San Jose, Calif.-based cloud security firm Zscaler (NASDAQ: ZS) said it will acquire Redmond, Wash.-based startup Cloudneeti for an undisclosed sum. Cloudneeti offers cloud security posture management to prevent and remediate misconfigurations in SaaS, IaaS and PaaS.
“Cloudneeti augments Zscaler’s data protection capabilities and will dramatically improve organizations’ cloud security by discovering and eliminating some of the most common causes of data breaches and compliance violations,” said Jay Chaudhry, Chairman and CEO of Zscaler. “Whether caused by SaaS applications being configured incorrectly or a developer accidentally misconfiguring a new public cloud application, these preventable data protection lapses are behind some of the biggest breaches in history.”
3,813 breaches were reported in the first half of 2019. From these incidents, 4.1 billion records were exposed, and — according to IBM — 78% were exposed because of misconfigurations. Gartner had warned in January 2019, “Nearly all successful attacks on cloud services are the result of customer misconfiguration, mismanagement and mistakes. Security and risk management leaders should invest in cloud security posture management (CSPM) processes and tools to proactively and reactively identify and remediate these risks.” It added that CSPM could reduce misconfiguration-based cloud security incidents by 80%.
Across Office 365, Azure and AWS, Cloudneeti’s product collects actual configurations from the service providers, compares them against best practices, identifies misconfigurations and fixes them to prevent breaches and ensure continuous compliance. It provides compliance scores for each compliance framework, and the compliance status for all security policies. This shows both compliant and non-compliant cloud resources, and identifies the most important fixes via a risk matrix. This is based on 1500 security policies across 13 different compliance frameworks, including HIPAA, NIST, PCI, GDPR and others.
Cloudneeti was founded by Gururaj Pandurangi (CEO) in 2017, “with a vision to end breaches and compliance violations that are caused by entirely preventable misconfigurations as applications move to the cloud,” said Pandurangi. “Cloudneeti was built in the cloud for the cloud, which is why Zscaler is such an exciting technological and cultural fit for the team.”
Zscaler was founded in 2008 by Jay Chaudhry (CEO), and Kailash Kailash (chief architect). Cloudneeti is the firm’s third acquisition, having bought TrustPath (an artificial intelligence algorithm developer) in August 2018, and Appsulate (a web isolation platform) in May 2019. In August 2015, Zscaler raised $100 million in a series B funding round led by late stage investor TPG, and had an initial public offering (IPO) on the NASDAQ exchange in March 2018.
Related: Trend Micro Acquires Cloud Security Firm Cloud Conformity
Related: AppOmni Raises $10 Million to Help Companies Prevent Cloud Misconfigurations
Related: NSA Shares Guidance on Mitigating Cloud Vulnerabilities
Related: Zscaler Raises $38 Million To Protect Businesses Through the Cloud
Kevin Townsend is a Senior Contributor at SecurityWeek. He has been writing about high tech issues since before the birth of Microsoft. For the last 15 years he has specialized in information security; and has had many thousands of articles published in dozens of different magazines – from The Times and the Financial Times to current and long-gone computer magazines.
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