F5 Networks announced a $68 million deal to acquire Threat Stack, a cloud security and workload protection company that it claims will grow its cloud security portfolio by enhancing visibility across the application infrastructure.

F5’s VP of Product Marketing Mark Weiner called the deal “a win-win” for both parties and their customers. F5 has “a lot of great traditional web application security components,” he said. “But seeing inside of these very modern workloads, the app infrastructure, the app workloads themselves, really is an extra benefit to our customers, particularly as they're distributed.” And this is the boost that Threat Stack's technology will provide.

Plus, Threat Stack will be able to take advantage of F5's resources including access to its thousands of customers, Weiner added.

Threat Stack is based in Boston and was founded in 2012. It raised around $72 million through six funding rounds, according to Crunchbase. F5 expects the translation will add about $15 million to its revenue for the fiscal year 2022.

Threat Stack offers risk identification and real-time threat detection across cloud workloads, and customers can manage their security tools and responses through its Cloud SecOps program. 

Through the deal, F5 plans to integrate its application and API protection products with Threat Stack’s cloud-native application protection capabilities to improve observability and actionable security insights.

Applications are a focal point for cybercriminals, and attacks, fraud, and disrupted customer experiences cost businesses more than $100 billion a year, according to F5.

As ​​applications are distributed across multiple environments and deeply interconnected through APIs, organizations’ infrastructure — including security strategies — must adapt, Weiner explained. F5 helps customers to adapt by offering real-time threat identification and detection, he added. 

Prior to Threat Stack, F5 has acquired three companies in the past three years.

F5 bought DevOps company NGINX in a $670 million deal in early 2019, which helped the vendor to expand to open-source, multi-cloud services. Later that year, F5 paid $1billion to buy Shape Security, and that deal brought Shape’s cloud-based application security software and artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics platform in house.

More recently, in January F5 closed its Volterra acquisition. Volterra’s VoltMesh service provides globally distributed networking and security for cloud-native, API-centric applications. 

Weiner served as chief marketing officer for Volterra before the acquisition. “In seven or six of my startups that have been acquired, I've never seen something integrate this quickly and make an impact on the company and on the customers,” Weiner said about the deal.

He calls the F5 platform “a great Swiss Army knife,” which adds blades through acquisitions. Volterra is a blade offering “distributed cloud service that you can put wherever you put your apps,” Weiner said.

Weiner explained that there are three main product groups for F5. In addition to the products based on the NGINX and BIG-IP platforms, there is also a security division that includes Shape, Volterra, and now Threat Stack.

He expects F5 will continue to focus on cloud visibility offerings, bring these capabilities the edge, and power adaptive applications.

The Threat Stack deal is expected to close in F5’s first quarter of fiscal year 2022 ending Dec. 31, 2021.