These are exciting times for Banyan! We have just partnered with Nitin Chopra from Shasta Ventures as the lead investor for our Series A funding round, along with continued participation from John Vrionis at Unusual Ventures. I feel incredibly fortunate to have these accomplished and thoughtful investors as partners in our mission to modernize secure remote access.
Secure remote access is fundamentally broken for today’s perimeter-free world with a mobile workforce and hybrid/multi-cloud environments. Decades old solutions like VPNs have fundamentally failed to address the key tectonic shifts in modern IT infrastructure. Today nearly 40% of the workforce is mobile and comprised not only of employees but also third parties such as contractors, partners, and vendors. They access applications and data using both company-managed and BYOD devices. Furthermore, more than 75% of enterprises deploy applications across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. As these major shifts have stretched VPNs beyond their limits, the result has been data breaches we hear about every day as well as a poor IT admin and end user experience.
When my two co-founders, Tarun and Yoshio, and I started our Banyan Security journey we decided to look at the Secure Access market through a fresh lens. Our early customer engagements convinced us that enterprises need a new approach to this problem that’s not constrained by specific boundaries for user or application location. Despite IT teams’ best efforts, they are unable to balance the challenges of security and user mobility, causing end users to become increasingly frustrated with their remote access experience.
At Banyan, we’ve completely reimagined remote access by building a comprehensive zero trust platform from the ground up to address these big challenges. It was obvious that relying on privileged networks is the wrong approach for this new perimeter-free world. We also realized that to fully realize the Zero Trust mantra of “never trust, always verify, and enforce least privilege access”, we need to focus on three core elements to build out our platform:
- Quantified Trust: Trust cannot be binary; it has to be quantified for that particular moment in time based on factors such as user identity, device posture, location of access, etc.
- Continuous Authorization: Granting access to sensitive corporate resources cannot be an “approve once and forget it” approach. Once access is granted, it needs to be continuously monitored to ensure the activities are within normal behavior patterns and no malicious activity is underway.
- Decentralized Enforcement: Access control needs to be highly granular and close to the application to enable end-to-end security, high performance, and scalability. This also enables enterprises to own their data plane, without needing to worry about privacy or compliance issues.
These three elements are critical to enabling a comprehensive Zero Trust Remote Access solution and are foundational to the way we have developed our platform. As we worked with more and more customers it was apparent that enterprises want to take advantage of their existing investments in security tools and pull them into the zero trust solution framework. We have taken this approach and have integrated with SSO, MDM, EDR, SIEM and other toolsets to provide a real-time responsive Secure Remote Access solution that delivers on the promise of zero trust.
Over the last five months since our product went GA, Banyan’s solution has started rolling out at Fortune 500 and commercial enterprises across verticals. We have been encouraged by the enthusiastic reception and the ability of our solution to meet the critical needs of these enterprises.
Building on the progress we’ve made so far, I’m super excited about the future of Banyan. Nitin Chopra from Shasta brings deep expertise in security and product focus, whereas John Vrionis from Unusual brings experience from his winning track record in building great enterprise companies. Both are big believers in our vision and will be invaluable resources as we execute towards our vision. We’ll use this investment to scale our go-to-market and further enhance our unique product offering in order to help our customers in securing remote access to their corporate assets through their cloud migration, multi-cloud, and third-party access initiatives.
I encourage you to keep up with our latest product and company updates and if you have challenges with your remote access or want to pursue bringing zero trust to your environment, please reach out to us and see how we can help with your efforts.
