Cloud security firm Skyhigh Networks raises $42m

Skyhigh Networks, a company that helps CIOs secure data that employees access via web applications, has raised US$40 million (A$42 million) in equity funding, its most significant cash injection to date.

Skyhigh for cloud storage service Box. Credit: Box.

The company's latest Series C round - led by Greylock Partners and Sequoia, with participation from SaaS vendor Salesforce.com - brings the total capital raised to date by the California-based company to US$66.5 million.

The company has around 133 employees and began operations in February 2013.

Skyhigh offers a service that allows an IT administrator to monitor and control staff access to a wide variety of cloud services using data gleaned from network devices such as firewalls.

Skyhigh's flashship cloud discovery software alerts employers to the use of "shadow IT" - cloud services a company's staff are using outside of its internal IT systems, and aggregates reputation scores assigned to each of these services by other CIOs around the world. The company has more recently moved into providing the means to secure access to these services - including identity management, encryption and data loss prevention tools.

Microsoft is in the throws of building a competing service on its Azure platform, dubbed Azure AD Cloud App Discovery, a basic version of which is currently released in beta.