Oracle kicked off its annual OracleWorld customer conference in San Francisco Sunday by announcing it has agreed to acquire cloud security startup Palerra.

Palerra provides a Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB), which the company calls LORIC, to protect and assure compliance of applications, workloads and sensitive data stored across cloud services. Oracle said of the acquisition: "Palerra offers a unique combination of visibility into cloud usage, data security, user behavior analytics and security configuration, with automated incident responses." The Palerra technology allows customers to respond to security incidents in real time. Oracle will integrate it into Oracle Identity Cloud Services.

Peter Barker, Oracle senior vice president of identity management and security products, said in a blog post that the acquisition comes as organizations are aggressively moving sensitive data to the cloud, but have little faith that traditional network security tools and appliances work well in protecting the public cloud.

Want to know more about the cloud? Visit Light Reading Enterprise Cloud.

Palerra customers include service provider Ooyala, a Telstra subsidiary, VMWare, software provider BMC and investment bank Jefferies.

Founded three years ago, the startup's vision was to enable and accelerate enterprise cloud adoption by reducing security concerns, according to a blog post by Palerra co-founder and CEO Rohit Gupta, who says he and his co-founder, CTO Ganesh Kirti, plan to join Oracle.

Palerra was called Apprity when founded in 2013. It has raised $25 million in funding from investors including Norwest Partners and August Capital, according to Crunchbase. Terms of Oracle's acquisition of the startup were not disclosed.

— Mitch Wagner, , Editor, Light Reading Enterprise Cloud