Palo Alto Networks today announced its intention to acquire Dig Security, an Israeli cloud security start-up specializing in data security posture management (DSPM). The emerging domain addresses deep data-related risks in the cloud.

The two companies didn't disclose the exact financial details of the transaction, but the deal is reportedly to be valued at over $300 million.

Dig Security has undergone three funding rounds to date, with its most recent round in June 2023 led by Samsung Venture Investment, bringing its total funding to $45 million. The startup scored $34 million in its Series A and $11 million in the seed funding round.

Its founders, Dan Benjamin, Ido Azran and Gad Akuka, will continue to lead their teams as they transition to become part of Palo Alto Networks' Prisma Cloud team upon the deal's completion.

The acquisition comes at a time when nearly 70% of organizations have data stored in public clouds, the increasing adoption of generative AI technologies, and the relentless surge in the volume and impact of cloud data breaches. This underscores the essential role of DSPM in any robust cloud security strategy, Palo Alto Networks noted.

"As companies build AI-enabled applications, there will be a substantial increase in the amount of data transferred to the cloud,” Palo Alto Networks Chief Product Officer Lee Klarich said in a statement. “Dig's highly innovative DSPM technology helps safely enable this shift, and its dedicated team will complement and help advance Palo Alto Networks' strengths across cloud security.”

Ankur Shah, SVP of products of Prisma Cloud at Palo Alto Networks, echoed these sentiments, highlighting that "Dig lets security teams see and secure their data across multicloud environments. This visibility and security is becoming increasingly important in the age of generative AI.”

The security giant recently unveiled its Prisma Cloud Darwin release to specifically address the longstanding gap between developers and security professionals. Both the Darwin release and the Dig Security acquisition are part of the vendor’s code to the cloud security offerings.

“Dig's innovation, coupled with Prisma Cloud's leading code-to-cloud intelligence highlighted in the recent Darwin release, will create what CISOs need to drive complete cloud security and data protection with a single, integrated, cloud-native platform,” Shah touted.

Dig Security’s DSPM technology is designed to enable organizations to discover, classify, monitor, and protect sensitive data across all cloud data stores. Palo Alto Networks plans to integrate this technology into its Prisma Cloud platform.

IBM recently also announced a DSPM startup acquisition — Polar Security. “DSPM, while being a relatively new technology category, has attracted strong attention from customers and investors alike, largely due to the pervasive problem it addresses around data security in the cloud,” Eric Maass, director of data security product management, IBM Security, told SDxCentral in an earlier interview.

But what is DSPM? DSPM focuses on deep data-related risks starting from discovery, compared to cloud security posture management (CSPM) has traditionally focused on cloud infrastructure and compute workloads.

DSPM can aid organizations in discovering shadow data, classifying sensitive data, and managing the posture or configuration of their data stores, along with any policy violations that may be occurring, according to Maass.