Bracket Computing

Bracket Computing, founded in 2011 by Tom Gillis and Jason Lango, was a cloud security company that operated in the hybrid cloud market. The founders, both veterans of Ironport Systems, which was acquired by Cisco, brought extensive experience in network and content security to the venture. Gillis, who served as CEO, previously held a leadership role at Cisco's Security Technology Group, while Lango acted as CTO. Their collective background in enterprise security shaped the company's core mission.

The company's business was centered around providing a secure and consistent operational environment for enterprises across multiple public and private clouds. Bracket Computing targeted large enterprise clients, including financial firms and companies like GE and DirecTV, who needed to run significant workloads on the public cloud without compromising security or control. Revenue was likely generated through a pay-as-you-go or subscription model for their primary software offering.

The main product was the Bracket Computing Cell, a software solution designed to encapsulate applications, data, and their associated security and networking policies into a single, encrypted construct. This "cell" could be deployed and managed consistently across various cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, as well as on-premise VMware clouds. A key feature was its patented virtualization technology, the "Metavisor," which sat between the guest operating system and the cloud hypervisor, allowing for the transparent insertion of security services without modifying the workload. This provided full workload isolation by extending encryption and micro-segmentation to a workload’s compute, storage, and network resources.

After operating for several years and raising over $130 million in funding from prominent investors like Andreessen Horowitz, Fidelity, and Goldman Sachs, Bracket Computing's journey concluded in 2018. VMware announced its intent to acquire the company's intellectual property and hire some of its key technical staff, with co-founder Tom Gillis joining VMware to lead their Network and Security Business Unit.

Keywords: cloud security, hybrid cloud, workload isolation, micro-segmentation, enterprise computing, data encryption, virtualization, network security, multi-cloud management, cybersecurity