NetCitadel

NetCitadel, founded in 2011 by Mike Horn, carved a niche for itself in the cybersecurity landscape by pioneering one of the market's first Security Orchestration and Automated Response (SOAR) platforms. Horn, a serial entrepreneur with over two decades in cybersecurity, identified a critical gap where enterprises, despite having robust threat detection systems, struggled with the manual and slow process of incident response. This firsthand experience with enterprise security teams directly shaped NetCitadel's mission.

The firm operated with a clear focus on automating the threat response process for large organizations. Its core offering, the Threat Response Platform, later known as ThreatOptics, was designed to integrate with a company's existing security infrastructure, including products from vendors like Palo Alto Networks, FireEye, and HP ArcSight. The platform worked by ingesting security alerts from these disparate systems, then correlating and synthesizing the data to confirm and prioritize genuine threats. This allowed for rapid, automated containment actions, such as quarantining affected systems or blocking communication with malicious sites, effectively bridging the costly time gap between threat detection and mitigation. The business model centered on selling this platform to enterprises, enabling them to dramatically reduce incident response times from hours or days to just minutes.

NetCitadel's journey as a venture-backed startup, with investors including NEA, culminated in its acquisition by Proofpoint, Inc. in May 2014 for approximately $24 million. The move was a strategic play by Proofpoint to extend its advanced threat solutions by incorporating NetCitadel's automated incident response capabilities. The entire NetCitadel team, including its security experts and engineers, was integrated into Proofpoint, with Mike Horn taking on a leadership role as vice president of threat and response products. The NetCitadel technology was rebranded as Proofpoint Threat Response and integrated into Proofpoint's flagship Targeted Attack Protection (TAP) suite, where it continues to serve thousands of enterprise customers.

Keywords: NetCitadel, security orchestration, automated response, SOAR, incident response automation, Mike Horn, threat response platform, ThreatOptics, Proofpoint acquisition, cybersecurity automation, threat containment, threat verification, firewall configuration management, security alert correlation, network security, enterprise security, venture-backed