Modern businesses are built entirely around providing valuable services such as insights and analytics on the ever-exploding data that all users and their respective devices generate. This data no longer resides in one location within the walls of an enterprise. On the contrary, businesses are choosing to adopt an “all in the cloud” or a “hybrid cloud” approach for storing and analyzing data. In such scenarios, how do companies protect and use the data with the implied assurance that their data is secure in the entire workflow? More importantly, how does a business manage the process of data migration from the enterprise to all aspects of the cloud from a security standpoint?

Enter Baffle. It is the only data-centric security solution that universally protects data as it’s created, stored, and processed, from any source to any destination, on premise or in the cloud or in any combination thereof.

The encryption methods embedded in certain cloud databases require significant developer effort to implement and maintain, are error-prone, and provide no means for protecting data at the field level. Furthermore, these methods expose the data when it first lands in the cloud, creating a significant vulnerability and compliance risk during the process of migration to the cloud. Baffle’s data protection service creates an abstraction layer that sits between data and analytics/applications without impacting performance while delivering on security requirements.

The market for Baffle’s product is bolstered by two tailwinds: an increase in cloud migration and evolving data security regulation. An April 2020 Deloitte survey of 50 CIOs found that they expect to see total workloads on-premises drop from 59% in 2019 to 35% in 2021 while they expect public cloud’s proportion of total workload to grow from 23% to 38% in the same timeframe, with private and hybrid cloud reaching 20% and 7% of workloads respectively. Further, Gartner estimates that by 2023, 40% of organizations will have a multi-silo, hybrid and multi-cloud data encryption strategy, up from less than 5% today.

The last five years have also seen a proliferation of new data security regulations including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) along with increasing public scrutiny resulting from a string of high-profile data breaches. As a result, the cloud security market is estimated by Gartner to grow 41% in 2021 to $841M and the data security market will grow 18% to $3.51Bn.

At Celesta Capital, one of our core investing pillars is companies that provide the building blocks for the development of a robust cloud infrastructure that is capable of handling extensive application workloads. Such building blocks include compute, memory, storage, interconnects and application capabilities. The most critical of such capabilities is the security implementations that enterprises have come to demand. Quite simply, cloud providers must deliver a degree of data integrity and security that should be akin to what enterprise IT expects if such data were to reside within its premises. This is true for the “data in transit” in addition to “data in storage.”

Baffle has had tremendous success in the last 12 months by tripling its revenues and surpassing 100 billion records protected across multiple industries, such as financial services, healthcare, retail, industrial IoT and government, including the five top global financial services companies and five top 25 global companies. We believe Baffle’s opportunity is large, and its differentiation is unique. The team has unparalleled skills to address this with solutions that are ripe for the market. The company is clearly on its way to even more success, and we are delighted to partner with them on the next stage of their journey.

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