Zscaler bought Edgewise Networks for an undisclosed amount marking the security company’s second acquisition in two months.

Edgewise, a 4-year-old startup based in the Boston area, provides application microsegmentation and zero-trust networking. It has raised $18 million in two funding rounds.

Edgewise’s technology discovers individual applications and their legitimate communication patterns and using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning algorithms it automatically creates and enforces authorized communication to provide application segmentation. This prevents attacks from moving laterally within the network as east-west traffic.

The acquisition follows on the heels of Zscaler’s deal to buy Cloudneeti, a cloud security posture management company, which was announced last month.

“With the Cloudneeti acquisition we moved more into data protection,” said Punit Minocha, Zscaler SVP of business and corporate development. “We already had the user protection piece. And now we start to get into the application-to-application access piece [with Edgewise Networks], and so we believe this is a good rounding out of the portfolio. And it gives us a good step into something we haven’t done in the past, and our customers have asked for it.”

The company will continue selling Edgewise as a standalone product and then “gradually” begin integrating it with the Zscaler platform, Minocha said.

“[With Edgewise] we have a new product here that has a tremendous amount of potential, that has already been sold and validated by quite a few customers, so let’s not slow that down,” he said. “We have ZPA [Zscaler Private Access], and that is doing extremely well. Especially with COVID-19, the scaling traffic is unprecedented.”

Prior to the pandemic, the platform processed more than 100 billion transactions every day, Minocha said. “And ZPA has experienced well over 10x growth in the last few months,” he added. “We have two high-potential products. What we certainly don't want to do is, you know, try and integrate them and slow them down by any stretch. The mindset is: let’s keep selling them. And let’s build a plan to start doing integration.”

Zscaler has been steadily building out its cloud security platform over the past few years. The vendor started as a secure web gateway provider before adding next-generation firewall and zero-trust network access. Last year, it added out-of-band cloud access security broker (CASB) capabilities to its platform to provide visibility and enable data protection for software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.

In addition to these home-grown technologies, Zscaler has also added security capabilities through acquisitions. Prior to buying Edgewise and Cloudneeti, Zscaler acquired AI and machine learning startup TrustPath in August 2018, and browser isolation startup Appsulate in May 2019.