Highlights – 

  • The DDR solution is a boon for firms as it holds the potential to offer greater transparency over data assets stored in the cloud.
  • Dig works with Microsoft Azure and AWS and will soon support the Google Cloud Platform.

Dig, a Tel Aviv-based cloud data security provider, announced that it has emerged from stealth armed with a USD 11 million investment with a new Data Detection and Response (DDR) solution to help organizations protect data stored in public cloud environments.

It’s known today that the ultimate target for some cybercriminals is data. Dig believes that countless organizations continue to work without any visibility, context or control over their data stored in public cloud environments — like the ones run by Amazon, Google and Microsoft. The firm launched the DDR solution to help enterprises discover, protect and govern their cloud data in real-time.

Dig’s DRR solution tracks data assets stored in the cloud in Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) environments. It offers real-time protection and response capabilities for those assets. With this, users can understand how their data is being used and if it’s protected or not.

Unlike traditional security tools that failed to provide data protection to enterprises, the DDR solution is a boon for firms as it holds the potential to offer greater transparency over data assets stored in the cloud.

According to Dig, as against the existing solutions, the DDR solution analyzes and responds to threats to cloud data spontaneously, sending alerts on suspicious or anomalous activity, eliminating attacks, data exfiltration and employee data misuse.

Benjamin, the co-founder of the startup, said that Dig works with Microsoft Azure and AWS and will soon support the Google Cloud Platform. But the ultimate goal is to go beyond public clouds to offer a solution to protect data wherever it sits within an organization.

Team8 led the current round of funding. Others such as CrowdStrike, CyberArk and Merlin Ventures, too, contributed. With new funds in its kitty, Dig aims to expand its team from 30 to 50 by the end of the year, including in the U.S. Product expansion, too, is on the cards, as Benjamin noted that the startup “still has a lot to do” across discovery, context and threat protection.

Experts’ Take 

“Companies don’t know what data they hold in the cloud, where it is or most importantly how to protect it. They have tools to protect endpoints, networks, APIs but nothing to actively secure their data in public clouds,” Dan Benjamin, Dig’s co-founder and chief executive, tells TechCrunch. Prior to founding Dig in October last year, Benjamin led multi-cloud security at Microsoft and mentored CTOs at Google Cloud for Startups.

“If you speak to data security teams in large organizations today, most of them work with manual reports and run manual scans. We help organizations analyze and understand how that data is being used,” he added.

“Just the other week, we integrated with a large financial public American company, and after five minutes, we had alerts. What we discovered is that they had all financial reports being copied to an external AWS account that doesn’t belong to them,” Benjamin says. “We see stuff like this all of the time because no one has real visibility into how this data is being used.”

“Data sits in five main locations for a typical enterprise; endpoints, email, on-premise, SaaS and public clouds,” Benjamin says. “We only cover public clouds, but I believe that, eventually, customers will want a single platform that protects data wherever it is.”