Automox Secures USD $9.3 Million Fund

Automox, an organization known for providing cloud-based automated patch management and configuration management solutions, has announced that it managed to secure a 9,3 million dollar fund.

The investment was backed and led by a new investor "TechOperators," along with several other known investors such as CRV. BlueNote Ventures, and Tom Noonan.

Noonan is also to join Automox's board of directors. He is known to be a cybersecurity veteran and is a general partner with TechOperators.

“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.”

Tom Noonan is also the founder and CEO of Internet Security Systems (now acquired by IBM), Endgame and JouleX (acquired by Cisco).

With the increasing complexity of enterprise IT environments, present IT admins have to manage the ever-increasing number of devices connected to the network while addressing zero-day threats, with limited resources available at their disposal.

The focus on scanning, detecting and removing threats has been the main focus of the security industry over the last decade. That being said, little efforts have been made to fix the vulnerabilities in the infrastructure.

Automox is working to fix this void by providing IT admins with various tools which will help them automate the basic tasks thus helping to plug in the loopholes in the security.

“While cloud-based technology has revolutionized the enterprise security landscape, most enterprises large and small still rely on a 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.”''

Some of the investors backing up the company include 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.

“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.”

Most of the cybersecurity measures are independent services and require their own servers, most of which are behind the organization's firewall. Companies which deal with multiple servers scattered throughout the globe with different software instances, need to be patched and updated periodically. These systems become are ineffective when we use traditional security tools.