IBM inked a deal to buy cloud security posture management startup Spanugo for an undisclosed amount. Big Blue plans to integrate Spanugo’s software into its public cloud to help meet the security and compliance needs of its customers in regulated industries like banking and health care.

Cloud security posture management vendors provide security processes and tools to prevent and fix cloud misconfigurations, which are the leading cause of data breaches and compliance violations in cloud applications. And as such, these companies are hot mergers and acquisitions targets for larger security vendors.

“Spanugo matches really well with where we’re headed in addressing regulated industries because of their understating of what it takes to automate recourse discovery, do assessment, do analysis, do monitoring, and do remediation,” said Hillery Hunter, IBM fellow, VP, and CTO of IBM Cloud. “And there are nuances in understanding that space and what it mean to have visibility into what’s going on versus create evidence for audit that Spanugo and their leadership understand really well. So they align incredibly well with what we are wanting to do for not only financial services but also you key health care clients that we’re working with, insurance, telco, and others that have those that need for both visibility and control, but through a regulated-industry lens.”

Late last year IBM announced that it is developing what it calls the world’s first financial services public cloud to address those organizations’ regulatory compliance and security needs. When it’s available, IBM says this new public cloud will provide preventative and compensatory controls for financial services regulatory workloads, multi-architecture support, and proactive and automated security.

Adding Spanugo’s software to the financial services public cloud will help IBM more quickly develop a security control center that will allow customers to define compliance profiles, manage controls, and monitor compliance across their organization in real-time.

The acquisition reflects “our continued investment in public cloud for related industries,” Hunter said. And it comes as a handful of public cloud providers battle to gain market share in an increasingly competitive environment.

More than half of the first quarter 2020 cloud market belonged to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft, according to Synergy Research Group, which showed AWS with a 32% market share, Microsoft at 18%, and Google at 8%. Behind the big three, Alibaba and IBM both had 5% of the market.

While it likely won’t catch up to Amazon anytime soon, IBM has long positioned its public cloud as the security-first public cloud for enterprises. And in the last couple of years it has beefed up its public cloud security capabilities including partnering with encryption startup Fortanix on confidential computing and “keep your own key” technology, which gives enterprises the ability to retain control of their own encryption keys and the hardware security modules that protect them so customers (not public cloud providers) are the only ones who can control access to their data.

“It’s a continuation of our focus on mission critical workloads,” Hunter said. “We’re aggressively investing in public cloud and in companies that bring unique value to our public cloud portfolio.”