Aorato, based in New York, was founded in 2012 and has raised $10M in funding. It currently has a dozen employees and counting. Aorato came out of stealth mode in January, and offers a new type of advance firewall that protects Active Directory services. According to industry pundits, more than 90% of companies use Active Directory in their environment. The Aorato product is called the “Directory Services Application Firewall (DAF)”.
Microsoft Active Directory Services
The purpose of Microsoft Active Directory is to authenticate and authorizes users, computers, and mobile devices on a Windows based network. Once a user logs into the corporate network, Active Directory ensures the user is legitimate, and allows the user to access information in their particular group.
Active Directory runs on LDAP, an application protocol that manages directory services on an IP network. For large corporate networks, where employees are spread across multiple locations, managing the Active Directory infrastructure is fairly complex, and difficult to manage. Large complex networks, with users spread across global locations is a great target for cyber criminals.
Cool Startup: Aorato
The Aorato DAF is a dynamic application firewall, that’s in continuous learning mode, studying its surroundings, waiting for suspicious behavior, and ready to detect anomalies, and mitigate breaches in the Active Directory infrastructure. The DAF is unique and different from the application firewalls in the market today. The new wave of advanced cyber security products are designed to counter the advanced cyber criminal, whose sole purpose in life is to penetrate corporate networks, and cause damage in one form or another.
Conclusion
Aorato is part of the new wave of advanced cyber security solutions, along with Cybereason, that act in real time, detecting and responding to threats, malware, and suspicious user behavior. Aorato is going places fast. My prediction is they get acquired by CA, IBM or even Microsoft.