Founded by Brocade’s Executives, AlephCloud Raises $7.5 Million
Start-up in security cloud sharing
This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on May 27, 2013 at 3:03 pmAlephCloud Systems, Inc., a start-up developing a new technology for managing content privacy and provenance in public clouds, announced that it has closed a $7.5 million Series B round of financing.
The funding was led by Handbag, LLC, a new wave venture capital firm created by noted Silicon Valley investor and former Crosspoint general partner Seth Neiman.
The new investment brings the total amount raised to $9.5 million.
The firm also announced that Neiman has joined the company’s board of directors. His investing group, which provides institutional investments without the institution, is composed of VCs and CEOs who helped create much of the technology used to build Internet and data center infrastructures.
"With the advent of personal devices and data sharing in public clouds, the traditional ‘moat and citadel’ approach to content protection is broken," said Neiman. "AlephCloud technology will redefine content and device management for the cloud era."
Recently AlephCloud was one of six start-ups selected from a pool of more than 100 companies for Orange Fab, the technology accelerator program managed by Orange Silicon Valley.
According to a report from Gartner, "Personal cloud services are simple, available free of charge and elegantly solve sync and share problems, which is why smart-device users are adopting these services. They represent a serious security and compliance threat for an IT organization, because employees can share corporate documents with third parties, or store documents on home PCs and other personal devices, completely out of an IT organization’s control." (Gartner, Inc., MarketScope for Enterprise File Synchronization and Sharing, February 12, 2013, by Monica Basso, Jeffrey Mann)
"IT consumerization, which is characterized by BYOD and BYOC (bring your own cloud), is making it almost impossible for enterprises to manage the OSs and devices that employees use to access corporate information," said Jieming Zhu, CEO of AlephCloud. "To maintain privacy, control, and compliance, organizations must be able to protect their content wherever it resides. We have the opportunity to completely change the dynamics of trust in public clouds."
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Based in Sunnyvale, CA, AlephCloud, just emerging from stealth mode, was founded in 2011 and is currently recruiting software engineers.
Aleph is the first letter of the Phoenician alphabet.
In cryptography, 'zero knowledge' proof or protocol is a method by which one party can prove to another party that a given statement is true, without conveying any additional information apart from the fact that the statement is indeed true. AlephCloud uses the same principle to mean that no one can see your content, not cloud providers and not even AlephCloud. Objects put into the cloud repository are always encrypted before leaving the customer’s trusted domain (or trusted device), ensuring security and privacy.
The solution leverages Suite B cryptography at levels recommended by the NSA for protecting top-secret government assets, along with a cryptographically protected key federation service that operates without the need for a central adjudication authority.
The AlephCloud SaaS solution allows large enterprises to expand cloud adoption based on cloud providers including Dropbox, Box, Amazon, SkyDrive.
Start-up's co-founder and CEO is Jieming Zhu most recently a chief technologist at HP. Prior that, he was the VP of engineering at several start-ups including Xsigo systems (acquired by Oracle), and LogLogic (acquired by TIBCO). Prior to LogLogic he served as VP of software and advanced development at Brocade. He holds multiple patents in the areas of storage networking and data center technology.
Co-founder and CTO is Roy D'Souza most recently with Microsoft as partner architect (GM), working in the Office 365 and SQL Azure teams. He was architect at Azure Trust Services. Prior to Microsoft, he was co-founder and CTO of Mimosa Systems acquired by Iron Mountain. As director of systems architecture at Brocade, he was responsible for engineering in SANs and SAN routers. He has held technical leadership positions at Intel, Digital Equipment Corp., and HP.
VP marketing Ron Totah spent over 9 years at Brocade most recently as senior director of marketing. Previously, he was senior director of technical marketing at BluArc (acquied by HDS) and director of technical marketing et Tasma Networks (acquired by Nortel).
Note the big name of Jay Kidd, CTO of NetApp, in the advisory board, and, at the board of directors Seith Niemann, who was at the board of Brocade, and well as famous Brocade's co-founder and CTO Kumar Malavalli to come.
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