Armor, the security-minded cloud hosting provider, is putting the finishing touches on a service to extend its secure cloud to other locations.

The Armor Anywhere service, introduced last year, was first set up to extend Armor's secure environment into Microsoft Azure deployments. The service now works with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and can reach into a private enterprise network as well.

AWS and Azure are OK with this. "We're providing a service they're not interested in getting into, which is that per-customer security," says Jeff Schilling, Armor's chief of operations and security.

The service works by adding a small agent to virtual machines. The agent communicates back to Armor's own security operations center, which can then keep watch over the network and interpret what it sees.

What the customer is getting is the intelligence behind Armor's own cloud. Originally named FireHost, the Dallas-based company was founded with the goal of designing the most secure cloud possible.

One variation on Armor Anywhere is that Armor could aggregate the data coming from monitoring devices and other security elements that are already on a network. The company has a number of managed service provider partners "that are building out this infrastructure but have nowhere to send the data," Schilling says.

Neither service is meant to be a substitute for running a network inside Armor's own data center. "Inside our private cloud, we can protect our customers a lot better, because we can control the entire stack," Schilling says.

Armor Anywhere has been available in some form since last year, but its official soft launch came in April, and its debut as a full-fledged production service will come this week during the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas.

"We have about 20 customers on it right now, and we've grown very confident that the product is ready to scale," Schilling says.

A year ago, Armor had talked about issuing a complete version of Armor Anywhere by the end of 2015. But building tools that would work in all network environments, while also watching for regulatory compliance for a variety of industries, proved even more difficult than the company had expected, Schilling says.