Sepio Secures Shadow IT Assets from the Cloud to the Edge of the Network, Raising $22 Million

When it comes to security, you can’t protect assets you don’t see. Unfortunately, in an era of hybrid cloud adoption and remote working, shadow IT assets are ubiquitous, in the form of apps, IoT devices, and cloud instances.

These assets are all vulnerable to threat actors. Therefore, many providers are trying to streamline the discovery and management of these assets.

Last month, risk management provider Sepio announced it had raised $22 million as part of a Series B funding round for its Asset Risk Management Platform, which provides security teams with the visibility to continuously manage known and unknown shadow assets and assign an Asset Risk Factor.

The new funding round brings Sepio’s total funding to $37 million and provides an approach to securing shadow IT assets that often slip under the radar of traditional security approaches.

Diving into the unknown

More and more enterprises are concerned about the risks posed by unsecured IT assets, including: Research showing that 75% of IT and IT security professionals in the US agree that using cloud apps and services without IT approval is a serious security risk.

If companies want to meet this challenge, the first step companies need to take is to make them visible.

“The most reliable source of asset risk is the actual properties on the physical layer. Sepio’s hardware DNA technology discovers all managed, unattended and hidden devices that are invisible to all other security tools,” said Yossi Appleboum, CEO of Sepio.

By discovering known and shadow assets, Sepio empowers users to monitor the security position of these assets from one location, using an Asset Risk Factor to identify and address security risks before they can be exploited by an attacker.

“Sepio’s unique approach and algorithms automatically generate an accurate Asset DNA profile for each asset with automatically generated Asset Risk Factors based on contextual matters, location and rules,” said Appleboum.

Once discovered, these assets can be checked for vulnerabilities and misconfigurations that increase the risk of a data breach.

A Look at IT Asset Management Vendors

Sepio is one of several providers in the IT asset management market that: researchers worth $2319.7 million in 2021 and is estimated to be $3381.4 million in 2028.

One of the organization’s main competitors in the market is: Armiswho raised $300 million in financing last year and achieved a valuation of $3.4 billion.

Armis provides a platform for security teams to discover IT assets and maintain an accurate inventory database. Users can scan devices to identify information including manufacturer, model, IP address, MAC address, operating system and username.

Another major competitor in the market is: Axonius. Axonius provides a cybersecurity asset management platform that creates an inventory of all IT assets so that security teams can identify misconfigurations and automatically apply security policies and custom response actions to secure them.

Earlier this year, Axonius closed a series E financing round with $200 million in funding and reached a valuation of $2.6 billion.

According to Appleboum, the main differentiator between Sepio and competitors is:

The lack of dependence on behavioral factors. “Sepio’s technology is unaffected by behavioral perceptions that can mislead the most robust cyber tools or behavioral impact assumptions that can drown the most powerful cyber operations.”