The perhaps not-so-surprising winners during the pandemic turned out to be security vendors with cloud access security broker (CASB), secure web gateway, and zero-trust networking technologies — all key secure access service edge (SASE) components. While these technologies’ stars were on the rise before COVID-19 forced the global workforce to telecommute from home, the pandemic gave them more urgency as employees began accessing corporate systems and cloud-based services from their home networks and devices.

“COVID killed the firewall,” said Anurag Kahol, Bitglass CTO and co-founder.

Bitglass is the last-standing original CASB. It also provides secure web gateways, anti-malware, and data loss prevention, and it recently partnered with Duo Security to add zero trust capabilities to its customers.

“It’s a good market for us right now because COVID forced everybody to be home,” Kahol said. “Our product, in a way, was long building for this use case where people are not in the office. You’re basically anywhere, and you connect to cloud applications, and your security has to move into the cloud. So that was the basic premise with which we have started off as a company. If all your applications, and users, and laptops, and phones, if everything is outside the company perimeter, then security can’t be tied to the perimeter.”

SDxCentral caught up with Kahol just hours after VMware announced a deal to buy disaster recovery and software-defined storage provider Datrium. This is relevant to Bitglass for a couple of reasons.

First, Bitglass is the only leading CASB vendor that hasn’t been acquired by a larger security company. Gartner’s most recent Magic Quadrant for CASBs named Bitglass a “leader” in the sector, along with Microsoft, McAfee, Netskope, and Symantec. McAfee and Symantec both acquired their CASB technology: McAfee bought Skyhigh Networks in late 2017, and Symantec purchased Blue Coat Systems for $4.65 billion a year prior. Also in 2016 Cisco agreed to pay $293 million for Cloudlock, another CASB.

VMware doesn’t have a CASB or secure web gateway technology in house. Meanwhile, VMware’s been pushing its SASE software stack, but it’s missing these important security capabilities. And Bitglass has been promoting itself as a “powerful SASE,” but it’s missing the SD-WAN component, which VMware has.

Kahol said that Bitglass is “looking at more of a partnership,” to fill the SD-WAN hole in its SASE architecture, but he won’t say with which SD-WAN vendors. There’s no denying that Bitglass makes an attractive acquisition target, especially for a deep-pocketed company like VMware that has been on a buying spree lately, including two security vendors in two months.

Has VMware or anyone else approached Bitglass about a sale? Kahol laughed when asked. He did, however, admit “there are always conversations. It’s a hot market, we have a hot product, which solves these problems, and that automatically makes the company valuable.”

Investors seem to agree. Even before SASE became the buzziest security trend of 2020 and the pandemic made cloud security a top priority for the C-suite, Bitglass closed a $70 million Series D funding round last year bringing its total haul to $150 million.

CASB technology secures an enterprise’s data running on someone else’s infrastructure by enforcing that enterprise’s security policy in the cloud. It’s important because there’s a shared responsibility model when it comes to cloud security: vendors like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure are responsible for protecting their public cloud infrastructure, but the enterprise is responsible for protecting its workloads running on those servers.

In addition to CASB, Bitglass’ SmartEdge Secure Web Gateway pushes security to the endpoint using an agent, which means the on-device secure web gateway locally terminates SSL, inspects all network activity, blocks threats, and prevents data leakage.

Meanwhile, Bitglass partners with a slew of companies, including Splunk for security information and event management integration and CrowdStrike for Cylance for zero-day threat protection, among others. Earlier this month it also teamed up with Duo Security, owned by Cisco, to integrate that vendor’s multi-factor authentication and zero trust capabilities with Bitglass’ platform.

Kahol said Bitglass’ core technologies position it well in the SASE market, while its partner integrations give it an added edge.

“In the security stack I basically think of CASBs, and now SASE, as essentially the main network security platform — kind of what a firewall was for your network security,” Kahol said. “Firewall was the central point of policy enforcement. And essentially SASE is now becoming that other central point, but now delivered from the cloud. So these integrations are a big part of what we do as a platform. Once you sort of control the pipes through which all traffic is flowing and all users are going to their applications,” which is what Bitglass does, he added, “all these integrations make a lot of sense.”