Public cloud security startup Sonrai Security Inc. said today it has closed on a new $50 million funding round, bringing its total amount raised to $88 million.

The Series C round was led by the venture arm of cybersecurity platform provider Istari Global Ltd. and also saw participation from existing investors Menlo Ventures, Polaris Partners, TenEleven Ventures and New Brunswick Innovation Fund.

Sonrai Security has created a comprehensive cloud security platform that leverages identity and data controls to secure environments and eliminate risk. The Sonrai Dig Platform is built on a patented graphing technology that’s used to map every possible access and activity within a company’s cloud environment. This is important, because cloud environments are a complex web that contain more than just people. Different services and machines within the cloud have their own identities too.

Sandy Bird, co-founder and chief technology officer of Sonrai Security, explained the situation in a July interview on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. “When we talk about identity, we always think of people. But it’s not, of course,” he said. “Sometimes it’s a machine; sometimes it’s a cloud service. It could be many different things. How does every single one of those identities get access to that given resource? And it’s not always as clear as ‘OK, well, here are the direct identities that can access this resource.’”

Sonrai Dig maps all of these identities and the data they need to access and compiles it into a graph data model that quickly surfaces the data relationships that exist between them. Unlike many solutions that only show singular Identity Access Management relationships, Sonrai Dig ties the data together to show all relationships in a single picture. With this, companies can see what the effective permission of each identity is, and also uncover hidden risks.

“It really helps by putting it in a graph, because we can actually see all of these interconnections,” Bird explained. “We can see how they’re interrelated and determine the exact effective permissions of any identity and what risks that may have.”

Each cloud environment can be viewed through a single pane of glass, with visual representations of security posture and risk. The platform also makes it possible to filter and obtain information on any single instance or object within a cloud environment.

With this single view, companies can more easily address infrastructure entitlement management, data classification and configuration management. The setup also makes it simple to enforce compliance, achieve and maintain least privilege and lock down critical data.

On the monitoring side, Sonrai Dig provides alerts through approximately 40 different channels, automatically directing any issues to the right teams or bots for remediation to eliminate alert fatigue.

Sonrai Security co-founder and Chief Executive Brendan Hannigan explained that his company’s approach of securing identities and data is the most logical way to safeguard public cloud computing environments, whether it’s Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud.

“Large enterprises have embraced this approach and our latest funding round supports our global expansion,” he said. “Istari’s unique value proposition of capital, global client relationships and thought leadership will be a catalyst for our business.”

Looking ahead, Sonrai Security said it will use the funds raised today to accelerate its research and development plans and expand its sales and marketing teams globally.

Here’s Bird’s full interview, where he discusses how companies can use the Sonrai Dig Platform to build a comprehensive cloud security architecture:

Image: Sonrai