Cybersecurity company Palo Alto Networks has announced it is forming a $20 million security venture fund to provide early stage capital investments for development of innovative security applications for its Next-Generation Security Platform. The fund will be aimed at seed, early and growth-stage security companies with a cloud-based application approach.
Palo Alto explains that the participating companies can accelerate their routes to market for their respective technology by developing cloud-based applications built on their platform and Application Framework. The fund expects to collaborate with
Greylock Partners and
Sequoia Capital to identify and evaluate innovative security applications for potential co-investment.
“Many early stage security startups have excellent ideas, but struggle to reach customers. By tapping into this fund and application framework, companies can get their technologies to market faster and into the hands of Palo Alto Networks customers,” said Jim Goetz, Partner, Sequoia Capital.
According to Chad Kinzelberg, Senior Vice President, Business and Corporate Development, Palo Alto Networks, this new fund will help organizations prevent cyber breaches by inspiring and accelerating a groundswell of security innovation in a model that can be easily accessed and deployed by customer organizations.
New security service for remote locations and mobile users
Along with this, the company also announced
GlobalProtect cloud service, a new offering that provides the its security infrastructure as a cloud-based service for remote offices and mobile users. This cloud service aims to enable customers to utilize the preventive capabilities of the
Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Security Platform, including application visibility and control, Threat Prevention, URL Filtering, and WildFire threat analysis service, to secure remote networks and mobile users.
With this new service, widely distributed organizations can improve security while reducing the complexity of managing costly, time-consuming and cumbersome global deployments. The company claims that it eliminates the operational hurdles posed by traditional distributed security infrastructure approaches and provides customers with consistent protections needed to prevent successful cyberattacks across globally distributed network and cloud environments.
Additionally, Palo Alto Networks has launched an
Application Framework, a cloud-based framework that aims to allow customer organizations to rapidly consume and implement a variety of innovative cloud-based security applications from any provider, large or small.
The framework introduces a SaaS (software as a service) consumption model, allowing customers to rapidly evaluate and deploy new capabilities via security applications built by the company, third-party developers, MSSPs, and their own teams to solve a myriad of security challenges and use cases. This new model will leverage existing Palo Alto Networks sensors, customer-specific data stores and security infrastructure, enabling organizations to instantly activate cloud-delivered applications from different providers as security needs change and without deploying or managing additional products.
