CloudPassage lands $14M to boost cloud security for Foursquare, StrongMail, others

Cloud security startup CloudPassage has raised $14 million in second-round funding, with an aim of helping businesses like Foursquare, StrongMail, and others secure their data in the cloud, the company announced Wednesday.

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Security is one of the most important factors for companies who want to store data and operate using the cloud. Companies using Amazon for cloud computing, for example, get very basic security from Amazon but must go to other vendors if they want more advanced protections. That’s where CloudPassage comes in, offering companies things like server security configuration, host-based firewalls, intrusion detection, server account auditing, and event reporting and alerting.

“Security in the cloud has to be elastic and has to be able to scale,” Carson Sweet, co-founder and CEO of CloudPassage, told VentureBeat. “Our platform gives companies the ability to deploy much better security for their servers.”

Forrester Research predicts that the cloud security market will grow to at least $1.5 billion by 2015, suggesting that CloudPassage is an area ripe for growth. It has already attracted subscriber growth of more than 70 percent during the first two months of 2012, compared with the same period last year. The company will use the new financing to up their marketing and penetration of its HALO platform on which all of its services are built.

In terms of competition, the company faces Tripwire and Dome9, both of which offer some of the same services. Sweet also said there were other some other startups in stealth mode that are looking to offer a “complete solution” like CloudPassage.

The new round of funding was led by Tenaya Capital, with participation from previous investors Benchmark Capital and Musea Ventures. Brian Melton, Managing Director at Tenaya Capital, will join CloudPassage’s board of directors.

San Francisco-based CloudPassage has raised a total of $20.5 million to date. Other current customers include Exois, Avatar New York, and Izoox.

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