After spending its first four years helping companies protect the data they keep in Office 365 and other leading cloud apps, Bitglass Inc. is moving into the broader cloud computing market.

The startup kicked off the expansion into infrastructure-as-a-service today by adding support for market leader Amazon Web Services to its flagship reverse proxy. Described as the only “cloud-scale” offering of its kind, the system can register every attempt to access a company’s infrastructure-as-a-service deployment and automatically look for potential risk factors. Bitglass allows traffic to pass through to its destination only if certain security requirements are met.

Every organization can customize the service’s filter based on its specific requirements. A company with a bring-your-own-device policy, for instance, might set Bitglass to only accept requests from handsets that have been pre-approached by the information technology department. Administrators could even regulate access based on location to ensure that workers don’t use their authorized handsets to  interact with sensitive assets when they’re outside the office.

Bitglass’ fixed security policies are complemented by a behavioral analytics engine that looks for more subtle signs of suspicious activity. Among others, the mechanism takes into account the fact that the average organization relies on multiple cloud providers in its operations. It can thus immediately raise the alarms if a worker’s credentials are used to, say, simultaneously download data from AWS and Salesforce.com.

There’s no reason why Bitglass couldn’t make its tool’s capabilities available on other infrastructure-as-a-service platforms as well further down the line. The startup already provides limited integration with Microsoft Corp.’s Azure and has a strong partnership with Google Inc., which operates its own public cloud.

Supporting multiple providers will be essential for Bitglass long-term expansion plans, a key element of which was unveiled today alongside the AWS compatibility. The startup  introduced a new integration feature that lets companies plug its service into their custom internal applications. The more infrastructure-as-a-service platforms Bitglass supports, the more workloads it will be able to target.

Today’s launch announcement indicated that the capability allows integration with in-house services as well, which should broaden Bitglass’ reach even further. Earlier this month, the company closed a $45 million funding round. 

Image courtesy of Bitglass