CloudCoreo

CloudCoreo operated as a cloud security and compliance automation platform, founded in 2014 by Paul Allen and CY Megnin. The leadership team included CEO Tom Hull and co-founder and CMO Jason Needham. Needham brought extensive experience from his time at F5 Networks and from co-founding Union Bay Networks, which was acquired by Apple. Paul Allen served as the CTO, leading the technical vision for automating cloud security. The company was established to address the growing security challenges companies face when migrating workloads to public clouds like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

The firm's core business centered on providing a platform that identified and remediated security risks in public cloud environments in real-time. It targeted both SecOps and DevOps teams, aiming to embed security directly into the development and deployment pipeline, a practice that would become known as DevSecOps. The platform worked by continuously scanning cloud infrastructure for misconfigurations, policy violations, and vulnerabilities, preventing potential data breaches before they could occur. For example, it could detect issues like an improperly secured Amazon S3 bucket, a common source of data leaks. This allowed clients, from small businesses to large enterprises, to maintain speed and agility in their cloud operations without compromising on security.

In October 2016, CloudCoreo secured $2.9 million in a seed funding round led by Madrona Venture Group. A significant milestone occurred on February 14, 2018, when VMware acquired the Seattle-based startup for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition was a strategic move for VMware to bolster its multi-cloud security offerings. The entire CloudCoreo team, which consisted of fewer than ten employees, was integrated into VMware's Cloud Services unit, and its technology was incorporated into VMware's product portfolio to help customers manage and secure their hybrid cloud environments.

Keywords: cloud security, compliance automation, DevSecOps, cloud configuration management, vulnerability assessment, multi-cloud security, real-time remediation, infrastructure as code security, cloud policy enforcement, data leak prevention, AWS security, Azure security, Google Cloud security, security posture management, VMware, Madrona Venture Group, Paul Allen, Jason Needham, Tom Hull