DigitalOcean Inc. is pursuing an aggressive development roadmap to counter the competition from Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp. and the other bigger players in the cloud market.

The provider passed another milestone today after launching a native firewall for its infrastructure as a service platform. It’s designed to reduce the amount of effort involved in securing workloads hosted on its platform, which until now required developers to manually configure their own firewall. Now, they can enforce access restrictions through a centralized console that provides control over all the servers in a deployment.

The update holds broad significance for DigitalOcean’s growth strategy. The startup attracted more than a million users since launching by making it easier for developers to rent infrastructure than the competition, which means that any added convenience strengthens the very core of its value proposition.

Moreover, the new firewall should enable DigitalOcean to better compete for important workloads with heightened security requirements. Removing the need to install and manage a deployment’s network defenses manually reduces the risk of human error occurring during configuration, which in turn means fewer flaws for hackers to exploit. The result, according to the startup, is that companies can defend their deployments more effectively.

The firewall is part of a broader plan by DigitalOcean to attract enterprise clients. The idea is to have the developers that use the platform for hosting personal projects bring it into the workplace. To that end, the startup has been adding features designed to streamline the management of large-scale deployments.

The most recent addition arrived two months ago in the form of a monitoring tool that allows companies to check how their infrastructure is used. It tracks the amount of hardware that each instance consumes, displays key details about the processes inside and alerts the administrator on call when certain utilization thresholds are crossed.

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