Akamai today said it acquired Irish network security company Asavie in an all-cash deal to boost its 5G strategy.

The companies didn’t disclose financial details.

Asavie, based in Dublin, developed a platform that automates and manages security, performance, and access policies for mobile and IoT devices. Its tier-one operator customers include AT&T, Verizon, O2, Singtel, Telefónica, and Vodafone.

Akamai will fold Asavie’s platform into its Security and Personalization Services product line that it sells to carriers, which embed the technology into the bundles that they sell to their enterprise customers.

“What’s notable about the Asavie solution is that, as more IoT devices connect over cellular and 5G, it has been shown to be very easy to scale and protect them,” said Tom Leighton, CEO and co-founder, Akamai Technologies, in a statement.

The acquisition complements Akamai’s $180.3 million Nominum purchase in 2017. Nominum provided security for carriers based on broadband connections. “So our focus, from a carrier perspective, had been on the fixed aspect,” said John Morgan, Akamai Technologies VP of product and operations. “This [Asavie acquisition] expands us to be able to offer services in mobile and especially 5G. We’re really excited about [Asavie’s] ability to technically secure the end enterprise user that’s on a mobile or IoT device and not have a client software.”

This is important because IoT devices are difficult to secure at scale using agent-based technology for several reasons. Different devices use different standards that may not communicate with each other, industrial sensors are often in hard-to reach locations, and the sheer number of connected devices that 5G will enable makes manual security updates and patches nearly impossible.

“You think about the billions of IoT devices out there — who’s going to manage clients on them? This is where we see the growth of IoT in 5G where 5G can handle a factor of X, 10, 20 hundred more than 4G and 3G,” Morgan said. “This is a way to help secure those devices.”

This clientless architecture is particularly well-suited for regulated verticals, such as healthcare, financial services, and education, and Akamai expects Asavie’s technology to help these industries as they transition to a secure “office anywhere” environment as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The acquisition comes a couple weeks after Akamai updated its secure access service edge (SASE) stack with data loss prevention, application visibility and control, and end-to-end security for DNS traffic. These additions will further support employees working from home because of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as remote, distributed infrastructure and workforces in the future, said Patrick Sullivan, Akamai CTO of security and strategy, in an earlier interview with SDxCentral.