Microsegmentation is essential to containing attackers’ lateral movement within compromised networks, making it fundamental to cyber defense and foundational to building zero-trust architectures. Gartner predicts that by 2026, 60% of enterprises working toward zero trust architecture will use more than one deployment form of micro-segmentation, which is up from less than 5% in 2023. Unsurprisingly, Exactitude Consultancy predicts the global microsegmentation market will grow from $2.63 billion in 2023 to $12.47 billion by 2030.
Realising this growth, California-based Elisity, operating in the identity-based microsegmentation sector, has raised $37 million in Series B funding. The investment came from global software investor Insight Partners.
Elisity will use the new funding to extend its platform’s AI capabilities, fully leveraging organisations’ device identity data to anticipate and pre-empt emerging cyber threats and establish unprecedented control over IT, OT, IoT, and hybrid environments.
Easy implementation of granular controls
Elisity’s ability to abstract policy management from networks allows healthcare and other organisations to easily implement granular controls in hybrid environments merging information technology (IT) and internet of things (IoT) assets.
The company has partnered with healthcare organisations facing not only cyber threats, but also regulatory requirements demanding tight controls over patient data and access to life-supporting medical devices.
Its agentless, identity-based platform also provides tremendous advantages to the OT environments of industrial control systems (ICS) powering critical infrastructure. Identity-based controls are particularly critical in these environments given a wide range of devices are legacy systems that cannot be protected with agent-based endpoint security solutions common in IT environments.
It supports a number of critical infrastructure providers’ efforts to protect OT systems lacking security features, prevent expensive operational disruptions, address compliance requirements, manage supply chain risks, converge IT-OT networks, and facilitate cyber incident response.
“Elisity is addressing a critical segmentation need within our customers’ infrastructure, but our identity-based approach and continued AI investments will ensure we can leverage our ‘single source of truth’ on network assets to redefine network security with more real-time, adaptable security policies,” said James Winebrenner, CEO of Elisity. “Traditional segmentation efforts often pitted performance and availability focused networking teams against security teams inserting control choke points. By abstracting segmentation from network operations, Elisity removes traditional project friction, costs and delays, allowing zero trust projects to quickly proceed and enabling new network security capabilities as needs evolve tomorrow.”
“As a former CISO, I had completely dismissed microsegmentation until I talked to Elisity’s customers,” said Stephen Ward, Managing Director at Insight Partners. “More than a decade as a former operator taught me that these projects are notoriously difficult due to a lack of viable, scalable technical approaches to implementing essential controls exactly where and how they’re needed. Due diligence and conversations with customers convinced me that Elisity could be quickly and effectively implemented and scaled to address a fast-growing need across thousands of IT and OT environments.”
