With the pandemic still raging, the past few years saw the founding of exciting new companies and the rise to prominence of some companies that found opportunities amid the turbulent global health and economic conditions. They defied gloomy business forecasts by taking advantage of the opportunities that emerged as more companies have gone online and turned to digital and cloud solutions to be able to do business under inhospitable conditions.

It is not surprising that some standouts come from the cybersecurity industry, as the shifting paradigms created more opportunities for threat actors, thus the need for enhanced security. Here are five of the top security companies to watch out for in 2022.

For Remote Infrastructure Access Security: BastionZero

The increased online activity of businesses and surge in popularity of the remote work setup made it inevitable for security companies to offer solutions specifically designed to address remote infrastructure threats. BastionZero is one of the firms that responded to this need. What makes it notable, however, is its focus on making remote infrastructure access security quick and simple.

BastionZero provides a cloud-based solution with a proprietary cryptographic multi-root zero-trust protocol that enables secure remote setups without relying on privileged access. The company aims to remove the need for tedious VPNs, privileged certificate authorities, and the use of long-lived credentials, which pose critical security risks. It offers a solution that is easy to configure and comes with fine-grained access controls suitable for both on-prem and cloud environments.

The company announced their $6 million seed round led by Dell Technologies Capital in March.

For IoT Device Security: Sternum

Sternum is an autonomous security and observability platform designed for IoT devices. It seeks to provide device manufacturers with a convenient security solution for their products to enable real-time self-protection and self-monitoring. The security of connected devices is a growing concern for businesses with threat actors becoming more adept in exploiting vulnerabilities to access networks, steal data, or spread malware. Sternum offers a solution that emphasizes threat prevention and active mitigation.

Sternum's cross-platform security solution provides a centralized data platform that addresses security visibility issues with accurate and consistent real-time data. This ensures security in resource-limited environments that used to be incompatible with full-fledged security solutions. This allows device manufacturers to optimize product delivery as they shift left without imposing a heavy burden on product development teams to spend most of their time debugging or patching vulnerabilities.

The company recently raised $27 million in series B financing led by Spark Capital.

For Attack Surface Management: JupiterOne

Attack surface management is another crucial concern for enterprises with the growing adoption of online modes of transactions and the increased reliance of consumers and businesses on web-enabled devices. JupiterOne aims to cover the gaps in the way organizations deal with attack surfaces with its comprehensive cyberattack surface management platform. The company's security solution makes it easy to conduct cyber asset mapping, identification, analysis, and security as it enables full visibility into complex business IT environments especially when it comes to the cloud. 

JupiterOne helps organizations fortify their security programs to ensure more effective and efficient threat discovery, risk prioritization, and the plugging of security regulation compliance gaps. The company's solution is not limited to finding threats through centralized threat intelligence. It also takes into account the relationships between cyber assets to establish context and detect potential risks without always relying on existing threat identities. This allows the solution to significantly enhance overall security posture management, incident response, SecOps, and vulnerability management.

The company announced just in June $70 million in funding, led by Tribe Capital.

For Cloud-native Applications Security: Lightspin

Lightspin specializes in cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP). It offers a graph-based cloud security system specifically developed for the use of cloud engineers with inputs from cloud engineers. This graph-based technology is the centerpiece of Lightspin's contextual emphasis as it uncovers exploitable vulnerabilities and brings to light potential critical attack paths. It is also built to ensure immediate response to alerts that matter the most through its one-click vulnerability prioritization and remediation system.

Lightspin offers a solution designed to achieve maximum security with minimal effort, especially with the complexities surrounding AWS, GCP, Azure, and Kubernetes. It is essentially an agentless software-as-a-service solution that not only centralize security management but also makes it easy to understand risks, find their origin, and address as soon as possible. Lightspin uses infrastructure-as-a-code wherein pre-created Terraform or JSON files are readily available for DevOps or security teams to use as they remediate risks.

The company raised a total of $20 million to expand their market reach and product offering.

For Private LTE/5G Network Security: OneLayer

While 5G technology may have slowly slipped out of everyone's attention, one security company built a solution to ensure enterprise-grade security for private LTE/5G networks. This company is OneLayer, and it seeks to optimize the potential of private cellular networks by making sure that they are adequately secure without requiring cellular technology expertise.

Offering a flexible, adjustable, and unobtrusive platform, OneLayer's platform is designed around a versatile architecture that suits on-prem, cloud, and hybrid environments. This solution is also software-driven for cost-efficiency and minimalistic processing. Its implementation enables full asset visibility as well as fast cellular detection and response, context-based segmentation, and zero-trust device connectivity. Moreover, OneLayer provides an IoT toolkit specifically intended for the cellular environment.

The company just announced in March their $8.2M Seed Round. 

In conclusion

The cybersecurity industry continues to be vibrant. Fortune Business Insights projects a 13.4 percent growth CAGR for the period 2022 through 2029. This growth is fueled by a staggering and higher-than-anticipated demand for security solutions across all regions. The field of cybersecurity continues to grow and companies are unlikely to run out of new innovative products and services as new threats ceaselessly emerge. The companies featured above are just some of the forward-thinking startups that address new and evolving security concerns, and they deserve some spotlight for the innovations they introduce.