vArmour raises $44 million for proactive cloud cybersecurity

But coinciding with its rise is a climb in cybercrime — mostly of the data theft variety — orchestrated by individual hackers, state actors, and crime syndicates alike. That’s why eight years ago, former Juniper Networks senior architects Michael Shieh and Roger Lian cofounded vArmour, a Mountain View security company that provides a collection of APIs that apply controls across hybrid clouds. In addition to isolating suspicious events automatically, it tags and organizes them, and flags the entry points from which the threats originated, along with sensitive areas within the system they attempted to probe. Those insights could mean the difference between preventing a breach and compromised data, the company claims — particularly considering that some attackers can live inside a network for 243 days before they’re found, according to research firm Gartner. vArmour has a strategic partner in multinational Australian carrier Telstra, which tapped the startup’s expertise three years ago to sell data center security services in the Asia Pacific.