Cloud security provider Netskope has acquired startup Sift Security, it announced yesterday.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but as part of the acquisition, Sift’s technology (including the Cloud Hunter platform) will be brought into the Netskope Security Cloud, and Sift Security’s technical employees and its CEO Neil King will join Netskope. Sift Security, which was founded in 2014, had raised $3.3 million in angel funding from Freeman Group.
Sift Security and its Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform Cloud Hunter use machine learning and anomaly detection to improve breach detection and response capabilities, and help secure cloud infrastructure services such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.
In his new role at Netskope, King will be leading product strategy and management for IaaS, including these cloud infrastructure services.
“Sanjay and team have an unmatched vision for the future of the security market, and we could not be happier to partner with Netskope as part of Sift’s next chapter.”
– Neil King, founder and CEO, Sift Security; Head of IaaS Security, Netskope
“Neil and the team at Sift have built an award-winning, best-of-breed solution for enterprises struggling to keep up with security and compliance requirements as they move workloads to the public cloud, and I welcome them all to Netskope to continue the next chapter with us,” said Sanjay Beri, Netskope’s founder and CEO. “The market is demanding a new approach to today’s challenging security problems, and the integration of Cloud Hunter into our ‘one cloud’ architecture will accelerate our journey toward making Netskope the next great independent, iconic security company.”
He elaborated on this in a blog post, saying: “Specifically, Sift enhances our ability to uniquely gather and visualize the richest set of contextualized data about transactions. This rich contextual data informs nearly all of the services provided by the Netskope Security Cloud, whether transaction visibility, DLP, threat protection, adaptive access control, anomaly detection, and many more.”
Both King and Beri also emphasised the importance of company culture in the decision.
“Netskope and Sift are very well aligned from a company culture point of view — this was one of the most important things we looked at when we started talking about joining forces with Netskope,” said King.
Beri added: “The Netskope team and I have had a wonderful experience with the Sift team since early this year, and I couldn’t be happier with how well we have aligned already and that Sift has joined the Netskope family.”
The market is demanding a new approach to today’s challenging security problems, and the integration of Cloud Hunter into our ‘one cloud’ architecture will accelerate our journey toward making Netskope the next great independent, iconic security company.
– Sanjay Beri, founder and CEO, Netskope
Many companies are moving towards cloud-based infrastructure as a way to handle remote working, storage space required for big data analytics, and issues such as identity and access management.
But while cloud storage has distinct benefits, it can also mean that very little data is actually kept on-premises, making it difficult to maintain complete visibility on where exactly that data is – and where it might be going. Over the years we’ve seen plenty of breaches caused by incorrect configuration of cloud servers – just in 2017, Accenture, Time Warner Cable and Uber all fell victim to this issue, to name just a few high profile cases.
According to King, the integration of Sift Security and Cloud Hunter into Netskope will allow users greater visibility into and control over their cloud infrastructure.
“Four years ago we set out to build a security solution that could detect, correlate, visualize and automatically respond to threats in infrastructure-as-a-service environments like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform,” said King. “We’re excited to combine those capabilities into the market-leading Netskope Security Cloud. Sanjay and team have an unmatched vision for the future of the security market, and we could not be happier to partner with Netskope as part of Sift’s next chapter.”
“The combined companies will provide customers with the most comprehensive and differentiated security cloud in the market,” he went on to say. “And we’re not stopping there — the innovation and strength in the market you’ll see from Netskope in the years ahead will continue to meet the demands of an enterprise being completely transformed by the cloud. I look forward to sharing more about those developments in the future as a Netskoper.”
