Stealthy Israeli data security startup Polar Security has published a website explaining its intention to discover businesses’ managed, unmanaged and shadow data automatically — and secure it.
The company was started up in January 2021 by co-founders Guy Shanny (CEO) and Roey Yaacovi (CTO), and its chairman is Dov Yoran. Glilot Capital Partners and IBI TechFund are listed as investors with an undisclosed amount of funding. Polar has offices in Tel Aviv and, already, in San Jose.
The website claims its product will halt exhausting gap-bridging ping-pong between R&D, Security, and Data Governance teams to ensure data compliance and respond to security pain in the DevOps security vortex.
Polar’s technology platform, which is agentless and non-intrusive, is claimed to automatically detect all cloud-native data stores, and maintains continuous visibility across cloud accounts, regions, VPCs and subnets, and their shadow data. It says this is constantly created by R&D, often without documentation. Once detected, the data is automatically labelled to identify valuable and sensitive data with reference to GDPR, CCPA, PCI, PIIs, HIPPA, and other data classifications.
There can be automated enforcement of pre-emptive sensitive data security and compliance controls. Also, once identified, data flow and access can be tracked. Polar says this can prevent sensitive data leakage and pre-empt regulatory exposure. The platform can identify data at risk and provide actionable recommendations to restore data security, mitigate data vulnerability and compliance violations before costly escalation.
Polar’s software can connect to a business’s IT system in minutes and is zero-touch — with no SDKs, network scanners or sidecars (supporting processes or services) needed, just read-only data access permission.
Identified use cases include automated data store inventory, auditing data flow security, preventing sensitive data exposure, ensuring ransomware-resilient sensitive data stores, and preventing compliance violations.
Shanny spent ten and a half years in the Office of the Prime Minster of Israel working in the cybersecurity field. While a teenage high school student he started FreshServ — a private web vulnerability and hosting company. Yaacovi also worked in the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office but then joined Check Point Software Technologies as a software engineer.
Yoran has a background of working at Cisco — founding malware analysis startup ThreatGRID which was bought by Cisco — and Symantec. He is based in New York and a partner at MetroSITE Group which participates in early-stage cybersecurity investments and provides advisory services.
