SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Cloudentity, a leading provider of modern application authorization and consent solutions, today announced the appointment of Jason Needham as chief executive officer and member of its board of directors. Needham brings over 25 years of leadership experience across application networking, IT automation, cloud security and SaaS solutions to his role at Cloudentity, where he will lead the company during its accelerated growth period.
Most recently, Needham served as senior director of multi-cloud security at VMware, where he oversaw engineering, product and marketing of emerging cross-cloud security and management services after the company acquired CloudCoreo, a startup he co-founded two years prior. He also founded Union Bay Networks, a software-defined networking startup acquired by Apple in 2014. Additionally, Needham served as vice president of product management and marketing at F5, where he helped define the application delivery controller (ADC) market and grow revenue from $100M to $1.3B.
"As organizations advance their digital transformation journeys, application modernization and service integration require greater application programming interface (API) visibility and control in order to mitigate access, privacy and compliance requirements,” said Jason Needham, CEO of Cloudentity. “Companies are sharing more and more data across an increasingly larger array of internal, external and partner applications. It’s difficult to manage and getting worse. Cloudentity allows our customers to increase the velocity of application development, lower their cost and better control application authorization and data privacy. We have a significant market opportunity in front of us, and I look forward to joining the team and helping our company scale and serve our customers.”
With the move to cloud and microservices-based architectures, APIs serve as the foundation for digital business as data is shared with customers, partners and even other internal application components. Gartner predicts that by 2022, API attacks will become the most frequent attack vector, causing data breaches for enterprise web applications.*
While organizations have adopted federated identity authentication mechanisms to protect session access, essential identity and authorization management across APIs and services remains fragmented, inconsistent and error-prone, burdening developers with maintaining hard-coded rules for each application. Cloudentity enables enterprises to speed up digital transformation and manage these security challenges by decoupling identity and authorization from applications and APIs, and enabling simple and powerful authorization fabric. Organizations can discover and onboard APIs and services; centrally manage granular access, privacy, and data exchange policies; and achieve continuous enforcement anywhere the applications live. With complete data lineage and auditability, Cloudentity provides a standards-based and infrastructure-agnostic approach, enabling organizations to seamlessly integrate with existing identity providers and policy enforcement points.
“We are excited to have Jason take the helm of Cloudentity. Jason’s extensive cloud services, application and security background, combined with his strong leadership experience, will strengthen the company’s go-to-market proficiency as the company enters into its expansive growth phase,” said Sean Cunningham, managing director at ForgePoint Capital, a Cloudentity investor.
For more information on Cloudentity or to join its growing team, please visit www.cloudentity.com.
About Cloudentity
Cloudentity provides the most flexible and scalable solution for modern-application authorization and consent solutions to secure digital business across hybrid, multi-cloud and microservices infrastructure. Delivered as an external declarative authorization service, the platform empowers developers to centrally manage fine-grained policy as code, orchestrate provisioning, assure privacy consent, and achieve continuous transaction-level enforcement at hyperscale. As a result, enterprises increase development velocity and service agility while mitigating privacy, API security and compliance risks. For more information, go to www.cloudentity.com.
* Source: Gartner Webinar, July 2021, Mark O’Neill and Dionisio Zumerle, API Security: Protect your APIs from Attacks and Data Breaches re: “API Security: What You Need to Do to Protect Your APIs” (G00404900)
