Wipro partners and invests in cloud security firm CloudKnox

Information technology (IT) services firm Wipro has invested and partnered with Sunnyvale, California based cloud security firm CloudKnox Security to provide multi-cloud and hybrid cloud infrastructure solutions for enterprises. 

Wipro Ventures, the corporate investment arm of the IT services major, invested in CloudKnox through its recently announced $150 million Fund II. The company, however, did not disclose the value or nature of the bet.

Founded by Balaji Parimi in 2016, CloudKnox is an activity-based access permission software for employees to prevent cybersecurity-related incidents. 

According to Wipro, the investment will expand its cloud security portfolio to meet growing demand from enterprises to protect their cloud infrastructure from identities with excessive high-risk permissions. 

The joint solution will proactively protect and manage cloud assets by continuously detecting and remediating over-permissioned identities, according to a statement.

The fragmentation of cloud has led to an increase in the attack surface area, and as a result, exposes them to new cybersecurity vulnerabilities, Wipro said. With the proliferation of hybrid and multi-cloud workloads and identities by humans, service accounts, bots or resources, the problem of managing authorisations and entitlements related to permissions for identities is becoming more complex and critical, it added.

The country's fourth-largest software exporter said that it will offer CloudKnox-powered access governance for hybrid cloud “as-a-service” offering. The company will leverage its own nextgen cyber defence centres to deliver the service.

“While adoption of private and public cloud is increasing, existing security solutions are inadequate to manage identities and resources across such a hybrid environment. The partnership will give us a first-mover advantage in offering identity governance and secure cloud workloads for customers who are migrating and managing hybrid cloud infrastructure,” Sheetal Mehta, CISO and senior vice president for cybersecurity and risk services at Wipro said.    

The joint solution will automatically right size excessive identity permissions, detect anomalies, create identity activity analytics apart from helping customers with compliance reporting, the statement said.     

“The current market environment is fueling large-scale adoption of multi-cloud and hybrid cloud infrastructures, creating even greater global demand for the CloudKnox platform. Our platform complements Wipro’s offering by delivering a continuous and adaptive framework for managing cloud permissions that ensures that identities and resources only have the permissions they need to perform their daily tasks,” Raj Mallempati, COO, CloudKnox, said.

This week, Wipro has stitched multiple partnerships including VMWare, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and IBM.

Last week, Wipro said in a disclosure to market regulators that its former CEO Abidali Neemuchwala’s salary rose 12% to nearly Rs 31 crore for the financial year 2019-2020, even as founder Azim Premji and chairman Rishad Premji gave up profit-linked commissions for the year.