Today, access governance solution provider Pathlock announced it has merged with Appsian, an ERP data security company, and Security Weaver, a governance, risk and compliance management tool for SAP, and raised $200 million as part of a funding round led by Vertica Capital Partners. 

The merge is intended to position Pathlock as a leader in the Access Governance space, while providing a unified solution that offers access governance, application security capabilities and automated data controls as part of a single tool. 

For enterprises, Pathlock is designed to enable them to mitigate risks in real-time so they can have a complete view of user access to applications, users, and threats, so that organizations can have an accurate perspective of risks of critical business applications. 

Maintaining regulatory compliance 

With more regulations released by world governments year after year, many organizations are finding it more and more difficult to keep up, with many paying millions a year  to insulate themselves from compliance violations and data breaches. 

“We estimate the global market for control testing, enforcement, and compliance services is nearly $100B per year. The cost to each company of reaching SOX compliance alone can be $2M or more annually,” said President at Pathlock, Kevin Dunne. 

“Pathlock automates the manual and disconnected processes associated with providing financial and data controls for business applications,” Dunne said. 

The enterprise governance, risk and compliance market 

The announcement comes as researchers expect the global enterprise governance, risk and compliance market to grow from a value of $40.84 billion in 2021 and grow at a compound annual growth rate of 14.0% from 2022 to 2030 as more organizations look for solutions to help them meet their compliance goals. 

Pathlock is not only competing with legacy solutions like manual spreadsheets, but also identity governance and administration or identity and access management providers. 

One of Pathlock’s main competitors is identity management provider Saviynt, which offers a solution called Enterprise Identity Cloud that a user can use to unify access controls across identities and apps throughout the environment. To date, Saviynt has raised $170 million in capital following an investment of $130 million last year. 

Another competitor is Sailpoint, which recently announced raising $439 million in revenue last year, with lifecycle and compliance management solutions that enable users to automate access controls.

The main difference between Pathlock and these solutions, is its focus on combining data access controls with access visibility. 

“Our key differentiation is our focus on business applications and providing 360-degree visibility and protection, looking at what users are actually doing across applications, and preventing future attacks with preventative controls.”