Technology giant IBM on Tuesday announced a deal to acquire Polar Security, an early stage startup in the red-hot data security posture management (DSPM) category.
Financial terms of the transaction were not released, but some reports said IBM paid roughly $60 million for Polar Security.
Polar Security, based in Israel and backed by Glilot Capital Partners, raised $8.5 million in seed-stage funding and emerged from stealth just over a year ago with software to help organizations track, manage and security identities and data flowing through cloud deployments.
“The pandemic drove a sharp increase in cloud adoption, leaving organizations to grapple with a deluge of cloud data that led to more silos and “shadow data”– sensitive data not being tracked or managed,” said Dinesh Nirmal, VP of Product at IBM Software.
In a note announcing the acquisition, Nirmal said Polar Security’s product works to help companies discover, continuously monitor and secure cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS) application data – addressing the growing shadow data problem.
“Polar Security is a pioneer of data security posture management (DSPM) – an emerging cybersecurity segment that reveals where sensitive data is stored, who has access to it, how it’s used, and identifies vulnerabilities with the underlying security posture, including with policies, configurations, or data usage,” IBM Said.
Nimal said the plan is for IBM to integrate Polar Security’s DSPM technology within its Guardium family of data security products.
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Ryan Naraine is Editor-at-Large at SecurityWeek and host of the popular Security Conversations podcast series. He is a security community engagement expert who has built programs at major global brands, including Intel Corp., Bishop Fox and GReAT. Ryan is a founding-director of the Security Tinkerers non-profit, an advisor to early-stage entrepreneurs, and a regular speaker at security conferences around the world.
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