As enterprise adoption of containers goes into high gear, Twistlock Ltd. is bolstering its efforts to capitalize on the trend.

The two-year-old startup today secured $17 million in funding from Polaris Partners, YL Ventures, TenEleven and Rally Ventures. Twistlock will use the capital to drive more demand for its container security software, which promises to help organizations detect vulnerabilities in their Docker deployments. The platform places a particular emphasis on identifying operational problems that violate compliance requirements.  

Twistlock 2.0, a new version that rolled out earlier this month, introduced a dedicated tool for monitoring such problems. Dubbed Compliance Explorer, it provides a centralized dashboard through which administrators can monitor the different components of their container environments. The console shows how well each item meets the relevant requirements, flags those that aren’t up to code and provides historical ratings dating back 30 days.

Compliance Explorer expands upon the security assessment features that Twistlock has provided since its earliest versions. The software can check a container environment against the financial industry’s PCI standard and the HIPAA regulations governing healthcare records, as a well as any custom rules that a company chooses to set. The latter feature is designed to accommodate the large number of organizations that go beyond the minimum requirements laid out by their sector’s security regulations.

For added measure, Twistlock also seeks out security risks of the malicious kind as part of the assessment process using a homegrown threat database. The startup draws on information from more than 30 different vulnerability and hacker activity feeds to stay up on top of the latest developments.

Twistlock value proposition has struck a chord in the market. The number of organizations using its platform tripled in the past year, with the installed base featuring insurance giant Aetna Inc., Booz Allen Hamilton Inc., Amazon Web Services Inc. and several other big names.

Twistlock has raised nearly $30 million in funding to date.

Image: Twistlock