CloudPassage, Inc., a pioneering security SaaS company, today announced that it has completed a Series A round of financing led by Benchmark Capital.  Kevin Harvey, General Partner at Benchmark, will join the company's board.

Server-level security protection is critical in the cloud where front-line perimeter defenses are limited.  Customers deploying cloud servers are largely on their own to protect them; strong and highly automated host-based controls are essential. CloudPassage is the only company delivering completely portable, elastic and highly scalable server security capabilities.  

Symplified, a Boulder, Colorado based Cloud security company, has this week announced the closing of a $9.2m Series B round of venture capital financing, bringing its total funding to $18.8m. The firm also said its business performance in 2010 “shattered expectations”, as the company grew revenue by 700 percent year on year, to reach a multi-million dollar run rate. Symplified also said they have surpassed one million licensed users for its cloud identity and access management service.

The company is led by the same experienced management team behind Securant and ClearTrust, the identity management software vendor acquired by RSA Security for $140m. The latest financing round was led by existing Symplified investors Granite Ventures and Allegis Capital and also included a strategic investment by Quest Software. The company plans to raise additional Series C expansion capital later in 2011.

Cloud computing is revolutionizing small business all over the world, but many of its skeptics are in the ranks of IT professionals themselves. An international survey conducted by the Information Systems Audit and Control Association earlier this year revealed that one in 4 professionals polled would not use the cloud at all, while only 1 in 10 would use it for mission-critical tasks.

The IT industry moves faster than any other, yet many IT professionals are not only conservative when it comes to the cloud but downright afraid, steering their companies away from it and, in many cases, from greater enterprise and profitability. Is the fear justified? We take a look at some of reasons why people fear the cloud, and the facts that they overlook.

When you ask IT professionals if they use cloud computing or software-as-a-service, most start by saying "no". But if you ask some follow up questions, you will quickly find out about "that one application" that is a SaaS application.

In security, this effect is even more pronounced. Companies don't think they use security-as-a-service or "cloud" security. Yet, many do, in the form of messaging security: e-mail antispam and antivirus. This type of security outsourcing, where security is delivered as a service from the cloud and without on-premise hardware, is growing 12% year-on-year. It's becoming a great outsourcing option for companies that lack the skills or do not want to retain and maintain the skills in some security function.

This week we discuss Gmail's new phone feature (watch out Skype!) and a recent study by IBM's X-force on the greatest threat to cloud adoption. 

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 My 100th Blog!!!

This week we focus on further growth in the Saas/Cloud space. With Salesforce's stock jumping 13% today (Aug 20th) due to beating the Street's predictions and the growth of the Cloud Security sector it is no wonder enterprise level companies are making the move toward implementing more of the sector's technologies.

 Also I give a recap on my recent experience at Parisoma - Innovation Loft for a event entitled Failchat #4: How to Survive Without Funding. Check below for a plethora of articles/links/& bonuses. 

Is the cloud insecure? Maybe. But that's not the first question IT should ask.

As a result, this CTO's company, which had deployed its applications on top of Amazon's Web service offering, is bugging out of the public cloud and into a private co-location facility. While he believes his team can configure the Amazon service to be just as secure as the on-site option, and the cloud's low startup costs and rapid deployment benefits are attractive, he had to ask: Could the model cost us business?

I recently read an article by Anita Moorthy, Sr.Solutions Marketing Manager for Novell, Inc.  in which she articulates the results of a survey on what organizations want when purchasing SaaS products.

It seems that the group falls into 2 categories:

• Those that want their needs met by developing capabilities in-house
  • The issue being the customers bring a variety of identity management solutions to the relationship which will require devoted development resources to a never-ending cycle of customization.
• Those that would rather someone else take care of it for them
  •  2 most popular options being OEMing through a third-party or sourcing through their hosing vendor.

She goes on to mention that Identity Management is essentially an infrastructure function. Since contemporary hosting tends to be moving towards infrastructure as a service (IaaS) it's likely these providers will have the technical know-how to integrate IaaS into there offerings and should have a definite stake in supporting it into the future.