UpGuard Inc. is an Australiancybersecuritystartup company founded by Alan Sharp-Paul, Leo Venegas, and Mike Baukes; and presently based in Mountain View, California. UpGuard provides products and services to help companies stand up securely configured systems and guard against outages and breaches. In 2016, the company raised $17m in a series B funding round. As of 2018, the company employs around 46. Upguard's Cyber Resilience platform determines a company's cyber-security risk factors by scanning both internal and external computer systems. The platform automatically scans every server, application, network and mobile devices in IT environments to create a living model of their configuration state, thereafter continually assessing this system of record for security vulnerabilities, configuration drift and procedural changes. From this model, the platform dynamically derives a unified cyber-security risk score, CSTAR, that determines the cyber risk posture of IT assets against multivariate factors.
History
UpGuard, formerly ScriptRock, is an Australian IT security company with offices in Mountain View, California and Sydney, Australia. While working at investment firm Colonial First State, company founders Leo Venegas, Alan Sharp-Paul, and Mike Baukes met on-the-job in Sydney, Australia. Sharp-Paul was a web developer and Baukes was a systems administrator. After spending years in financial services in Australia and the UK, the trio developed a system for corporations to understand business software portfolios and the consequent risk of breaches and outages due to poor configuration management. The first release of the system was initially named guardrail and allowed for the automation of typical cybersecurity DevOps practices, focusing on deep analysis into all relevant servers and software applications settings. In 2016, the company raised $17m in a series B funding round co-led by Pellion that included August Capital, Square Peg Capital and Insurance Australia Group. In early 2017, UpGuard then, signed an exclusive distribution partnership with ACA Pacific in order to establish a stronger presence in the APAC region and Baukes and Sharp-Paul opened an UpGuard office in Sydney, Australia, bringing the company back to the region "where it all began." In June 2017, UpGuard announced that it had found an unsecured server containing data from Deep Root Analytics, which contained information on almost 200 million American voters.
Products
UpGuard helps companies stand up securely configured systems and guard against outages and breaches. The product uses a resilience supervisor that integrates checks into every step of the technology lifecycle whilst continuously assessing for risk factors such as misconfiguration, configuration drift, and process vulnerabilities. The approach is unique as the platforms architecture allows the dynamic capture of large configuration datasets continuously in order to difference, visualize and report on potential breaches and outages proactively. At the products core configuration information can be transformed into security policies, procedural validations or automations to ensure the desired integrity of IT environments is maintained and auditable. This is further enhanced by identifying authorized change vs unauthorised change and dynamically reconciling entire environments against ticketing systems for ITSM processes or SDLC processes, UpGuard summarizes key insights across this data dynamically and includes a proprietary risk modeling method called CSTAR that aggregates all relevant risk factors into a score between 0-950, similar to a credit score, allowing companies to effectively predict and prioritize high-risk impact areas, track risk hotspots over time, and compare scores to similar companies in like industries for comparison. UpGuard ships three products that interoperate to form a deployable cyber resilience strategy, Discover, Control, and Predict. Each aims to address a different source of risk related to information technology.
