Sometimes the fastest way to add new capabilities to a product portfolio is to acquire them.
On Oct. 3, Palo Alto Networks announced that it is acquiring privately held threat defense vendor RedLock for $173 million in cash. The deal is expected to close during Palo Alto Networks’ first quarter of its fiscal 2019 year. RedLock’s technology will help bolster the cloud security capabilities that Palo Alto Networks provides to its customers.
“We built a technology platform that’s entirely cloud-based and provides very quick time to value, since customers can just turn it down through APIs,” Varun Badhwar, CEO and co-founder of RedLock, said in a video post. “We love to shine the light and show our customers how to safely move into public cloud.”
RedLock was founded in September 2015 and emerged from stealth alongside its first product in May 2017. The company had raised a total of $12 million in venture funding from multiple investors, including Sierra Ventures, Dell Technologies Capital and Storm Ventures.
RedLock’s core technology is the Cloud 360 Platform, which provides a series of cloud security capabilities, including cloud forensics, suspicious activity detection and compliance management.
Badhwar said that in the move to the public cloud, organizations tend to face several challenges. One them is dealing with the ephemerality of the cloud and understanding what is out there and deployed, as well as who the developers are that are launching resources. The second challenge is all about speed and agility, making sure that developers can do the right things at all times. Another key challenge cited by Badhwar is understanding how to do threat detection and response in the cloud.
Integrating RedLock, Evident.io Technology
Palo Alto Networks plans on combining RedLock’s technologies with some of its existing assets. On March 14, Palo Alto Networks acquired Evident.io for $300 million, bringing its suite of public cloud security and compliance automation technologies into the portfolio.
The combination of RedLock and Evident.io is expected to lead to the development of a new unified offering in 2019 that will combine security monitoring, analytics and advanced threat detection.
“We are thrilled to add RedLock’s technology to our cloud security offerings,” Nikesh Arora, chairman and CEO of Palo Alto Networks, wrote in a statement. “The addition of their technologies allows us to offer the most comprehensive security for multi-cloud environments, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure, and significantly strengthens our cloud strategy going forward.”
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.