BOULDER, Colo. — (Nov. 13, 2018) — Automox, a global provider of cloud-native automated patch management and configuration management solutions, today announced it closed a $9.3 million investment round from leading cybersecurity venture capital firms and long-standing industry veterans.
The Series A investment was led by new investor TechOperators with participation from CRV, BlueNote Ventures and Tom Noonan, along with previous insiders.
In addition to personally participating in the financing, Noonan also joins the Automox board of directors. A cybersecurity veteran with more than 20 years of experience in the field, Noonan is currently a general partner at TechOperators and formerly the founder and CEO of Internet Security Systems (acquired by IBM), JouleX (acquired by Cisco) and Endgame.
“At the heart of every corporate cyber practice are two basic questions: are all of my systems and software patched and up to date, and are those systems configured and maintained correctly?” said Jay Prassl, Automox founder and CEO. “Unpatched and misconfigured systems are massive problems that represents 80 percent of the corporate attack surface. That is an astounding statistic. Imagine eliminating all those issues for corporations and organizations of every size. That is exactly what we are doing at Automox through our automated cloud platform.”
Automox: A Unified, Cloud-Native Cyber-Hygiene Solution
Enterprise IT environments are increasingly complex. Today’s IT administrators must manage a growing pool of devices and new cyber security threats across a broad geography with limited resources. In addition, the fatigue caused by years of purchasing one-off solutions has made keeping critical infrastructure patched and configured at scale almost impossible.
Over the last 10 years the focus of the security industry has largely been on new and novel ways to scan, detect and report on threats, while little energy has been spent revolutionizing the tools to actually fix infrastructure vulnerabilities. Automox fills that void in the security market by empowering IT administrators with a suite of tools that automates the fundamental tasks that keep their organizations more secure than ever before.
“While cloud-native technology has revolutionized the enterprise security landscape, most enterprises large and small still rely on legacy, on-premise systems to keep their diverse systems up to date,” said Noonan. “Automox has modernized this cornerstone of enterprise security with a fully cloud-native offering to deploy and validate patches and security controls across their Windows, Mac and Linux infrastructure within one platform.”
Traditional approaches to cyber-hygiene require many siloed products with each running on its own server that sits behind the corporate firewall. Organizations with multiple sites need multiple servers and software instances, each of which must be patched, updated and maintained. When systems move outside the protective firewall they become out of reach for traditional server-based security tools.
“Unpatched systems can have a material impact on a company and its profits,” said Devdutt Yellurkar, general partner at CRV. “We’re impressed by what Jay and the team at Automox have developed. They are tackling the fundamentals of security hygiene with a cloud-native approach that takes a huge weight off the IT staff, raises their security confidence and enables them to focus on the most critical threats to their infrastructure.”
TechOperators, CRV and Noonan join previous Automox investors including Ron Gula, founder and former CEO of Tenable Network Security; Art Coviello, former executive chairman of RSA; Tim Belcher, former CTO of RSA; Mike Viscuso, co-founder of Carbon Black; and Roger Thornton, CTO of AlienVault. Automox will be leveraging the new capital to accelerate the growth of engineering, sales and marketing. For more information see https://www.automox.com.
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About Automox
Facing growing threats and a rapidly expanding attack surface, understaffed and alert-fatigued organizations need more efficient ways to eliminate their exposure to vulnerabilities. Automox is a modern cyber hygiene platform that closes the aperture of attack by more than 80% with just half the effort of traditional solutions.
Cloud-native and globally available, Automox enforces OS & third-party patch management, security configurations, and custom scripting across Windows, Mac, and Linux from a single intuitive console. IT and SecOps can quickly gain control and share visibility of on-prem, remote and virtual endpoints without the need to deploy costly infrastructure.
Experience modern, cloud-native patch management today with a 15-day free trial of Automox and start recapturing more than half the time you're currently spending on managing your attack surface. Automox dramatically reduces corporate risk while raising operational efficiency to deliver best-in-class security outcomes, faster and with fewer resources.
