Alphabet and Cisco Fund Ex-HP Security Lead’s Startup

Art Gilliland, former HP executive department and current chief executive officer of Skyport Systems, says he believes there ar 2 styles of network architectures that ar necessary to the long run of cybersecurity.

The first entails cloud access brokers, gatekeepers that manage the traffic flowing between cloud services and company networks, he says. (See Blue Coat, Netskope, Skyhigh Networks, Elastica, and Zscaler, for instance.) and therefore the second involves “microsegmentation,” a way of protection that divvies up a network and controls however its elements, or nodes, interact.

Three ex-Cisco and Juniper Networks JNPR -0.73% engineers—Michael Beesley, Rob composer, and can Eatherton—founded Skyport in 2013. Gilliland, WHO headed enterprise security code at HP previous the company’s breakup into Hewlett Packard Enterprise HPE two.19% and HP opposition. HPQ -0.61% , left the technical school big last year to require the reins of the startup. Stefan Dyckerhoff, director at Sutter Hill, originally incubated the corporate at his working capital firm whereas serving as interim chief executive officer.

Dave Munichiello, general partner at GV and Amazon AMZN zero.64% alum, tells Fortune that his call to take a position within the company reflects his dynamical attitudes concerning company IT infrastructure. “If you had talked to American state 3 years past i might have same it had been inevitable that 100% of workloads would visit the cloud,” he says.

“As I’ve spent longer with portfolio corporations, I’ve seen a hybrid approach from enterprise IT execs,”continues Munichiello, WHO has additionally invested with in Slack and CoreOS. “Some employment goes to the general public cloud, some to a non-public cloud, some to a hybrid—that’s the trend I see over consequent ten years.”

Despite several corporations currently undergoing a shift to cloud infrastructure, Skyport aims to assist secure in-house networks. one in every of the company’s biggest competitors within the microsegmentation market is VMware, closely-held by EMC EMC -0.15% (soon Dell). Smaller companies that supply similar options embody information center security startups vArmour and Illumio.

“Most breaches occur through merchant connections into Associate in Nursing IT setting,” Gilliland says, outlining the matter his firm seeks to unravel. “Our system controls what’s allowed therein setting.”