Cybersecurity from Israel: Portshift raises 5.3 mill. USD

Team8, the leading think tank and company-creation platform specializing in cyber resilience and data science, today announced the official launch of Portshift, a cloud-workload protection platform backed with $5.3million in seed funding.

Portshift introduces a new IT security paradigm in which developers can deploy applications at efficiency and speed with security built-into the deployment rather than layered on after. The solution offers continuous security from code to run-time.

While operating in stealth mode, Portshift is already working with several large organizations across multiple sectors with massive deployment in the cloud in both US and Europe.

Portshift is built on the premise that the world of IT has changed dramatically, defined by unprecedented and unmanageable infrastructure complexity that render traditional legacy systems as obsolete. Infrastructure that ran for months before being updated or changed is now replaced with ongoing deployments of new applications and hourly updates of granular compute units.

Whereas security signoff was previously required for firewall rules to be configured, and servers to be installed, today developers enjoy the agility to deploy new applications at scale, independent of the traditional security checkpoints.  Security teams are left behind with the old network rules and firewalls that cannot keep up with the pace of change. The result is a loss of ownership and lack of control of what is happening in the enterprise networks.

The old world of security based on IPs and ports is not able to keep up with the way IT infrastructure scales today, resulting in a lack of visibility and loss of control of the network and even worse, a complete bypass of security by developers or even worse an attacker. In order to keep up, security has to ‘shift left’, to be integrated into part of the development, deployment, and operations processes.” said Ran Ilany, Portshift CEO & Founder. “Security should be something that operational teams can orchestrate as part of their day-to-day job, rather than a separate step once the application is already deployed,” added Zohar Kaufman VP R&D and Founder.

As enterprises strive to realize the true benefits of digital transformation and accelerate their cloud workflows, there must be a shift in mindset around security as an enabler, not an enforcer,” said Nadav Zafrir, CEO & Co-Founder of Team8. “Security and operational agility cannot be two different discussions, but rather work hand-in-hand to unleash business growth and ensure organizations thrive.”

From network IP to application ID, Portshift is unveiling a new way of controlling security for application deployment and communication. With Portshift, security teams can define guardrails for identities, instead of being limited by network constraints.

Portshift is born out of Team8’s unique company-building model. Portshift is founded by serial entrepreneur and former head of security infrastructure division at Check Point Technologies, Ran Ilany, and Zohar Kaufman who spent 20 years managing software, networking and embedded system development teams and was previously the founder and VP of R&D at CTERA Networks and VP of R&D at SofaWare technologies. Eran Grabiner, who joined the team recently after being the COO of Spotinst, will lead the company’s business activity. In 2019, the team plans to double in size and expand its US presence.