This week, Texas-based Intrigue announced the completion of a $2 million seed round led by LiveOak Venture Partners. The company says this latest funding will allow it to accelerate product development of its attack surface management platform and establish a go-to-market strategy. Intrigue’s open-core platform was purpose-built for the most demanding security teams and fits perfectly with today’s cloud-native IT environment.
Why Attack Surface Management?
The York IE team chose this Intrigue seed round as our transaction of the week to discuss attack surface management (ASM) platforms and their journey to becoming many organizations’ top security priority. With mass adoption of cloud and SaaS, and an increasingly mobile workforce, network perimeters are becoming increasingly difficult to define. With ASM software, users are able to map and secure all internet-facing assets within their networks. Already an emerging industry in 2019, attack surface management kicked into high gear during the pandemic; three critical changes drove this shift:
- the transition to work from home;
- accelerated cloud migration; and
- consistent security team overload.
According to a recent IDC report, organizations spent $125 billion on cybersecurity in 2020 with expectations that spending will increase an additional 40% by 2025; despite this, cyber risk remains a top priority and the perceived threat of cyberattacks continues to increase. With this situation arguably getting worse, the traditional inventory-centric approach to network perimeter security does not meet today’s standards. By taking an attacker’s perspective to uncover new sources of risk, an attack surface management platform enables an adversary-focused and risk-based approach to network perimeter security. As the number of sophisticated cyberattacks continues to increase, organizations have reached a realization that legacy tools are unable to adapt quickly enough to these evolving threats and have begun adopting new cybersecurity approaches to better understand where their weaknesses lie.
Growing Digitization Fuels Cybersecurity Market Success
Previously, we’ve discussed the overwhelming digitization occurring across almost every industry. As more organizations continue to rely on and create vast amounts of digital information, the complexity and interconnectedness of networks and systems increases exponentially. This push to digitization has created universal demand for cybersecurity products and services across industries. As the market expands, successful organizations are those who remain on the cutting edge of technologies and services; evolving threats and vulnerabilities require continuous monitoring and management compelling many organizations to employ third-party vendors for their cybersecurity needs.
