Technology powerhouse Palo Alto Networks is officially on a billion-dollar shopping spree in the cloud data security space.
One week after announcing plans to spend about $400 million to purchase data security posture management startup Dig Security, Palo Alto on Monday said it plans to buy enterprise browser play Talon Cyber Security in a deal pegged at $625 million.
The acquisitions signal an aggressive push by Palo Alto to match rival Cisco’s shopping spree and beef up its own product offerings in the enterprise cloud data security space.
Talon, a hot-shot Israeli startup selling a secure browser to enterprise customers, raised about $125 million in multiple funding rounds and has gained traction with software that helps businesses deal with risks from unmanaged devices.
According to Palo Alto vice president Anand Oswal, the plan is to bake Talon’s enterprise browser technology into its Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) suite to secure all devices – managed and unmanaged – with complete zero-trust principles.
Oswal said current approaches to securing unmanaged devices are ineffective and are forcing corporate defenders to either ignore security entirely in favor of flexibility and user experience, or to adopt cumbersome technologies that add operational complexities.
With the Talon purchase, he said Palo Alto gets new technology to enable unmanaged devices to securely access enterprise apps and protect them from malware, phishing and keylogger-type attacks.
Oswal said the new technology also lets Palo Alto provide data security controls natively in the browser to prevent data exfiltration and software that makes it easy for IT administrators to onboard new users and have a single sign-on (SSO) integration framework on all devices and operating systems.
Palo Alto’s intent to buy into the enterprise browser space comes as Microsoft jostled its way into the market with a new product promising a native browsing experience tightly integrated with enterprise-grade security and manageability features.
Redmond’s strategic move came with an automatic rollout to billions of customers signing in with Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory) and is being viewed as disruptive to the startup ecosystem where hundreds of millions have been wagered on companies in the enterprise browser category.
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