Two years after launching its first pure-play security product, ExtraHop CEO Arif Kareem says he’s doubling down on cloud, and he sees 5G security as an expansion opportunity for the company.

“And there are two aspects of our doubling down,” Kareem added. “On one hand, we are moving most of our products into the cloud. And another piece: we are addressing the concerns of our customers who are, No. 1, worried about migration.” To this end, ExtraHop can help make it easier for customers to move their workloads to the cloud, he said.

Additionally, enterprises worry about cloud security whether they deploy workloads in a single cloud or multiple clouds. “So our strategy is making sure we address the multi-cloud space,” Kareem said.

And while ExtraHop doesn’t specifically play in the 5G security space yet, “I’m intrigued with 5G’s influence on the edge of the network,” Kareem said. “Our earliest sense is, it’s a play from an IoT perspective because 5G is considered to be a way of connecting these devices. As we look into the proliferation of unmanaged devices, that would be an interesting vector for us.”

It also seems a natural fit for the company, which spent its first 10 years as a network performance monitoring company before moving more directly into security about three years ago around the time Kareem took the helm.

ExtraHop released its first security product, Reveal(x) in January 2018. The company has since partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud to provide software-as-a-service (SaaS) based threat detection and response for cloud workloads. ExtraHop also integrates with AWS, ServiceNow, Palo Alto, and IBM to provide visibility, quarantining, and incident remediation.

In fact, Kareem says that a tenfold increase in security-product bookings along with its SaaS-based threat detection and response has propelled the company to a record-breaking year in 2019. “We had another year of more than 40% growth in bookings and revenue,” he said. In addition to the year-over-year growth, the company ended the year with more than $150 million in bookings, Kareem claims.

ExtraHop now secures more than 13 million assets under management across global enterprise customers, company executives claim.

Looking ahead to 2020, “our top priority is becoming the unquestioned leader in the NDR space,” Kareem says. By NDR, he’s referring to network detection and response. These are security tools that capture and analyze network traffic to detect and respond to threats. Some of the other players in this market include Cisco Stealthwatch, Darktrace, Vectra, and Awake Security. ExtraHop contends that network detection and response remains cloud security’s missing link.

“It’s visibility, it’s detection, it’s investigation, and response,” Kareem said, adding that ExtraHop’s competitive advantage here comes from its monitoring and analytics roots, coupled with its newer hybrid-cloud security capabilities. “We have converted the network from an attack surface to an advantage, and we provide 360-degree visibility into your whole IT environment.”