The past few years have been an incredibly exciting time to be an enterprise investor. We have seen the rise of the cloud, the shift away from PCs to new mobile computing platforms, and the emergence of Big Data and Analytics as a core enabler of business agility. With these trends as a backdrop, we are in the early innings of a massive redirection of enterprise IT budgets towards new technologies and architectures.
At Lightspeed we have been investing thematically in each of these trends, having led early investments in cloud companies like AppDynamics and Mulesoft, in Big Data Companies like DataStax and MapR Technologies, and in enterprise mobile companies like Rapsphere and Push Computing. What excites us the most about these trends is that together they are driving massive change in the way that enterprises have to think about their IT infrastructure.
One particularly interesting (to us!) side effect of enterprise cloud and mobile adoption has been the creation of a new set of security challenges. As application consumption has moved from behind the protected firewall to outside a company’s trusted perimeter (due to employees adopting SaaS and mobile applications), enterprises have lost visibility and control over their users’ actions. This creates not only a security headache, but also a compliance and auditability nightmare.
A quick background: In the legacy (pre-cloud) world, enterprise applications resided in a company datacenter and were accessed from PCs that were primarily on-premise. In this environment, IT managers could manage, monitor, and secure enterpr