After nearly two years of work, ProtectWise Inc. is finally moving into the public light with a new cloud-based service that promises to address one of the greatest operational challenges for the modern enterprise: Understanding the corporate network.

Organizations have no shortage of monitoring software to choose from nowadays, but the breadth of their environments makes it difficult for the security teams charged with finding threats to cover every base. That unchecked sprawl, which is often compounded by infrastructure gained through acquisitions, has proven the downfall of even the most heavily-defended networks.

The most recent anecdote for that came from JPMorgan Chase & Co., which saw hackers siphon data belonging to tens of millions of consumers through a single mis-configured server overlooked by internal experts. Worse, the breach took weeks to detect, a testament to the difficulty of working in such large environments, and a problem that ProtectWise promises to remove with a single stroke.

Its namesake service runs the data crisscrossing an organization’s network through homegrown machine learning algorithms and correlates the resulting patterns with external threat intelligence sources to identify suspicious behavior. That analytic approach is hardly unique, with both other startups and established providers such as Cisco Systems Inc. offering similar capabilities, but ProtectWise’s deployment model is different.

The startup implements its technology in the cloud instead of an on-premise appliance as security vendors have traditionally done. That makes it possible to hold onto network data longer, which in turn enables the tracking of attacks and other malicious activity across greater periods of time.

The result, according to ProtectWise, are more complete and accurate insights into traffic. Not only does that allow for easier identification of sophisticated threats, but the increased amount of reference data also reduces the risk of false alarms. Security professionals can access the metrics through a cloud-based visual interface complete with advanced forensic and problem resolution capabilities.

That value proposition has already attracted more than a dozen customers including UMG Recordings, Inc., along with an impressive roster of investors that injected $17 million into the startup on occasion of its launch from stealth. The new funding, courtesy of Crosslink Capital, Trinity Ventures, Paladin Capital Group and Arsenal Venture Partners, will help expand operations and hire more developers.

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