Skyhigh Networks gets $20m boost to help businesses identify and manage cloud services
Cloud control company Skyhigh Networks has raised $20m in a second round of fundraising, bringing total investment in the company up to $26m.
Skyhigh Networks helps companies discover which cloud services their employees are using so that they can address any potential security issues. The funding round was led by Sequoia Capital, but existing investor Greylock Partners also contributed.
"The money will be used to expand our sales, marketing, engineering teams and programs," co-founder and CEO Rajiv Gupta told ZDNet on Thursday. "We will be enhancing the product in all of the key areas of discovery, analysis, and control,"
He said the company would also be expanding further into US, Europe and Asia.
Skyhigh Networks, which has more more than 2,600 cloud services in its registry, claims that it can help businesses identify more than 10 times the amount of cloud services that an IT department was aware of.
In a recent survey, many of Skyhigh Networks' customers suspected that there were only 25-30 cloud services being used across their businesses. However, the results showed that organisations often had 300 to 400 cloud services running on their networks or on their devices.
"We deliver our service by leveraging the existing infrastructure in our customer environments," Gupta said. "We determine the number of cloud services by applying cloud intelligence to the logs of their existing firewalls, proxies, or routers. More specifically, they download from us a script that ingests the logs, removes all confidential information (like user names, internal IP addresses, etc), compresses the logs, and uploads the anonymised logs to the Skyhigh service."
In addition to discovery and analysis, the Skyhigh Networks application can also be used for controlling cloud services being used across a business.
"We apply the customer's policies such as access control, data loss prevention, device registration and data encryption," Gupta said. "Our control functionality is through a reverse proxy capability that we deliver through a Skyhigh hosted multi-tenant service, an on-premise virtual appliance, or a hybrid deployment.