Forbes Recognizes Illumio as Top Cloud Company

This week, Forbes announced their Cloud 100 list in partnership with Bessemer Venture Partners and Salesforce Ventures. This list honors the best private cloud companies in the world that stand out for their growth, sales, valuation, culture and reputation. Needless to say, we are thrilled to be on this elite list for the fourth time (2016, 2018, 2019 and 2020).

Companies are selected for the Forbes Cloud 100 list based on growth and strength, and from a reputation score that's determined by 40 CEO judges from leading public cloud companies.

So, how did Illumio make the list for the fourth time in five years? In short, 2020 has been a big year for us.

Illumio goes to the endpoint (with cloud!)

In June we launched Illumio Edge, stopping the spread of ransomware and finally bringing Zero Trust to the endpoint. This solution is delivered and managed entirely through the cloud - another first for Illumio. We also announced and major strategic partnership with CrowdStrike, so that customers can deploy Illumio Edge either via our own lightweight agent, or via CrowdStrike's Falcon agent.

2020 has been a challenging year for everyone, and security teams in particular have been stretched thin to defend against an increased threat landscape. With organizations moving to a work-from-home model nearly overnight, cyber resiliency has become synonymous with business resiliency. By delivering Illumio Edge six months ahead of schedule, the Illumio team worked to do our part to protect our customers and further our mission of organizations realizing a future without high profile breaches.

Leadership in segmentation

In our continued journey to lead the segmentation market and Zero Trust movement, we also released first-of-its-kind functionality for Illumio ASP, App Owner View (AOV). AOV makes it easier to scale segmentation projects. It gives application owners the ability to write their own security policies and puts the power into the teams that know best‚  the app owners. Illumio is the first to bring this feature to market, enabling our customers to fast track their path to Zero Trust.

We continue to partner with industry leaders

Illumio partnered with Palo Alto Networks to integrate our segmentation platform with their Next-Generation Firewalls and Panorama to automate dynamic security changes for workloads inside of Palo Alto Networks Dynamic Address Groups. Now, our joint customers can streamline their policy management and reduce manual tasks so they can continually update their security policies with real-time context for their dynamic workloads.

Within the last year, we also joined the IBM Security App Exchange with our App for QRadar, which gives customers greater real-time visibility into the communications happening in their data centers and clouds. This also helps enhance security operations and improve our customers' security posture.

Illumio also made updates to our application on the ServiceNow store this year. Being certified for the ServiceNow store means that our product successfully completed specific tests focused on Now Platform security, compatibility, performance, and integration interoperability. This partnership enables more efficient workload labeling and saves customers time and headaches. Beyond this, we have strengthened our partnerships with companies like Oracle Exadata, Splunk, Citrix, F5, and more. That's because we believe intentional partnerships with seamless integrations make customers more secure and successful, and that's the end goal.

Continued growth and market validation

Over the last year we expanded the business globally. In APAC alone, we grew our employee headcount by 325 percent and our customer base in the region by 300+ percent. Worldwide, we saw a 151 percent increase in total customers.

Part of growing the business is investing in research that helps the industry at large. That's why we worked with Bishop Fox and their red team to quantify the efficacy of micro-segmentation. The key takeaway? Micro-segmentation is effective. Implementing application ringfencing on 100 workloads made it 4.5X more difficult for an attacker to reach their intended target. Expand that to 1000 workloads and it becomes 22X more difficult for the attacker to reach their goal.

Additionally, Illumio was recognized as a leader in The Forrester Wave^TM: Zero Trust eXtended (ZTX) Ecosystem Platform Providers Q4 2019 report. We received the highest possible marks in seven of the evaluation criteria: workload security, visibility and analytics, automation and orchestration, manageability and usability, APIs, vision and strategy, and advocacy. We made serious strides toward our mission this year - to realize a future without high-profile breaches.

But our customers say it better than anyone. One of our customers on Gartner Peer Insights said, "Excellent company, the support and knowledge of their solution and how it fits into the enterprise is excellent. The team we work with go above and beyond to find the solution that is right for us."

As always, it all comes down to the team. Illumineers run to challenges and bring their best every day in order to better serve our customers and help them to protect their critical assets. We are honored to have that drive and hard work recognized by Forbes, and as we often say at Illumio, Onwards!