Striking a balance  between security and user freedom has proven one of the greatest challenges for CIOs in recent years. It first hit agenda after workers started taking corporate data outside the firewall with the proliferation of mobile devices and is now reemerging on an even bigger scale in the public cloud, where FireLayers Inc. hopes to bring order to the governance chaos with the help of new funding from some big-name investors.

The undisclosed amount of capital that the raised in the round will help of its namesake service, which provides automated controls for preventing unauthorized access to cloud applications and the records kept inside. Administrators are able to set specific rules on who can do what based on different parameters like role and location, configure alerts to notify them of security anomalies and record that suspicious activity for compliance purposes.

FireLayers is hardly the first provider to offer that value proposition, nor the only one that managed to attract investors’ attention attention for that matter, with rival Netskope Inc. having completed a massive $75 million round only last month. But the startup manages to set itself apart from the crowd on several important counts, most notably simplicity.

FireLayers comes with a threat assessment capability that allows administrators to quickly gauge the severity of a particular incident like, say, hackers compromising a Google Docs folder belonging to the accounting department, and determine how strictly access should be regulated accordingly. They can create own rules or choose from a selection of pre-made templates that the startup’s engineers have put together to simplify the chore. .

That’s a potentially major boom for large organizations with thousands of workers using upwards of dozens of different services, where effectively identifying and addressing every single potential access scenario can become a massively tedious chore to be perform by hand. Worse, administrators run the risk of defining some rules too loosely or others too strictly, compromising both security and user experience.

FireLayers eliminates that dual challenge at one fell swoop, which has helped attract several customers to its service since launching last year and now, a number that the new financing is meant to help increase. The capital came from Akamai Technologies Inc. and YL Ventures, an early-stage equaity firm specializing in Israeli cybersecurity startups that funded a container protection provider called Twistlock Ltd. to the tune of 2.5 million earlier this year.

Featured image credit: Photo via Sipa