Opus Security, a cloud security orchestration and remediation platform, emerged today from stealth with $10 million in seed funding led by YL Ventures, with the participation of Tiger Global and angel investors. CEO Meny Har tells ukbusinessupdates.com that the proceeds will be spent on the launch of Opus’ platform in general availability, increasing the startup’s US footprint and product R&D.
It is Har’s claim that cloud security teams rely heavily on manual processes to resolve security incidents, which is not scalable. He’s not exactly an unbiased source. But to his point, a questionnaire commissioned by Orca Security found that 59% of security teams receive more than 500 public cloud security alerts every day. In a separate poll by ISACA and HCL Technologies issued last May, 61% of IT security professionals said their teams were understaffed.
“To address the increasing number of security findings, today it has become necessary to engage a wide range of teams and stakeholders across the organization in security processes that are critical to remediation,” Har told ukbusinessupdates.com in an email interview. “This complex collaboration – without a streamlined orchestration process – creates friction and waste of time because the teams do not communicate clearly. This friction leads to a general lack of understanding of how well the organization is secured, how remediation processes are performed and what needs to be improved.”
Har co-founded Opus with Or Gabay, with whom he worked at Siemplify, a security orchestration startup. Har was a member of the founding team of Siemplify, which was acquired by Google earlier this year.
“We witnessed the challenges security teams face when analyzing, prioritizing and remediating security risks using cumbersome, distributed processes and various detection tools – without supervision or management,” said Har. “Opus’ vision is to empower security teams to see beyond alerts and threats and gain knowledge, capabilities and control to dramatically reduce the time to resolve them.”
To this end, Opus leverages operational and technical data from existing cloud security tools to create a “connective tissue” between security operations teams and other business departments. The attempts to orchestrate the response and recovery process with guidelines and playbooks, using automation to solve problems that usually don’t require human intervention – and deliver key metrics.
“Organizations today may choose to use a common ticketing platform such as ServiceNow or Jira and potentially add ‘background’ security automation platforms, which are used to manually create processes to support security operations and DevOps functions. Generic ticketing platforms can help with management, but do little in efficiencies through automation,” said Har. “With instant visibility and recovery mapping…Opus removes blind spots and provides security and business leaders with immediate and tangible insight in the status of their risk.”
That’s promising, especially in light of competition like cloud security startups Wiz, Paladin Cloud, and Laminar. But in a (possibly) encouraging sign, Har says Opus has seen early adoption with a “handful” of design partners, who are working to build out the platform ahead of a broad launch sometime in the first quarter of 2023. Ahead of general availability , Opus plans to expand its workforce from 10 employees to 20 to 25 by the end of the year, Har said.
“As organizations recover from the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, and with looming budget and workforce cuts plaguing the industry, Opus is a custom solution designed specifically with these externalities in mind,” said Har . “Implementing the Opus solution is easy, and as Opus drives the automation of all recovery processes, it’s a perfect fit for organizations striving to do more with less.”
Like many startups, Opus is benefiting from VC dollars that, despite the macroeconomic downturn, have not stopped flowing into the cybersecurity sector. According to Momentum Cyber’s latest cybersecurity market research, investors poured $11.5 billion in total venture capital funding into cybersecurity startups in the first half of 2021, up from $4.7 billion in the same period a year earlier.
John Brennan, senior partner at YL Ventures, added in an emailed statement: “The proliferation of cloud-centric security solutions has dramatically increased the organization’s awareness of the scope of their risk surface. While visibility in the cloud is strong improved, customers now need a dedicated solution to deal with the drastically increasing number of alerts… Meny and Or used their unique experience at Siemplify to build the industry’s first cloud native
remediation orchestration and automation platform.”
