder Justin Lundy as former punk renegade kids. CEO Prendergast said he grew up in IT and went on to lead technology teams at Adobe, Ingenuity, Ticketmaster, and McAffee. CTO Lundy also worked at Adobe and has spent time defending the castle, as his bio says, at CA (News - Alert), MTV/Viacom, and CA.

In fact, it was Prendergast who brought Lundy to Adobe after that company set out to transform itself into a service-oriented business. Three months in, Prendergast said, he noticed IT security is an ivory tower in which if things don’t fit in, you can’t do anything. So, Prendergast said, he went to the CTO and begged him to create a position to address that and then hired Lundy, who had been doing compliance and risk management for Wells Fargo (News - Alert) and other organizations, to fill the new post. In that newly created position Lundy led the effort to identify, implement, and manage security controls and strategies that would address the requirements of the cloud.

But as they moved forward they realized that working in environments in which software is deployed many times a day was unsustainable. So Lundy and Prendergast departed from Adobe (News - Alert) and set out to find a better way.

Evident.io was their answer. The men say it is the first company of its kind to offer continuous cloud security technology for Amazon Web Services (News - Alert).

It was a year ago this month that Evident.io announced it had closed its Series A funding, which yielded $9.85 million from Bain Capital Ventures and True Ventures. To date, the company has raised $11 million, and it expects to do another round in short order.

In an interview with me last week at TMC (News - Alert) Editor’s Day Silicon Valley, Prendergast explained that the company delivers more than 130 preset security controls and supports custom signatures at well, all of which are automated to allow for the rapid scaling that’s needed in this new world of programmable networks that is exemplified by Amazon Web Services. Indeed, Evident.io’s solution is targeted squarely at businesses using AWS. And Evident.io is fully endorsed by Amazon Web Services and is recognized as an AWS Advanced Technology Partner, the highest tier partnership with AWS. 

DevOps teams at such major media companies as Sega and Sony Online Entertainment (which came aboard after its high-profile breach) are Evident.io customers. Prendergast explained that DevOps can build stuff, feed it into the Evident.io system to identify security gaps, then fix those gaps with the guidance the company offers. Prendergast compares the process to a choose-your-own-adventure book, meaning there are a variety of preprogrammed “then” options in a security if-then scenario. The platform doesn’t currently do the actual remediations, he said, but that functionality will be added in 2016, as will support for additional cloud platforms.




Edited by Kyle Piscioniere
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