Cloud security platform Upwind expands into APJ, opens Sydney office

Cloud security platform Upwind has expanded into the Asia-Pacific and Japan region via the opening of a new headquarters in Sydney.

Upwind is an AI-powered Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP), with a focus on runtime security, defined by the company as defending against and responding to active threats during production. Runtime security can include any practice that focuses on protecting applications, systems, and workloads while they are actively running in production.

The expansion into APJ is being led by the local duo of Anthony Leverington, Upwind’s head of sales for ANZ and ASEAN, and Gavin Selkirk, Upwind’s VP and GM for Asia Pacific and Japan. The pair both joined the company from cloud security company Sysdig in the last six months.

Upwind recently raised US$250 million ($A350 million) in a Series B funding round, bringing the total investment in Upwind to over US$430 million. The company has grown global revenue 900 per cent year-over-year and is now targeting US$30 million (A$41.8 million) in APJ revenue over three years, aiming for 25-plus net new regional customers in the first 12 months.

A hiring plan also includes Sydney-based sales, solutions architecture, marketing and customer success teams in the coming months. As part of this, Marc Brown has been appointed director of solutions architecture for APJ, based in Sydney, to lead customer and partner engagement across the region.

Yarin Pinyan, Upwind's co-founder and VP of product, said the timing of the Australian launch was deliberate.

"Australian boards are asking harder questions about what is actually happening inside their cloud environments, not just what is supposed to be happening," he said.

"Cloud adoption has outpaced most security models, particularly across financial services, government and critical infrastructure. We chose Sydney because Australian organisations are leading that conversation, and they need a security partner on the ground that operates at the same speed as their business."

The company is also launching its APJ Founding Partner Program, which brings together cloud providers, systems integrators and managed security service providers to deliver runtime security across AWS, Azure, GCP and Oracle Cloud.

The program reflects Upwind's Partner Always go-to-market model, with every APJ deal running through the channel from day one.

Leverington said that the partner program is designed to give local partners a “fast start” with Upwind.

“What we're offering as part of that is preferred pricing for those founding partners, plus flying them to our annual sales kickoff, which will be in Maui next year, and get them on stage to talk about their success with Upwind,” he told techpartner.news.

Cloud repatriation and platform plays 

Pinyan said that he has recently seen "a lot of organisations" shifting back to on-prem where cloud is concerned.

"Cloud is becoming expensive for a lot of organisations, and then when you want to secure on-prem, you suddenly see that you don't have too many good solutions to secure it, because no one really built the proper solution to secure it on-prem in the same level that you secure your cloud," he stated.

"With the runtime sensor that we have created, it's completely compatible for on-prem Windows and Linux VMs, which means that you can deploy Upwind on-prem and get the same level of telemetry that you would expect to get from a cloud workload."

Leverington said that organisations are looking at spending less money on tooling, with most customers the platform talks to currently using a range of different vendors for 'point solutions', but now "starting to see the benefit of using a platform for that" instead.

"One of the reasons why a platform is better is we're taking signals from all these different sources, and we're doing a lot of the hard work that used to be done by SOC teams around triaging," he explained.

"Instead of organisations having to deal with four or five or six different vendors, they can now deal with one, so there's a tool consolidation component of this and a cost saving around that [too].

"We cover 10 to 12 different use cases when you look at cloud security, ranging from code analysis to vulnerability management to posture management to cloud detection and response, and unlike a lot of other vendors out there, we have one product, one SKU, and it's still the same cost for the end customer."