Symantec has announced the acquisition of cloud security company Luminate Security. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but according to Israeli publication Globes, sources close to the deal estimate the price at approximately $200 million.
Luminate Security, founded in 2017, aims to turn the BeyondCorp concept into a SaaS solution. Its Secure Access Cloud™ agentless solution is intended to let users connect to corporate applications without using traditional VPN appliances, and without granting access to the entire network.
As corporate applications continue to move to the cloud, IT organizations need innovative approaches to address the complexity and security challenges of providing users anywhere, anytime access.
Art Gilliland, EVP and GM Enterprise Products, Symantec
“Now and in the future, we anticipate more and more corporations will operate their business on infrastructure that is managed by multiple third parties such as Azure, AWS and Google,” said Greg Clark, president and CEO of Symantec. “In this rapidly evolving world, trust in external infrastructure must be carefully considered as corporations can outsource infrastructure but must also remain responsible for data and users.”
The integration of Luminate Security’s products into Symantec’s Integrate Cyber Defense Platform is intended to enable frictionless access to applications, whether in the cloud or on-premises, without sacrificing security.
“As a partner, our integrations with Symantec were successful in reducing complexity and increasing security for joint customers,” said Ofer Smadari, CEO of Luminate Security. “With this next step, we look forward to fully integrating across the entire portfolio and delivering even more innovation to offer complete security for the Cloud Generation.”
With more than 70 acquisitions under its belt, Symantec is well known for its strategy of building its portfolio through purchases, particularly of point products. That strategy seems to be an effective one, as the results of our ‘Who Secures The UAE’ project show – by absorbing popular, well-known providers, such as Blue Coat (which accounted for a significant proportion of Symantec’s votes in our research), Symantec acquires not just the company’s expertise but also its reputation and customers.
More recently, however, Symantec’s acquisition patterns seem to have shifted – since the acquisition of LifeLock and BlueCoat in 2016, both post-IPO at the time, its purchases have been of relatively young companies (none founded before 2010) in the early stages of funding, such as Luminate Security.
Others of these recent acquisitions include Appthority (specialising in enterprise mobile threat protection), SurfEasy (specialising in VPNs) and Skycure (specialising in mobile threat defense), indicating that hyperconnectivity and the cloud are a key area of interest for Symantec at present.
Symantec isn’t alone in that – demands for flexible working and constant access to apps are weighing on many corporate minds, in the security department and beyond.
“As corporate applications continue to move to the cloud, IT organizations need innovative approaches to address the complexity and security challenges of providing users anywhere, anytime access,” said Art Gilliland, EVP and GM Enterprise Products at Symantec. “Luminate Security’s agentless, cloud-delivered service solves these problems and adds a powerful Software Defined Perimeter capability to our Integrated Cyber Defense Platform.”
