Okera Sees Record Growth Driven by Need for Universal Data Authorization

SAN FRANCISCO, March 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Okera, the universal data authorization company, announced a year of record growth driven by an increasing need for organizations to minimize data security risks and demonstrate regulatory compliance while accelerating business agility. Demand for Okera's technology has surged over the last year, resulting in a growth of 374% net new business bookings and 105% growth in net new ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue).

The global COVID-19 pandemic and the need to work from home greatly expanded the potential attack surface for cybercriminals. Continued evolution and increased enforcement of privacy regulations, including GDPR, CCPA, and other international and U.S. state laws, kept data protection top-of-mind in boardrooms around the world. And the increasing cadence of data breaches and cybercrime, topped off last year by the massive SolarWinds hack, demonstrated the desperate need for new approaches to data protection and security.

The Okera Dynamic Access Platform (ODAP) automatically authorizes and audits all data requests, dynamically enforcing data security, privacy and compliance policies across all data platforms including hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Universal data authorization provides a critically important and highly performant way for organizations to protect their data, their customers, and their partners.

Okera's success comes from empowering companies to achieve their data protection goals, resulting in customers significantly expanding their deployments with the Okera platform. In fact, customer satisfaction is so high that no customer has ever stopped using the Okera platform, resulting in zero churn and a market-leading 150% Net Dollar Retention (growth in sales from existing accounts). Meanwhile, the company has expanded its customer base of the most sophisticated Fortune 500 enterprises over the last year by 80%. Among Okera's customers are three of the largest financial services companies and one of the top two global retail brands within the Fortune 100. Customers also include three of the largest healthcare and life science companies as well as other Fortune 500 companies within the technology sector.

Over the past year, Okera made substantial enhancements to ODAP, including the introduction of nScale™, the industry's first co-located deployment mode, allowing fine-grained data access on open distributed compute environments with enhanced security. This opens up tremendous opportunities for organizations to run secure, advanced analytics and data engineering jobs on cost-effective cloud data processing platforms such as Amazon EMR. "With Okera, we save millions of dollars per year in AWS service fees and data engineering costs and billions on GDPR and other regulatory exposure," said a Fortune 50 top retail customer. "Most importantly, we now have the agility to pursue new business opportunities that we could not have achieved otherwise."

Okera integrates seamlessly into existing data governance ecosystems, making it easy for organizations to ensure compliance with evolving data security requirements and data privacy regulations, regardless of their data deployment strategy. This focus on seamless interoperability is reflected in Okera's expanded partnership program, featuring new alliances and integrations with key players in the authorization lifecycle, including BigID, Collibra, Domino Data Labs, Dremio, Starburst, and vArmour. The company also recently achieved Microsoft Gold Partner status and the platform is available and transactable on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace in addition to the AWS Marketplace. The partnership program was spearheaded by Okera's recently appointed VP of Global Alliances and Partner Sales Channel, John Marchese. The company further bolstered its executive team with the appointments of Desiree Therianos as VP of People, Claire Umeda as VP of Marketing, and Alex Rombaut as Head of Finance.

"The major strides we've achieved over the last year reflect Okera's ability to deliver secure data authorization and governance at scale to the world's largest and most demanding enterprise organizations," said Nick Halsey, Okera CEO. "Through significant platform enhancements, new partnerships, and building out a world-class leadership team, our go-to-market strategy is shifting into high gear to deliver even greater benefits to our customers. We're excited to accelerate Okera's growth and success throughout 2021."

Highlights of the past year include:

Key ODAP innovations

• Universal Policy Builder - Enable customers to define a policy once and have it automatically and consistently applied for all managed datasets across all analytics tools in hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
• Dynamic Policy Enforcement - Dynamically enforce complex data security policies for each data request with real-time access controls. Clients can request data access authorization from the Okera Policy Engine using native client library integrations, through an Authorization Gateway or a REST API.
• Centralized Audit & Reporting - Built-in reports and easy integrations with SIEM tools allow CISOs and compliance officers to know who has access to sensitive and personal certain datasets and how and when they're using it.
• Automated Metadata Management - API-first integrations with best-of-breed data discovery and governance solutions ensure attribute-based policies are always up to date.
• nScale™ - An optimized, unique policy enforcement architecture that scales on existing big data compute clusters, eliminating the cost and complexity of managing a separate access management infrastructure.

Analyst reports and recognition

• Named a Cool Vendor in DataOps by Gartner
• Named to Forrester's Now Tech: Data Security Platforms, Q1 2021
• Named to Constellation ShortList™ Hybrid-Cloud and Multi-Cloud Data Lake Management 
• 451 Research report
• TAG Cyber research report

Mounting industry awards

• Named to Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies List, ranking #8 in the Security category
• Honored with two Datanami awards: Editors' Choice Award for Best Big Data Security Product or Technology and Readers' Choice Award as one of the Top 5 Vendors to Watch
• Included in the Database Trends and Applications Startups to Watch in 2020 list
• Included in the CRN 10 Hottest Big Data Startups of 2020 list
• Honored with the Innovation Spotlight award at the 2020 Evanta CISO Summit

Learn more
On Thursday, March 11, 2021, at 10:00 am PT, Okera will host a fireside chat with Paige Bartley, Senior Analyst at 451 Research, on the topic, "Research-Based Best Practices for Digital Transformation." Register for the webinar here.

About Okera
Okera, the universal data authorization company, empowers enterprises to accelerate business agility, minimize data security risks and demonstrate regulatory compliance. The Okera Dynamic Access Platform automatically authorizes and audits all data requests, dynamically enforcing data security and compliance policies across all data platforms in hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Okera can be deployed into production in days, adapts to any common data authorization framework, and seamlessly integrates into existing data governance ecosystems.

The company is headquartered in San Francisco and backed by Bessemer Venture Partners, ClearSky Security, and Felicis Ventures.

For more information, visit www.okera.com, contact [email protected], or connect with the team on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter.

SOURCE Okera

Related Links

https://www.okera.com/