Security automation vendor Palerra closed a new $17 million Series B round of funding on April 8, bringing the total funding for the company to $25 million.
The Series B funding round included the participation of August Capital, Norwest Venture Partners (NVP), Wing Venture Capital and Engineering Capital.
Palerra was founded in 2013 with a focus on security automation for the cloud. Rohit Gupta, founder and CEO of Palerra, said there are three key trends that drove him to help create Palerra: the increase in cloud adoption and security threats, and the corresponding decrease in the availability of skilled IT security professionals.
“We offer a simple software-as-a-service [SaaS] platform, and we give clients the ability to model threats, and discover breaches and issues in their cloud applications,” Gupta told eWEEK. “On the basis of what we find, we allow customers to orchestrate the incident response.”
The incident response piece includes a containment component that stops a given threat from proliferating.
The name “Palerra” is derived from two words: “palace” and “terra,” according to Gupta. “Palace” is reference to a structure that is strong, while “terra” means ground. Coincidentally, Gupta added that the domain palerra.com was available too. Palerra’s primary product brand name is Loric, which Gupta said is a nod to the word “algorithmic.”
The Palerra Loric platform works with cloud infrastructure providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) as well as SaaS applications including Salesforce and Box. The system can also be used to integrate with on-premises security controls, including firewalls. Plus, Loric can integrate with directory systems including Microsoft Active Directory and LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol).
With SaaS, a key concern for many organizations is the issue of shadow IT, where employees use services that corporate IT has not authorized. Gupta said that Palerra’s focus is not on solving the shadow IT challenge. Instead, “our focus is threat detection and incident response. We focus on applications that the enterprise is using,” he said.
From a back-end infrastructure perspective, Palerra is currently running on AWS, though Gupta said that he is also looking at other providers. As part of the technology stack, Palerra makes use of the open-source Apache Cassandra NoSQL database.
When running SaaS-based controls, a common concern for many organizations is that of performance and potential application latency. Gupta emphasized that Palerra’s platform doesn’t have a performance impact on applications: Loric makes use of application APIs so as not to be an application bottleneck and impact performance.
With the new funding in place, Gupta said the plan is for Palerra to expand its addressable reach—and to also continue to innovate on the platform to make it more powerful.
“We’ll also be investing to make the customer experience better, with better tools and customer support,” he said.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.