Cloud IAM recovery firm raises $5M to tighten identity access management

Cloud identity access management (IAM) systems are a high-value target for cybercriminals. Just last month, hackers stole partial source code from Okta, following a breach in March when a ransomware group managed to gain access to Okta’s backend administrative systems. 

In the current threat landscape, organizations need to be prepared to respond to breaches if their IAM solution fails. 

AccSense, a continuous access and business continuity platform for Okta, yesterday announced it has raised $5 million in seed funding. AccSense says that cloud identity and access management solutions are vulnerable to being compromised, and need to be hardened with data resilience and recovery capabilities. 

To address these weaknesses, AccSense provides enterprises with one-click recovery for Okta, alongside continuous automated backups and the ability to identify changes between different PiTs (points in time). This means organizations can restore data rapidly in the event of a breach.

A new subsector of cloud IAM 

In an era where data breaches are a matter of if, not when, organizations can’t afford to rely on cloud IAM solutions as infallible security measures. Skilled cybercriminals can find ways to navigate around almost any defense. This makes data recovery a critical capability so that mission-critical data remains accessible during a breach. 

“The SaaS and cloud data protection market is growing fast as companies adopt cloud-based solutions and replace their legacy on-prem products. Scaling in conjunction with SaaS adoption are identity and access management solutions such as Okta. But as we’ve recently witnessed, the major IAM solutions are vulnerable to targeted cyberattacks,” said Muli Motola, co-founder and CEO of AccSense.  

As a result, AccSense turns to disaster recovery to help harden the existing defenses of Okta’s platform, which has a customer base of over 14,000. At the same time AccSense is helping security leaders better understand their IAM business continuity posture and data resilience. 

“We provide security and risk management leaders a complete set of enterprise features to easily and quickly recover your entire Okta tenant in minutes from cyberattacks or misconfiguration, reducing downtime and associated costs,” Motola said. 

The providers seeking to redefine IAM 

AccSense’s solution sits within the IAM market, which researchers estimate will reach a value of $34.52 billion in 2028. It’s part of a fast-emerging subsector that’s turning to continuous access management to add an extra layer of security to existing identity protection solutions.  

Another provider that falls within this subsector is Tevora, which provides enterprises with an identity resilience solution for Okta with SSO, automated data backups and granular recovery options at the user, group or application level. 

Another competitor is Lyvoc, an Okta system integrator. It provides a solution to protect and monitor Okta tenants for changes and recovery, while securing user access to applications with multifactor authentication and contextual access. 

According to Motola, the main differentiators between AccSense and these vendors are its use of one-click or automated failure, an RTO and RPO of 10 minutes, an air-gapped backup tenant and infinite data retention.