Security startup vArmour announced a $41 million Series D today, a round partially led by service provider Telstra.

Redline Capital and "other strategic investors" also helped lead the round, which brings vArmour's total funding to $83 million. Today's round follows up a $21 million Series C in 2014, which was led by Columbus Nova Technology Partners, Citi Ventures, and Work-Bench Ventures.

The company's Distributed Security System (DSS) is part of the current wave of products for securing the innards of a data center. Traditional products have focused on making the perimeter impermeable, but the amount of cross-traffic going on inside a network — a byproduct of virtualization — has put a  greater emphasis on so-called east-west traffic.

Coincidentally, Citrix made a move in this area today as well, announcing a  Docker container version of the Netscaler application delivery controller (ADC).

Microsegmentation — the isolation of workloads from surrounding traffic — has become a key part of the new security philosophy. "Being able to partition workloads and apply controls (and prevent them from interacting with one another) enables organizations to strengthen the security of high-value assets/data and better support regulatory requirements," writes SDxCentral analyst Scott Raynovich in our "2016 Next-Gen Infrastructure Security Report."

While VMware has talked a lot about microsegmentation with its NSX network virtualization product, vArmour's partner in this area is Cisco. The companies announced in March that DSS is a security option for Cisco's Application-Centric Infrastructure (ACI).

Photo: Harshlight on Flickr. CC2.0 license. Photo has been cropped.