- Person
- Assaf Rappaport
- Lived
- b. 1983
- Field
- Cloud security
- From
- Israeli
The story
Assaf Rappaport was born in Israel in 1983. He served as an officer in the Israeli army's Unit 8200, studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Technion, and became one of a new generation of Israeli engineers focused on keeping computer systems safe.
In the early 2010s companies were moving their email, files and customer records into online services such as Office 365, Salesforce, Box and Dropbox. These services were convenient, but the data no longer sat inside the company's own network, where traditional security tools could watch it. Organisations often had little idea who was accessing what, or whether an account had been taken over.
In 2012 Rappaport co-founded Adallom with Ami Luttwak and Roy Reznik. The name comes from a Hebrew phrase meaning the last line of defence. Adallom built what is known as a cloud access security broker: a service that gave organisations visibility and control over how their staff used cloud applications and over the company data stored in them. It audited user activity and looked for signs of threats. In 2013 the company also discovered a token hijacking vulnerability in Office 365.
Microsoft acquired Adallom in 2015, announcing that it would help customers protect critical assets across cloud applications and strengthen security across multiple clouds. Rappaport went on to lead Microsoft's research and development centre in Israel. Adallom's product was renamed Microsoft Cloud App Security, which became generally available in April 2016, and in November 2021 it became Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps.
Because it became part of one of the world's most widely used business software platforms, the protection Adallom pioneered reached far more organisations than a small start-up could have served alone. The same founding team later went on to create the cloud security company Wiz, applying the lessons of Adallom to protecting the cloud infrastructure that so many services now run on.
Why it matters
The cloud app protection Adallom pioneered, now part of Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, helps organisations spot misuse of their cloud accounts and protect the personal data they hold about customers and staff.
About Assaf Rappaport
Israeli entrepreneur who co-founded Adallom and Wiz, whose tools help thousands of organisations find and fix weaknesses in their cloud systems; Google bought Wiz for $32 billion in 2026.
More about Assaf Rappaport
Assaf Rappaport in the news
Sources
- Adallom Wikipedia
- Microsoft acquires Adallom to advance identity and security in the cloud Microsoft
- Assaf Rappaport Wikipedia
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