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May 08, 2006
FireEye Targets Network Access Control Market
FireEye Inc. announced
its entry into the Network Access Control (NAC) market with patent-pending virtual machine technology
to provide an accurate and easy-to-deploy internal network
security solution. Founded by the former CTO of Sun Microsystems' N1
products, Ashar Aziz, and headed by security industry veterans from
Cisco, McAfee and Symantec, FireEye has closed a Series A round of
funding of $6.45 million led by Norwest Venture Partners and Sequoia
Capital. The company's first product, expected in the summer of 2006,
leverages virtual machines within a network appliance to examine the
impact of suspicious network traffic in an instrumented virtual
environment.
"FireEye has developed a genuinely transformational technology that
plays into an enormous market opportunity," said Promod Haque, managing
partner at Norwest Venture Partners. "Strong positive reaction from
customers, coupled with increasing business pressure to protect against
zero-day attacks, worms and network-borne malware, were key factors in
driving the current funding round."
According to a recent report by Infonetics Research, a leading
international market research and consulting firm, Network Access
Control (NAC) is the "Holy Grail" of network security. Infonetics
projects the NAC market will grow from $323 million in 2005 to $3.9
billion in 2008, driven primarily by increasing desire to protect
against internal malware infections.
"The ability to monitor for anomalous traffic and the ability to
quickly contain this traffic are important aspects of a post-connect
network access control process," said Lawrence Orans, security analyst
for Gartner. "The challenge is finding the right match for your
environment with a solution that provides high levels of coverage
without excessive quarantines or false positives."
Security products have historically been difficult to deploy,
configure and manage. FireEye technology allows IT administrators to protect internal network access by securing against
infected machines that spread zero-day attacks, worms and
network-borne malware, without the challenges of unnecessary
quarantines, software agents or complex policy administration.
FireEye technology goes beyond traditional indicators of infection,
such as policy violations or behavioral deviations, to precisely
identify attacks and eliminate the need to resolve false positives and
prevent non-infected machines from being unnecessarily quarantined.
With capabilities that are refined from a technological and management
perspective, FireEye will delivers
operational efficiency and management that might just set the
standard for network access control.
"Industry analysts have projected the network access control market
to grow to nearly four billion dollars in just under two years;
however, today's NAC solutions are time-consuming and painful for
organizations to deploy," said Gaurav Garg, a partner at Sequoia
Capital. "With an effective, simple-to-deploy NAC solution, FireEye
will fulfill the critical customer requirement for 'effortless NAC' and
is well-positioned to garner marketshare in this still burgeoning
industry."
Ashar Aziz, founder and CEO of FireEye, has received more than 25
patents over his career as a pioneer in the area of network
security and infrastructure virtualization technology. Prior to
FireEye, Aziz founded Terraspring, a company focused on data center
automation and virtualization. Terraspring was acquired by Sun
Microsystems in 2002. Aziz joined Sun Microsystems upon this
acquisition as CTO of the company's N1 program. Supporting Aziz is a team of seasoned security industry veterans from Cisco,
McAfee and Symantec, providing leadership in the areas of sales,
marketing, engineering and operations.
