The venture capital community’s appetite for cloud security startups reached another height this morning after Palerra Inc. snagged $17 million in financing to build out its managed threat detection and response service. The round continues a flurry of recent funding activity in that space.

Investors previously injected the same amount into a second emerging provider of cloud-based security monitoring called ProtectWise Inc. that likewise focuses on helping organizations catch hackers faster. Both leverage machine learning algorithms in their respective services to filter malarious activity from the massive amounts of normal traffic traveling through the enterprise, but that’s where the similarity ends.

Whereas its fellow recently-funded startup concentrates its efforts around protecting corporate networks, Palerra is directing its attention to the growing amounts of corporate data kept in the cloud, where administrators don’t have control over the underlying infrastructure. That aggrevates the already difficult challenge of enforcing security policies on an entire organization worth of files.

But large providers do offer a small consolation in the form of access to usage logs, which the startup’s namesake service collects and analyzes to understand how workers interact with each of their cloud applications. Palerra uses that data as a reference to identify suspicious changes in the habits of a particular employee, such as a sudden surge of remote log-ins or increased sharing of files with users outside the organization, that may indicate malicious activity.

The service then correlates such as actions with information from third-party intelligence sources to help companies identify exactly what they’re dealing with. That avoids the need for the security team to perform a manual assessment of each incident, which add up to a lot of time in large corporate environments, especially when counting false positives. Rounding out the defenses is a component that checks the configuration of the services used in the organization for potential vulnerabilities.

That focus on the specific requirements of each cloud application is both a major strength for Palerra and a weakness that currently limits the scope of its service to only a handful of major providers. But the new $17 million in funding from August Capital and existing backers Norwest Venture Partners (NVP), Wing Venture Capital and Engineering Capital should provide the startup with ample resources to remedy the situation with more third party support.

Palerra also plans to use the capital on expanding sales and marketing efforts. Meanwhile, Vivek Mehra of August is joining the board as part of the investment, which brings its total raised so far to a healthy $25 million.