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Cyber security vendor Palo Alto Networks has entered into an agreement to acquire cloud threat defence vendor RedLock in a US$173 million deal.
Through the acquisition, Palo Alto Networks will add critical security analytics capabilities across multi-cloud environments to its cloud security offering, according to the vendor.
RedLock correlates disparate data sets, including resource configurations, user activities, network traffic, host vulnerabilities/activities and threat intelligence to provide the necessary context on risks. This reduces incident response time from weeks to seconds.
"Say, for example, that a developer accidentally leaks cloud access keys on a well-known forum such as Github, and that as a result of this, a hacker attempts to login to the cloud environment using those keys," explained Chris Morosco, product marketing director - NGFW, data centre, mobility and cloud security at Palo Alto Networks.
"RedLock’s fast analytics detect that the key is being used in an unusual location to perform an unusual activity – and immediately alerts the SOC team, with a full history of all activities associated with that key."
After the acquisition is complete, Palo Alto Networks will combine Evident, from Evident.io acquired in March by the vendor, and RedLock technologies to provide customers with cloud security analytics, advanced threat detection, continuous security, and compliance monitoring in a single offering anticipated early next year.
“We are thrilled to add RedLock's technology to our cloud security offerings," said Nikesh Arora, chairman and CEO at Palo Alto Networks.
"The addition of their technologies allows us to offer the most comprehensive security for multi-cloud environments, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure, and significantly strengthens our cloud strategy going forward."
The company expects that the new offering will help security teams respond faster to the most critical threats by replacing manual investigations with automated, real-time remediation and reports that highlight an organization's cloud risks.
"We are excited to join Palo Alto Networks to bring together the strength of our cloud analytics and their industry-leading compliance technologies to help security teams protect their organizations," said Varun Badhwar, co-founder and CEO at RedLock.
The acquisition, which is subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions, is expected to be completed by the end of October with RedLock co-founders, Varun Badhwar and Gaurav Kumar, expected to join Palo Alto Networks.
