Israeli cloud-native data security startup Polar Security launched out of stealth mode today with $8.5 million in funding.

Glilot Capital Partners led the round. Also participating were IBI Tech Fund and angel investors, including Cloud Security Alliance founder and Chief Executive Jim Reavis, former RSA Chief Technology Officer Tim Belcher, former Qualys Inc. President Ann Johnson and IBM Security Vice President and General Manager Tom Noonan.

Founded by Dov Yoran, Guy Shanny — an entrepreneur who founded, built and sold a web vulnerability research and hosting company at age 14 — and Roey Yaacovi, Polar Security is seeking to answer an organization’s most critical data security and compliance questions. Those questions are where data stores exist, which stores hold sensitive information, who can and does access them, where data can flow and how to prevent potential data vulnerabilities and compliance violations.

Polar Security is addressing the issue where data creation has become chaotic and frantic with the migration to the cloud and the explosion in data stores. The company argues that it is nearly impossible to see, follow and protect managed and unmanaged data throughout a company’s workloads.

In their push for speed, developers are said to unintentionally create complex trails of “shadow data,” data that security and compliance teams don’t know exists — which presents a significant threat. Shadow data can include extremely sensitive business-dependent information, including IaaS databases, logs, backups, debug dumps and data within operational cloud services.

Polar Security’s agentless technology automates the discovery and classification of sensitive data across known and unknown cloud-native data stores. The platform automatically creates a complete data inventory, differentiating between actual and potential data flows to see and preempt every data security and compliance risk.

“To solve data security in the cloud, you must focus on the crown jewels — the data stores holding sensitive data — as fast as developers create new data,” Shanny explained. “We built Polar to help companies automate their data security across known and unknown data stores, to continuously prevent cloud data vulnerabilities and compliance violations at any scale — what was until now an unsolvable challenge.”

Image: Polar Security