Lacework expands in EMEA

Lacework is expanding into the EMEA region. Building on its innovation lead since launching in 2015, Lacework’s rapid growth is a testament to the company’s revolutionary approach of tackling security as a data problem through the Lacework Polygraph. Customers are increasingly relying on Lacework to access a unique view into all entities across applications, users, networks, containers and processes in a data centre to quickly secure the code, the container and the cloud in a way that empowers developers to build at lightning speed.

This EMEA expansion comes on the heels of eight straight quarters of sequential revenue growth, Lacework’s best quarter to date in Q1 of this year and $525 million in funding from Sutter Hill Ventures and other top tier investors in January.

The company is making significant investments into building out its EMEA operations, including a European HQ in Dublin, regional offices in the UK, France and Germany, and an AWS data centre in Frankfurt. Alongside strategic sales, marketing and customer success hires in the region, most recently the appointment of Ryan Sheldrake as EMEA Field CTO. The company has also expanded its Executive team, including the additions of Mike Staiger as CFO and David Hatfield as CEO, following his successful tenure as the President of Pure Storage, Inc where he led the company through eight years of hyper growth from inception to more than $1.5 billion in revenue.

IDC predicts that by 2023 there will be $218bn in Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service spend, with cloud security estimated at more than $12bn. Lacework’s security and compliance offerings aim to serve the needs of developers building solutions in the cloud as well as security teams, overcoming the challenges of increasing data volumes and replacing fragmented security solutions with a best of breed, easy-to-use platform. With EMEA currently facing a significant digital skills gap, automated security solutions are perfectly positioned to support overstretched IT and security teams. 

Ryan Sheldrake, Lacework EMEA Field CTO commented, “Lacework is a special company in a very exciting stage of growth and product development, and we are delighted to now expand our reach and operations into EMEA. Digital businesses should not have to choose between innovation, speed and security. With Lacework, organisations no longer need to make these tradeoffs. Our team has worked incredibly hard to develop a truly sophisticated platform with consumer-level ease of use that automates cloud security at scale, and it’s now time to kickstart a secure cloud revolution.”

Lacework enables organisations to both see and understand cloud changes at scale without requiring manual interventions or rule writing. Its innovative solutions give customers the visibility, context and telemetry needed to quickly assess cloud security postures, prove compliance, secure cloud workloads, and investigate anomalous activity, all in one place. Lacework understands and detects threats in cloud applications and infrastructure by applying automation and machine learning to tackle the massive scale of security data processing required to record and analyse constant changes in the cloud. As a result, its customers are able to reduce false positives by up to 98% and investigation times by over 90%. Lacework customers also typically reduce two-to-four point products, simplifying environments and delivering a compelling ROI.

Stephen Carl, CTO at Sliide, commented, “As a cloud native, lean tech company, Sliide was looking for tooling to allow our DevOps team to get on with platform scaling, without having to worry about vulnerabilities or threat detection. The Lacework product provided an initial audit of our environment then, after a clean bill of health, confirming AWS Well Architected state, was actively monitoring and alerting us to any irregular or unusual activities. Its dashboards allow us to not only ensure that we are on top of any issues, but also allows us to actively demonstrate to any partners or investors that we have it covered.”

Lacework’s partner ecosystem is critical to its continued success in helping customers implement and manage security in dynamic cloud environments. The company will continue to expand EMEA channel and technology partnerships and recently announced its collaboration with MBA IT, an established IT solutions and services partner that helps service-sector customers navigate the current and emerging technology choices to achieve better business outcomes.

Guy Brandon, CEO and Founder of MBA IT commented, “MBA is a trusted advisor to many forward-thinking organisations who are heavily investing in the cloud and we felt Lacework’s disruptive approach provides a great long-term solution to our clients in securing their organisation’s critical workloads and providing unrivalled visibility.