SAN JOSE — Elisity, a specialist in identity-based microsegmentation, has raised $37 million in Series B funding from global software investor Insight Partners. Elisity will use the new funds to extend its platform’s artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, fully leveraging organizations’ device identity data to anticipate and pre-empt emerging cyber threats and establish unprecedented control over IT, OT, IoT and hybrid environments.
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 microsegmentation, 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.
“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.”
Elisity’s identity-based approach to microsegmentation represents a major market shift by centralizing the security policy management process within Elisity IndentityGraph. This allows networking teams to gain unprecedented visibility and focus on enhancing performance and availability while security teams assert more granular control over users, devices and workloads based on their contextual attributes. In this way, Elisity addresses the long-time challenge of easily and quickly deploying microsegmentation and streamlines efforts to deploy zero trust and other critical capabilities.
“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.”