Facing the pressure and risks of moving to the cloud, the proliferation of privacy regulations, and a clear imperative to weave security into all phases of the development lifecycle, organizations are turning to Ionic Security for data protection through attribute-based access controls (ABAC), rich dynamic policy, granular encryption key management, and auditable analytics.

In their race to the cloud, companies struggle under old perimeter security models. Modern data protection approaches like Zero Trust recognize that a new data-centric approach using contextual policy controls is required. The number of breaches in 2019 has skyrocketed 130% since 2006 and the average total cost of a breach is $3.92 million USD. Since the average size of a breach now exceeds 25K records, costs will continue increasing under new legislation like the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), which imposes record fines of up to $750 per consumer per incident. Confronted with these risks, organizations are adopting DevSecOps approaches that pull security tools and practices earlier in the development lifecycle.

"Policy is the new perimeter and Machina delivers needed innovation to fight this new battle," said Adam Ghetti, founder of Ionic. "We built a rich policy engine paired with encryption key management that's capable of scaling to the largest global environments and is available as-a-service to reduce the friction of going from zero to protected."

The SDKs and APIs of Machina Tools provide advanced policy-based data security and access management while leveraging and extending the capabilities of deployed resource-, identity-, access-, and workload-centric solutions. Basic role-based access controls in identity and access management tools are not adequate to address the rich contexts required to make informed decisions about whether this person or service should be trusted to have access to that healthcare data, for example, on this device running on that network.

Simplifying the use of modern data protection methods for application developers strengthens privacy by design, especially for data-centric and cloud-native applications. The major cloud service providers recognize that enabling customer-managed trust in the shared responsibility model encourages developer innovation.

Amazon, Google and Microsoft all intensified their strategic partnerships with Ionic in 2019. In particular, the launch of Google Cloud External Key Manager acknowledges the importance of data security and privacy with their willingness to give up access to data stored with them. By adding a third party into the risk model, organizations can now move more types of sensitive data to the cloud with confidence.

In February, Ionic closed a strategic $40 million growth round led by JPMC, with participation from Google LLC as a new investor as well as our current investors, demonstrating their commitment to our vision and long-term success. Sales momentum in highly regulated industries like financial services and healthcare along with the public sector has been accelerated by increased urgency and risks related to cloud migration, application modernization, and regulations. Data-centric solutions to these problems are the cornerstone of modern data protection initiatives like Zero Trust and standards bodies like NIST, who recently released their Privacy Framework 1.0.

"Following clear industry signals, a strong pipeline, and deepening engagements with existing customers, Ionic has begun scaling our go-to-market team by appointing Doug Bleszinski as new vice president of worldwide sales," said Eric Hinkle, CEO of Ionic, "Doug and his team will be meeting the growing market needs for security and privacy with solutions for cloud storage and application development. If policy is the new perimeter, you need Ionic to enforce it."