Israeli security startup GuardiCore has closed a US$11m round of funding for its new system designed specifically to secure data centers.

Guardicore’s CEO Pavel Gurvich said the company will use the funds to create a new genre of network security.

The inventions will use software-defined networking (SDN) methods and take advantage of new advances in virtualization to create a defense that can work at multi-terabit traffic rates.

Gurvich described GuardiCore’s mission as creating advanced tools to win the war against cyber-attacks, since traditional security is ‘far from complete’.

Guardicore will aim to address the growing frequency of inside crimes that are committed as data centers becoming increasingly lucrative targets for cyber-attacks.

The tendency for modern data center design to include applications that cross security perimeters has created a weakness, according to Gurvich, which is exacerbated by the adoption of intra-data center (“east-west”) traffic at terabit levels.

This means that traditional systems (such as intrusion detection and prevention, sandboxing and deep packet inspection) cannot keep pace with the speed of data traffic as it moves inside data centers.

This makes security impossible to apply internally, as it is too slow.

GuardiCore aims to create a suite of security products that match the data rates of traffic moving in virtual environments.

The venture funding was led by Battery Ventures, whose general partner Scott Tobin will join GuardiCore’s board.

Tobin said tracking and eliminating intruders inside data center networks is the next most important survival skill that the industry must develop.

“Traditional security techniques have focused on keeping the bad guys out of the perimeter. GuardiCore’s approach assumes you have already been compromised and provides levels of visibility and protection that were previously unattainable,” Tobin said.

GuardiCore’s Active Honeypot is entering evaluation at private clouds and data centers of leading enterprise customers and data center service providers.

“As the data center evolves to a more software-defined model, enterprises need to think about security in radically different ways,” Tobin said.