Automation and IAM help enterprises address identity sprawl, Rezonate raises $8.7 million

Modern enterprises are facing an identity crisis. In the era of cloud connectivity, the average employee has over 30 digital identities, which all need to be managed and secured. This is simply too many to manage with manual processes alone. 

In response to identity sprawl, many technology vendors are recognizing that organizations need a process to automatically provision and deprovision user and machine identities if they want to decrease the risk of data breaches. 

One such provider is Rezonate, which today announced it has raised $8.7 million for a cloud identity protection platform that can detect identities, users and resources throughout an enterprise’s environment, manage access privileges and automatically remediate security incidents to minimize the impact of breaches. 

By leveraging automation, Rezonate aims to enable security teams to detect and respond to identity-based threats in real-time, while providing automated remediation actions so they harden their security posture against threat actors.  

Securing the cloud 

This funding comes as more organizations are struggling to keep cloud environments secure, with research showing that 45% of organizations have experienced a data breach or failed an audit involving data and applications in the cloud in 2022, compared to 35% in 2021. 

These breaches are also extremely high impact, particularly when considering that 66% of organizations store 21-60% of their sensitive data in the cloud. 

However, through a mix of automated access provisioning and remediation, Rezonate augments the capabilities of security teams so they can scale to keep up with the explosion in digital identities, and keep them secure. 

“Rezonate provides a security approach that is real-time-ready to harden defenses against every cloud identity and access exploitation attempt and at the same time enable a trusted developer to extend reach within controlled boundaries. A disruptively new approach that adapts to the speed, scale and agility of the cloud,” said CEO and cofounder of Rezonate, Roy Akerman. 

Visualizing potential attack paths across exposures and active threats provides security teams with detailed contextual insights that they can use not just to remediate live incidents, but guidance they can use to continuously improve the organizations cyber resilience over time. 

The vendors combatting cloud-based identity threats 

Rezonate’s solution falls loosely within the cloud security market, which researchers estimate will grow from $33 billion in 2022 to $106 billion in 2029 at a compound annual growth rate of 18.1%. Although, Rezonate isn’t alone in looking to address the challenge of identity sprawl. 

Identity and access management (IAM) provider Okta offers a solution called Workforce Identity, providing automated identity lifecycle management capabilities to enable security teams to automatically onboard and offboard privileged users. Okta recently announced raising revenue of $383 million in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2022. 

Another vendor taking a similar approach is Sailpoint, with an identity security platform that uses machine learning to identify identities and resources on-premises and in the cloud. Sailpoint’s solution provides customizable workflows to help teams discover, manage and secure user identities and, ultimately, automate real-time access. 

Sailpoint recently announced raising annual recurring revenue of $429.5 million. 

Akerman argues that Rezonate’s focus on identity security is what differentiates it from other access management providers. 

“Rezonate’s approach to cloud security is new and disruptively simple. Our single platform brings security and devops teams together as never before. They work as one, hence the name Rezonate, to eliminate the adversary’s opportunity to breach the cloud’s most critical control — its identity and access,” Akerman said.