Israel has become known for its security startups, and Scalock, a company that wants to secure the burgeoning container space, announced a $4 million Series A round today.
The funding was provided by Israel venture capitalists TLV partners, a new fund launched earlier this year by veterans of the Israeli VC scene, Rona Segev and Eitan Bek.
The company is run by two security industry veterans, Dror Davidoff and Amir Jerbi, who saw an opportunity in the virtual container market, which has been growing by leaps and bounds over the last two years, led by companies like Docker.
Containers help simplify application deployment by isolating different pieces as distinct components. This is great for developers and operations, who can make changes and redeploy without breaking the working app. It’s a process, however that requires several different helper applications to make it work, and that’s part of the security problem, Davidoff explained.
Once you start working with these containers, you need management, orchestration and monitoring tools. Another complicating factor is that containers by their nature aren’t static, they are in motion, he says. All of this makes it difficult to secure virtual container technology.
Scalock can help in several ways. It begins by analyzing the container and making sure it complies with whatever policies a company has defined. It also defines who can access the container, so that unauthorized users (like hackers) are kept at bay. Finally, it protects the container by enforcing the policies defined for the given container as it moves through its lifecycle.
Depending on how Scalock is configured, it can fix some issues automatically, while with other types of issues, it would alert users that there’s a problem and let them determine how to fix it.
The first step is defining those security policies around the containers and then allowing Scalock to monitor the containers to be sure they comply. “A lot of what we do is based on policies and best practices for security and what we learned how about how the container runs [during the analysis phase]. What the container does, we let it do. If it tries to do something different we would alert on that,” Davidoff explained.
While adding a run-time security layer to the container launch process could slow it down, Davidoff says his company tries to keep any friction to a minimum. “We are careful not to impact the advantage of containers,” he says.
The company, currently is based in Tel Aviv, and plans to keep its engineering team in Israel, but will open an office for the sales and marketing arm in Silicon Valley next year.
Scalock has 7 employees including the two founders and several beta customers. It hopes to become generally available in the near future.
