With the workplace now extending beyond the four corners of the office into the public cloud and the mobile universe,  the traditional perimeter-centric approach to securing corporate data has become all but obsolete. Yet while much of the vendor ecosystem is still scrambling to catch up with the new reality of the connected workforce, one startup claims that it already has the answer to CIOs’ information governance woes.

Bitglass Inc. offers a hosted security platform that allows organizations to manage files even when they’re stored outside the firewall on an employee’s personal device or a third-party service such as Dropbox and Salesforce.com. That unique value proposition had not gone unnoticed in the industry. Just seven month after its first funding round, the one-year-old company revealed that it has received another $25 million from a group of investors that included an unnamed global bank and the venture capital arm of Singapore Telecommunications Limited, one of the largest mobile network operators in Asia. Existing backers New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Norwest Venture Partners chipped in as well.

Bitglass said that the fresh financing will be used to scale sales and marketing operations and accelerate the development of its flagship service, which is based on a patent-pending, searchable encryption technique  that uses something akin to a watermark in order to track data for policy enforcement purposes. The offering implements the technology in the form of a proxy that automatically tags data as it leaves the four walls of the organization, thereby ensuring that IT away retains control over corporate information regardless of where it may be.

Focusing on the data itself rather than the system in which it resides has a number of added advantages beyond just enabling more effective governance, according to Bitglass. The approach avoids compromising user experience by eliminating the need for employees to download  specialized clients onto their devices and at the same time guarantees their privacy by ensuring that organizations only have access to their previously watermarked files.

The new funding brings the startup’s total raised to an impressive $35 million. The investment will see Scott Sandell,  the head of NEA’s technology investing practice and a repeat name on the Forbes Midas List, join the Bitglass board of directors.

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