San Francisco-based CloudPassage announced that it landed an additional $14m in funding led by Tenaya Capital, with participation from previous investors Benchmark Capital and Musea Ventures. Brian Melton, managing director at Tenaya Capital, will join CloudPassage’s board of directors. The company’s previous round was led by Benchmark and saw Kevin Harvey, general partner at Benchmark, join the company’s board. This latest round brings the company’s total funding to $20.5m, and will likely be used to expand CloudPassage’s headcount and fuel the development of additional product roadmap items.

With the spring thaw, new life emerges from its slumber, and it seems that companies are following suit. After a long, cold recession, we’re starting to see hopeful signs of blossoms, particularly in security. Proofpoint broke the ice in December 2011 with a planned $50m IPO, and Splunk followed in January with its own $125m debut. (Both of those companies are expected to price next week.) Although SafeNet pulled its offering last month, the forward momentum is clear, with Palo Alto Networks’ filing being the latest and largest at $175m.

Palo Alto has enjoyed a high profile in the industry, with its application control features that prompted many other vendors to add them to their own lines. Despite the current competition, the company enjoys an enviable popularity rating: it was listed at the top of the ‘exciting vendors’ list in the latest security survey of IT executives by TheInfoPro, a service of 451 Research, and with 44% of respondents saying they would be spending more money on application-aware firewalls in 2012, Palo Alto looks to benefit most from the firewall fever.

(Read the full report here. A 451 Research subscription is required but a free trial is available here).

San Francisco-based Splunk has released version 2.0 of its Splunk App for Enterprise Security to reinforce its commitment to the security capabilities of the company’s flagship software for collecting, indexing and harnessing machine data. Tied closely to its Splunk App for Enterprise Security 2.0 release, the company released Splunk Enterprise 4.3 with a focus on ease of use, manageability and a new non-flash user interface aimed at enabling the use of mobile devices for viewing and managing the product. Finally, Splunk has been granted US Patent No. US 8,112,425 B2 – a timely award given Splunk’s pending IPO. This is Splunk’s second patent. In 2011, Splunk was issued a patent for organizing and understanding machine data through use of a ‘machine data web.’ The technology covered by these patents helps power Splunk Enterprise 4.3.

(Read the full report here. A 451 Research subscription is required but a free trial is available here).