If software is indeed "eating the world," as famed venture capitalist and prognosticator on pretty much everything Marc Andreessen once opined, then it goes without saying that the pipes that have the unenviable task of carrying that software become ever more critical. The more important the internet, the more the underlying network of undifferentiated "dumb pipes" becomes important.
This has led to the rise of myriad vendors that all help to ensure those "dumb pipes" keep working. A case in point is Veriflow, a company that is bringing a new approach to network breach and outage detection via mathematical network verification.
Traditional approaches not good enough
Traditional approaches for identifying these problems rested largely with manual procedures. As the use of microservices-based applications rises, as well as the increasing complexity of infrastructure and application architectures, this approach is not sufficient.
In contrast, Veriflow utilizes formal verification techniques, using algorithms to prove or disprove the correctness of a system with respect to certain functional specifications. The platform pinpoints vulnerabilities in network-wide security and resilience policies, such as network segmentation, service availability and network compliance standards such as PCI and HIPAA. In doing so, it helps to avoid the surprises caused by change-induced incidents.
Veriflow exited stealth mode in April 2016 with $2.9 million in initial investor funding from New Enterprise Associates (NEA), the National Science Foundation and the Department of Defense. Today, the company received an additional $8.2 million by way of a Series A led by Menlo Ventures.
Veriflow wants to give technologists a toolkit to proactively identify vulnerabilities. Such a toolkit is becoming increasingly important as more organizations adopt iterative software development processes that call for more frequent software changes.
As Veriflow President and CEO James Brear said:
“The feedback from customers and analysts indicates the market is ready for a new approach to network breach and outage prevention. Our use of mathematical network verification, grounded in data plane information, gives customers a proactive approach to identifying vulnerabilities before they are exposed to catastrophic problems.
“Veriflow provides a comprehensive view of the network that gives administrators the confidence to make changes without fear of damaging critical services and layers of defense. We’ve spent several years developing our innovative technology, and this funding will enable us to hire key talent, bring our product to market more quickly and expand into new markets.”