FireLayers Comes Out of Stealth With YL Ventures Funding To Control Enterprise Apps

Over in the world of Enterprise, subjects such as security, compliance and governance remain dull but essential issues. In this arena SkyHigh Networks (backed by Sequoia and Greylock) and Netskope (backed by Lightspeed) are targeting the cloud application control market and doing a pretty good job of it. But now there is a new player on the block: namely FireLayers. This Israel/San Francisco-based startups today emerges from stealth mode to introduce a… you guessed it… policy-based security, compliance and IT governance platform for cloud applications. It’s also announced undisclosed funding from YL Ventures, though we understand it amounts to several million dollars.

You see, the problem with cloud apps is that they have different kinds of risks and vulnerabilities compared to the enterprise apps of old. The startup claims that IT departments can “immediately deploy predefined and customizable rule-sets for popular applications” with this platform.

Other features include: pre-defined and customizable rule-sets for popular applications including
Salesforce, NetSuite, Workday, Office 365, Box.com, Yammer etc; a user-friendly policy manager to create cloud controls and rules for every application and every element; open API enabling integration with 3rd party add-ons including encryption; and no client software.

Co-founder Yair Grindlinger told us: “SkyHigh Networks and Netskope are targeting the same market (cloud application control), and dealing with similar challenges, but they do so differently than we do. We believe that the emphasis needs to be on proactive security and compliance controls – they’re focus on reports and give “black box security”, almost one size fits all. Organizations are not looking for more reports, nor can they relay on “black box” security. They want a strategic policy based platform that will allow them to reclaim and expand their IT governance over cloud applications to obtain the necessary security and compliance levels.”

FireLayers is fully funded by San Francisco-headquartered venture capital firm YL Ventures, which invests in cyber security, cloud computing, big data and Software- as-a-Service businesses.