Skyhigh Networks Gets $20 Million to Detect Rogue Clouds update from May 2013

Do you know where your corporate data is living? Some of it may reside in cloud services without your knowledge, due to the ease of moving files and workloads to services like Dropbox, Box and Amazon Web Services. A startup has developed software to help companies get their arms around this "shadow IT" and investors like what they see.

Cloud visibility and control company Skyhigh Networks announced that it has received $20 million in Series B financing. Sequoia Capital led the round, with participation from existing investor Greylock Partners. Aaref Hilaly, partner at Sequoia Capital, has joined Greylock’s Asheem Chandna on Skyhigh Networks’ Board of Directors.

The Skyhigh Networks Cloud Services Manager is a  multi-tenant service that discovers, analyzes, and controls cloud services in use within an organization. It will see all cloud services in use, identify anomalous behavior and opportunities for consolidating subscriptions, and enforce key security and usage policies. Skyhigh will use the new capital to expand its sales, marketing, and engineering teams to meet the increasing demand for its services and to extend its leadership in the cloud visibility and control market. 

"The rapid spread of BYOD and cloud computing has led to vast numbers of cloud services being adopted, often with no involvement from corporate IT," said Hilaly. "Skyhigh sets itself apart from other security companies by giving IT a unique ‘searchlight’ to find these cloud services, assess the risks involved in using them, and control the confidential data stored in them - all in a way that's respectful of the end user. We are thrilled to partner with Rajiv and his exceptional team who have a long history of delighting customers with innovative products."

Cupertino, California based Skyhigh Networks was a finalist for the RSA Conference 2013 Most Innovative Company award and was recently named a “Cool Vendor” by Gartner. It lists customers of its products such as Cisco, Equinix, and Torrance Memorial Medical Center.

"We had no comprehensive way of knowing which services were in use, where outgoing data was headed, and what risks these cloud services implied for our business," said Steve Martino, vice president, Information Security, at Cisco. "The number of cloud providers we were using was definitely an eyebrow raiser. We knew there would be a number of them, but we were surprised by exactly how many showed up."