Boulder, Colo. , Nov. 13, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Automox, a global provider of cloud-based patching 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 represent 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-Based 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 has filled 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-based 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-based 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 as many as six siloed products with each running on its own server that sit 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-based 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/careers.
About Automox
Automox’s cloud-based, automated patch management solution simplifies patching and configuration management across Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and third-party software. Based in Boulder, Colo., privately held Automox provides IT managers and system administrators with a patching system of record to track, control and manage their patch management process, providing greater security, improved productivity and significant time savings. Automox protects tens of thousands of customer endpoints for organizations including Greyhound Lines, Hootsuite, NASA, Quicken,Yale University, Xerox, Dollar Shave Club and more. To sign up for a free, 15-day trial of Automox’s cloud-based, automated patch management solution, visit www.automox.com/signup.
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