Cloud Data Protection Startup PerspecSys Lands $12M

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A booming software-as-a-service (SaaS) market is causing some in the industry to turn their attention toward managing and security enterprise cloud application data.

PerspecSys, a cloud data protection firm whose U.S. headquarters is located in McLean, Va., announced today that it had secured $12 million in round of Series B funding, led be Paladin Capital Group and Ascent Venture Partners. Chipmaker Intel returned contributed to the round. To date, the company has raised $20 million.

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PerspecSys’ flagship product is the Cloud Protection Gateway. The technology, which sits inside the firewall or at a managed service provider, allows organizations to add an extra layer of security to public cloud applications and meet compliance requirements. Supported applications include Oracle CRM On Demand and Fusion, Salesforce.com and Xactly Incent, among several others.

The startup has gained traction in the realm of finance. PerspecSys boasts, somewhat secretively, that “three of the world’s largest financial institutions and one of [its] biggest multinational conglomerates” employ its technology.

PerspecSys Cloud Protection Gateway works by “intercepting critical data before it is passed to the application in the cloud, and replacing it with a random token or encrypted value that is meaningless unless viewed via the PerspecSys gateway,” according to the company.

Boasting that the deal “signifies the legitimate arrival of the category of Cloud Data Protection Gateways,” PerspecSys CEO David Canellos explained in a blog post how his company’s tech helps enterprises take the fear out of using public cloud application providers. “They have started to refer to us as a ‘next-generation’ gateway, because we do not require organizations to use proprietary/un-vetted encryption approaches (referred to as ‘Operations Preserving Encryption’ or ‘Function Preserving Encryption’),” he wrote.

Openness is PerspecSys’ approach. “Our customers can use strong, well-known encryption modules, even those with NIST FIPS 140-2 validation, from trusted and established companies such as Voltage Security, SafeNet, Symantec and RSA and data tokenization techniques that have been assessed by third party technology auditors to protect their sensitive data,” added Canellos.

Despite all of this hardening, the process doesn’t slow down applications and is transparent to users, claims PerspecSys.

A hot cloud data center market also beckons, signaled Canellos. “And we are now able to deliver the capability not only as an on-premise gateway solution, but also as a managed security service and hosted offering via trusted corporate and government service partners such as Fujitsu, CSC and Capgemini,” he informed.

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at InfoStor and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.