We are delighted to announce our investment in Obsidian Security. We have been waiting to invest in precisely what Obsidian has built since the founding of Wing – Identity as the new Security Perimeter – as we are in a world where the traditional network-based security perimeter, aka the Firewall Complex, is becoming ever more irrelevant to the enterprise with the transition from On-Premise to SaaS Applications, Cloud Infrastructure, and Mobile Usage.
Wing’s founding ethos is to address enterprise opportunities created by the tectonic shift to Data Mobile Cloud (DMC). As a result, our direct interest in the underlying idea dates back to 2013. We considered half a dozen Identity projects at the time, but it was early in the enterprise adoption of SaaS, Cloud, and Mobile. This migration has now reached critical mass; inevitably, as we expected, Identity has become the new perimeter.
Obsidian’s core mission is graceful migration during the transition and a solution to the ultimate state - fully distributed and highly dynamic enterprise services, assets and people. Participating in a real assault on this problem has been a long time coming at Wing.
Striking the balance between security and delivering easy to use flexible functionality to users, has always proven difficult for administrators. In addition, the lack of trained security administrators and complicated processes have become the largest bottleneck to effective security. The explosion of cloud services many of which are not managed directly by IT up the ante beyond the ability of humans to handle even with the best workflow and process tools.
Obsidian makes the entitlement process and migration tractable via an Identity Knowledge Graph that uses ML/AI to learn how Identity and Access connect to Cloud, SaaS and On-Prem Assets and Services. Obsidian overlays security on this graph by self-learning what’s normal, flagging the unknown, and identifying attacks. This allows the enterprise to cope with the entitlement and security of its rapidly evolving services, assets and user permissions.
Obsidian is the first company to build this new Enterprise Security Perimeter for the migration to Data Mobile Cloud. This is a huge market.
Last but not least, it’s always about the people. I have worked with many founders, standing side by side with them in growing from concept to public companies. There is always much uncertainty and many tears are shed along the long difficult journey. Our investment in Obsidian might be the first time I have begun my involvement with a company that has a proven, experienced, and easy to work with team, as well as co-investors I have known and worked with for almost two decades. We welcome Obsidian team to the Wing Family, especially the founders; Glenn Chisholm, Ben Johnson, Matt Wolff. Asheem Chandna and Sara Guo, our partners from Greylock, our thanks for your part in adding us to the Obsidian family. We are looking forward to the making the journey with all of you.
