Alphabet Inc. is emerging as an unlikely force for change in the data center. Two weeks after the company teamed up with Facebook Inc. to widen the adoption of commodity infrastructure among enterprises, its venture capital arm is leading a $30 million investment into Skyport Systems Inc., a startup that has developed a new breed of ultra-secure servers.

The SkySecure Platform packs two Intel Xeon processors and several terabytes of speedy flash storage into a tamper-proof chassis that has no unnecessary ports an attacker could potentially exploit. Traffic sent to the machine is processed by two lone transceivers at the back that automatically block incoming requests from applications without a permission to access its contents. The remaining connections that are allowed to be established then pass through a software-based filtering mechanism configured to weed out more indirect risks like lackluster authentication.

If, for instance, a SkySecure machine receives data from a legacy corporate application that uses an outdated version of SSL, the system can automatically apply up-to-date encryption before the packets are processed. The software is thereby able to counter most of the vulnerabilities that hackers typically employ to infiltrate backend infrastructure. Even if a determined attacker somehow does manage to bypass the startup’s defenses, however, they can only cause a limited amount of damage due to the way that the server is configured. The workloads running inside are isolated from one another using the native access control module of the Linux kernel to ensure a breach can’t cascade across an entire deployment.

As a result, hackers are left with few options besides trying to compromise the physical hardware components of the SkySecure Platform, which is difficult as well due to the Trusted Execution Technology included in Intel’s chips. The firmware checks the integrity of not only the server itself but also the Linux image running on top before every boot and cancels the start-up process upon the first sign of tampering. The functionality makes the system well-suited to run Active Directory deployments and other high-priority applications that are at high risk of attack due to their importance.

The company claims to have received orders from government agencies, enterprises and even universities since SkySecure hit the market last May, momentum that the new funding is meant to help accelerate. Besides GV, the round also included contributions from Intel and half a dozen other institutional backers, which have together poured some $60 million into Skyport’s coffers to date.

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