Cloud cybersecurity vendor Zscaler on Thursday announced plans to acquire Airgap Networks, a venture-backed startup selling network segmentation and secure access technologies.
Financial terms of the transaction were not released.
Airgap Networks, based in Silicon Valley, raised a total of $18.6 million in early-stage funding and built technologies to help companies embrace zero-trust principles like network segmentation and identity-based secure access.
The company’s Series A investors included Storm Ventures, Cervin, Engineering Capital and Sorenson Ventures.
In a statement announcing the transaction, Zscaler said the plan is to combine its Zero Trust SD-WAN suite with Airgap’s technology to protect so-called east-west traffic in branch offices, campuses, factories and plants with critical IT infrastructure.
“This will eliminate the need for east-west firewalls, NACs and microsegmentation and deliver greater operational simplicity,” Zscaler said of the acquisition.
Zscaler said it was impressed by Airgap’s agentless, identity-based approach to network segmentation which allows corporate defenders dynamically control access through continuous assessment of identity and context.
The software can also be used to gain visibility and policy enforcement at every connected endpoint without adding any software to those sensitive endpoints.
“This approach eliminates the risk of east-west lateral movement on local networks as well as the complexity of traditional segmentation approaches like east-west firewalls, without hardware upgrades or operational disruption,” Zscaler said.
Zscaler has been active on the M&A front in recent years, spending heavily to acquire startups Avalor, Edgewise Networks and Cloudneeti.
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