Cloud security company Netskope today said it acquired Sift Security, a cloud infrastructure security startup, for an undisclosed amount.
Sift’s product, Cloud Hunter, uses machine learning, analytics, and graph visualization to detect and respond to threats across infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platforms including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.
Netskope plans to integrate the product into its cloud security platform. Its IaaS security capabilities already use multiple data sources to help customers address data loss prevention (DLP), threat protection, continuous configuration, and posture management, said Netskope CEO Sanjay Beri.
Integrating Sift’s technology will enable the platform to better “correlate, visualize, detect and remediate breaches and threats and incidents within IaaS environments,” he said. “Sift Security enhances Netskope’s ability to uniquely gather and visualize the richest set of contextualized data on transactions across nearly all of the services provided by the Netskope Security Cloud — including transaction visibility, DLP, threat protection, adaptive access control and anomaly detection.”
Also, Sift Security CEO Neil King will join Netskope to lead product strategy and management for Netskope for IaaS.
Menlo Park, California-based Sift was founded in 2014 and according to Crunchbase it has raised $3.3 million to date in an Angel investment round.
Netskope got its start in 2012 as a cloud access security broker (CASB) and has since raised $231.4 million.
In March Netskope expanded its cloud security platform to include web access, essentially taking its CASB technology and applying it to web traffic. This includes capabilities like threat detection and data protection, visibility across web use, real-time web analytics, and web classification and content filtering.
CASB M&A SceneWhile CASB is a relatively new technology, the sector has seen a burst of merger and acquisition activity over the past couple years.
Symantec acquired Blue Coat, and its CASB technology, for $4.65 billion in 2016. Shortly after, Cisco agreed to pay $293 million for Cloudlock, another CASB. And late last year McAfee reached a deal to buy Skyhigh Networks for an undisclosed amount and bring its CASB technology under a new cloud business unit.
Also late last year Gartner, which coined the term CASB and has called it “the fastest growing security category ever,” published its first CASB Magic Quadrant. The three “leaders” in the Magic Quadrant are Symantec, Skyhigh Networks (later purchased by McAfee), and Netskope.
Of the three Netskope is the only CASB that hasn’t been scooped up by a major security vendor.
In an earlier interview with SDxCentral, Beri said his company is not for sale. “We’re not interested [in being acquired],” he said. “Everybody who has acquired someone called Netskope first and we gave them the same answer: ‘we’re not interested.’ We’re in the early innings of our platform, and we have many more modules to release.”