5 Highlights From an Exceptional Year at Lacework

As the year comes to a close, it’s fitting to take time to reflect on the past twelve months and take stock of what we have accomplished at Lacework.

It was undoubtedly an eventful year in the history of our company, which was validated by a major funding round, the doubling in size of our organization, innovative product developments, and vigorous customer growth. We look a lot different now than we did at the end of 2017.

Our growth has been paralleled with a massive uptick in market demand. The people responsible for security of their organizations are learning from headlining stories about breaches and recognizing the need to adopt smart strategies for the security of their workloads in the cloud. That’s been good for business, and I don’t say that selfishly. When organizations make security a priority, their stakeholders also become more secure, and as a result, there is a strengthened, collective effort to safeguard privacy.

While other vendors stick with outdated strategies or fumble for a new direction, Lacework will be charging forward in 2019 with product developments that will solidify our place as the most innovative provider of end-to-end security across cloud environments. I’m looking forward to an exciting new year.

I’m also grateful for what we’ve been able to accomplish in 2018 and am excited to share the major highlights:

Global and regional expansion: One year ago, our office in Mountain View seemed cavernous. While teeming with energy, it housed fewer than 20 people. Now, the office is bursting at the seams, it’s loud, and the excitement is palpable. In fact, our requisite, Silicon Valley startup office pool table is about to be converted into a conference table.

We also went both bi-coastal and global this year, with the launch of a Canadian subsidiary and the opening of an office in New York City that houses the bulk of our East Coast operations. More offices will be opened in 2019 and we continue to develop relationships among customers in new markets and add to our growing team.

Major customer growth and engagement with users: We had huge success in adding new customers in 2018; that certainly contributed to great bottom-line results. But more importantly, by adding new customers, we increased engagement with practitioners and greatly expanded our customer community. That gives us more insights and new perspectives that lead directly to improvements in product development. Through great relationships with the customer security teams that rely on Lacework to secure their cloud environments, we continue to improve our understanding of how to effectively address account, workload, container and overall cloud security. Beyond that, we also consider it a great privilege to work with our customers; their energy and insights remind us of why we do what we do.

Kubernetes support: In a move that broadens Lacework’s analytical coverage and threat detection across cloud environments, we announced support for Kubernetes container orchestration. With the rapid adoption of Kubernetes for application and infrastructure orchestration, there’s a corresponding increase in the risk associated with data exposure and vulnerabilities throughout the application lifecycle. This helps Lacework customers solidify their security posture. With this update to the product, Lacework customers will now have comprehensive threat detection for Kubernetes dashboards, pods, management nodes, and clusters, in addition to end-to-end security for their public cloud infrastructure workloads, accounts, and containers.

Launch of global channel partner program: To broaden our reach in the market and help customers who rely on integrators, we launched a global channel partner program that enables solution provider partners, including Value Added Resellers (VARs), integrators and Managed Service Providers (MSPs), to bring Lacework’s innovative cloud security solution to their customers that are operating their IT environments in the public cloud. We’ve already initiated the program with some of the biggest and most impactful partners in security, including Optiv, SHI and Tevora. The program is growing with the addition of many new partners who add valuable services.

Built the best team in the industry: We added some great people to our leadership team this year, including Dan Hubbard as our chief product officer, and former Google executive Johnny Chen to lead engineering efforts. The presence of sales, marketing, product, technology innovation, and administrative leadership is among the best I’ve ever seen, I’m also humbled by the growth and exceptional work being done by everyone on these teams. From my palatial 3’ x 2’ desk in our office, every day I see engineers, sales reps, admin staff, and everyone else create, collaborate, and shoot for excellence. Any time I’m asked how things are going at Lacework, I wish I could have them spend an hour walking around our office and meet with this team; they would see why we lead our field and are set up for continued success.

On a personal note, and on behalf of the whole team, I want to thank our customers, partners, and other stakeholders who make our work meaningful. These relationships are our reason for putting in the work we do, and we’re thankful we get to do see all these people be successful in our journey with us.

The year ahead has already begun. We’re already in planning mode; actually, we’re already in execution mode! Cloud security is serious work, and we’re putting a full court effort into continuing our product and organizational leadership in this market. We’re also going to have some fun doing it.

I hope you and those important to you have a safe, joyous, and happy holiday season.