vArmour—which CEO Tim Eades took out of steath mode in September 2014 to introduce a new approach to help secure data center networks—raised $41 million in a Series D round of funding to help finance the company’s growth and global expansion.
The Series D round of funding, led by Redline Capital and Telstra, brings vArmour’s total funding up to $83 million.
“The journey that we’ve been on at vArmour has been an interesting one,” Eades told eWEEK. “We spent the first 18 months building the technology and the team; last year was our first full year in customer environments, and now we’re raising money to continue building our go-to-market team.”
vArmour is doubling its sales and marketing team to help grow the business. When building a new company, it’s important to identify every potential customer opportunity, to understand why an organization will or won’t buy a given technology, Eades said. In 2016, the key challenge for vArmour is configuring its global go-to-market strategy as the company scales up, he explained.
Eades emphasized that the $41 million figure is important but even more-so is customer access.
Australian carrier Telstra, one of the lead investors in the security vendor, plans to add vArmour security technology to its portfolio of enterprise services.
“We’ve been working with Telstra for approximately 15 months,” Eades said. “Having a service provider leading you into a market really provides a lot of value.”
Beyond just Telstra, vArmour also received investment as part of the Series D round from an unspecified number of strategic partners that will also help with the go-to-market effort.
“As part of the round, we also went to strategic distributors of software and networking equipment in Dubai, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan and Europe, and they were able to invest between $100,000 and $1 million into the round, in return for customer access and distribution of the software,” Eades said.
The vArmour Distributed Security System technology has evolved since the company first emerged from stealth, Eades said. vArmour doesn’t touch the network perimeter, but rather, focuses inside the data center, specifically on virtualized and cloud environments, he explained.
“We have a Distributed Security System that allows organizations to segment a data center,” Eades said. “The real innovation that we did early on is making the segmentation work and scale.”
vArmour’s focus in the last year has been to simplify the approach for segmenting the network and enable a more rapid deployment. Initially, it took approximately 33 hours to install vArmour’s technology, and now it’s down to as little as 30 minutes, Eades said.
“The innovation that we’ve learned as we’ve come to customers is to make the technology as frictionless as we can,” Eades said.
The idea of segmenting an organization’s network for security is not unique one—with multiple vendors and approaches, including software-defined networking (SDN) as well as Docker containers and microservices—but two years ago Eades had a hard time explaining segmentation to many organizations.
“We’re completely infrastructure-independent, so we don’t care if the organization is using Docker containers or a Cisco SDN approach,” Eades said.
vArmour’s technology will continue to evolve, Eades said, adding that the goal is to provide more control as well as visibility into what’s running in an organization, as well as identifying potential risks.
Simplicity will also be crucial. “We’re going to continue the drive to make the product simpler,” Eades said.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.