TEL AVIV, ISRAEL, GuardiCore, a startup developing innovative security solutions for modern data centers, today announced that it has closed an $11 million round of funding led by Battery Ventures, with participation from Greylock IL and undisclosed strategic investors. As part of the investment, Battery general partner Scott Tobin will join GuardiCore's board. The company will use the venture funding to expand, productize and sell its technology, which tracks and eliminates intruders inside data center networks.

'GuardiCore is developing a completely new breed of network security,' said Pavel Gurvich, the company's chief executive. 'Powered by software-defined networking (SDN) methodologies and recent advances in virtualization, our solution is scalable to multi-terabit traffic rates. GuardiCore's mission is simple: to provide security and IT executives with advanced tools to win the war against cyber-attacks.'

Data centers are home to critical corporate data and business processes, making them a lucrative target for cyber-attacks. Traditional perimeter security is not designed to deal with today's threats where attacker sophistication and the risk of insider attacks are growing and modern data center architectures increasingly include applications that cross security perimeters. At the same time, recent architectural changes in data centers have led to an explosion of intra-data center ('east-west') traffic at terabit levels. State-of-the art security techniques such as IDS, IPS, sandboxing, deep packet inspection, and threat emulation cannot scale to these data traffic rates, and are therefore largely considered to be impossible to apply inside data centers. Once inside a data center, intruders are very difficult to detect and mitigate.

The GuardiCore platform helps solve this intra-data center security problem by making state-of-the-art security techniques scalable to keep pace with east-west data traffic. The company's first platform component, called 'Active Honeypot,' responds to attacks by dynamically re-routing traffic, without the attacker knowing, to a highly monitored stealth 'ambush' server. This approach exposes the true intentions of an attacker, provides quick insights about the nature of the attack and eliminates it in real-time.

'As the data center evolves to a more software-defined model, enterprises need to think about security in radically different ways,' noted Scott Tobin, general partner, Battery Ventures. 'Traditional security techniques have focused on keeping the bad guys out of the perimeter. But as we've seen in recent, high-profile security breaches, these methods are far from complete. GuardiCore's approach assumes you have already been compromised and provides levels of visibility and protection that were previously unattainable.'

GaurdiCore's Active Honeypot is entering evaluation at private clouds and data centers of leading enterprise customers and data center service providers.

About GuardiCore

GuardiCore provides security in depth for software-defined datacenters, detecting and mitigating Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs), malware propagation and insider attacks. Based on Software-Defined Networking (SDN) techniques, GuardiCore's unique approach to network security scales to multi-Terabit, intra-datacenter (East-West) traffic rates, breaking the attacker's 'kill chain' at an early stage. Visit www.guardicore.com for more information.