Automated cloud compliance startup Concourse Labs exited stealth mode today after securing a $15.2 million round of funding.

The Series A round was led by ForgePoint Capital and also included 83North and Capri Ventures. Concourse Labs said it plans to use the money to expand its marketing and sales teams and accelerate product development.

Concourse Labs sells a platform that helps companies to automate the compliance process by using an “immutable system of record” comprising their policy, identity and cloud usage history. The data is used to generate baselines and predictions of normal cloud activity, the company said.

The startup argues that traditional enterprise governance, risk and compliance methods aren’t suitable for cloud speed or scale, and says they’re not capable of dealing with the distributed nature of cloud resources. As a result, many enterprises struggle to move to the cloud, since doing so leaves them exposed to data breaches, service outages and tarnished corporate reputations. It also reckons that legacy methods slow innovation at a time when many enterprises are trying to adopt more agile software development processes.

The problem for many enterprises is that they’re constrained by frameworks such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act or Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation, which mandate very specific and often arduous practices. Compliance can be very expensive too, costing anywhere from $7.7 million to $30.9 million to meet and maintain regulatory compliance, according to Ponemon Institute data.

Concourse Labs says its platform performs much of the heavy lifting in meeting compliance by detecting behavior and usage patterns and delivering reports to cloud security analysts, who can use those insights to spot risks they would otherwise miss. The platform works by tapping into code to validate that cloud-based applications are in compliance with corporate policies and controls, both when they’re being built and once they’re up and running in production.

The platform integrates with existing continuous integration/continuous development tools and helps identify any problems that must be remediated. It also provides a comprehensive dashboard to keep security teams up to date with their risk posture.

The company said its compliance offering works with cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, as well as technologies such as Kubernetes and microservices. It also supports serverless computing infrastructure such as AWS Lambda.

International Data Corp. research fellow Michelle Bailey said in Concourse’s release that there’s a big demand for automated cloud compliance, since the typical enterprise has about 30% of its applications hosted in public clouds.

“Concourse Lab’s unique solution addresses these major enterprise needs,” Bailey said. “Being able to help enterprise customers accelerate the investments they have made in their digital transformation journey is the key to accelerating cloud success at scale.”

Image: TheDigitalArtist/Pixabay