Illumio has raised $100 million in new financing for its potentially game-changing approach to data center and cloud security. The latest round was led by BlackRock Funds, Accel Partners and others including industry leaders John W. Thompson.

The Series C round brings the security company’s total investment to more than $142 million in the past 27 months. Existing venture investors Formation 8, Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst.

Illumio was founded by former Cymtec Systems, Inc. executives Andrew Rubin and P.J. Kirner and includes a veteran executive team from Cisco Systems, Inc., McAfee, Inc., Nicira, Inc., Riverbed Technology, Inc. and VMware, Inc.. Previously, the company has raised $42.5 million in funding  from Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, Formation 8 and Data Collective as well as individual investors including Salesforce.com founder and chief executive officer Marc Benioff and Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang.

“Adaptive Security is the quantum leap for the data center and cloud,” said Andrew Rubin, CEO of Illumio. “We are removing today’s intractable roadblock for enterprises that want to both move quickly and enhance their security. Now enterprises can operate securely at enormous scale in any environment.”

Illumio’s secret sauce is security for the cloud, building on the current trend of “perimeter-less” security. Illumio has a smart software policy called adaptive security that acts like a giant brain that watches everything happening in an enterprise’s infrastructure. In effect, it sits on top of all the computing images and constantly calculates the security policy. This notion of security in real time based upon the needs of the applications and networks fits well with the new cloud architectures in the enterprise. According to VP or Marketing Alan Cohen, “It’s like a series of body guards versus just a lock on the front door.”

Illumio will use the new funding to meet demand for the Illumio Adaptive Security Platform (ASP), invest in R&D to drive additional platform expansion, grow its sales and marketing efforts, and fuel international expansion.

“Perimeter security solutions leave 80 percent of the data center and cloud exposed and vulnerable to attacks that often lead to costly data breaches,” said CEO and Co-Founder Andrew Rubin. “Illumio ASP is delivering security across all computing resources, infrastructures and applications.”

Illumio represents a “once-in-a generation opportunity to create a major new platform in the security space,” said Illumio board member John W. Thompson, who is also CEO of Virtual Instruments Corp. and chairman of the board of Microsoft.

Illumio says its ASP service programs the ideal security policy and enforces it across applications, workloads and processes as they are provisioned, operated and moved in any data center or private or public cloud infrastructure. Morgan Stanley, Plantronics, NTT and Creative Artists Agency (CAA) are among the enterprises Illumio said it already counts as customers.

I had a chance to sit down with the founder and senior executives at the recent AWS:Reinvent conference to explore the new technology and the super stealth venture. Watch the interview below (29:51)

Alan Cohen and P.J. Kirner – AWS Re:Invent 2014 – theCUBE

Savvy Investors Love This Company

Former VMware  CTO Steve Herrod, who is an theCUBE alum and now venture capitalist at General Catalyst, has been a big time supporter of and investor in this new model.

In an interview at VMworld with Dave Vellante and me, Herrod said Illumio’s approach to perimeter-less security is unique.  With cloud computing, mobile apps, and virtualization vaporizing traditional perimeters and with breaches at an all-time high, new models need to emerge.  Can Illumio be that model?

According to Herrod “[Security] used to be where the good guys were inside the company and bad guys were outside the company. This was the old way the perimeter could be secure.  Now, with both insider threats and mobile apps, the security model is completely reversed. The good guys and bad guys are everywhere. There isn’t a perimeter.  This new dynamic is killing and transforming the old IT security models for cloud, mobile, and API based services. Watch the video interview below (16:47).