Enterprise users are bypassing the IT department in favor of more accessible cloud services that offer convenient solutions to specific business problems. Known as shadow IT, this growing phenomenon is making it increasingly difficult for large organizations to effectively maintain security and compliance across their geographically dispersed environments.

Fresh out of stealth mode with $21 million in funding from Social+Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners, Netskope is championing a new approach to addressing this challenge. The Los Altos-based startup offers a subscription-based analytics solution that provides admins with the tools they need to monitor cloud usage trends and enforce policies at scale.

Netskope’s platform includes a database of more than 2,600 cloud apps that are sorted based on 30 “objective criteria” such as security, auditability and disaster recovery capabilities. Corporate IT professionals can leverage the complementary SkopeSights tool to identify applications that meet their organizations’ requirements and eliminate risks through increased visibility. The solution monitors users, incoming and outgoing traffic, and specific activities such as downloads and file shares.

“Cloud apps are the inevitable future because they let people go fast and work flexibly. Up until now, IT couldn’t embrace cloud apps because they couldn’t see what apps were running, what people were doing in them or enforce policies,” explained Sanjay Beri, the chief executive officer of Netskope. “We created Netskope to eliminate the Catch-22 between being agile and being secure.”

The company claims that its solution has been “extensively vetted and tested” by dozens of medium and large enterprises across wide range of verticals. Three of them are set to present their case studies at the upcoming Gartner Symposium/ITxpo event in Orlando, Florida.