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Cloud security solutions provider Zscaler has acquired Boston-based zero trust segmentation start-up Edgewise Networks, a move the vendor claims will broaden its cloud-native platform.
Founded in 2016 to eliminate the problems of data breach and application compromise against companies’ critical business applications, Edgewise Networks has made a name for itself securing application-to-application communications for public clouds and data centres.
According to Zscaler, the company’s technology works to verify the identity of application software, services and processes to achieve a zero trust environment which measurably reduces the attack surface and lowers the risk of application compromise and data breaches.
Edgewise’s solution discovers individual applications and their legitimate communication patterns and, using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) algorithms, automatically creating and enforcing authorised communication to provide application segmentation.
Given Zscaler’s existing offering, which works to secure connections between users and applications, Edgewise’s solution broadens the Zscaler cloud-native platform and secures application-to-application communication to deliver stronger security in public clouds and data centres.
“Zscaler was founded to innovate security in a cloud-first world,” Zscaler chairman and CEO Jay Chaudhry saud. “We are disrupting legacy network security, reducing business risk, improving the user experience, and consolidating security point products for our customers."
“Edgewise is highly innovative technology that enables application segmentation without having to do traditional network segmentation which is often done with virtual firewalls. We are excited to welcome the Edgewise team to the Zscaler family,” he added.
The deal, the terms of which have not been disclosed, follows on from the vendor’s recent acquisition of Cloudneeti, a cloud security posture management (CSPM) company that works to prevent and remediate application misconfigurations in software-as-a-service (SaaS), infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (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,” Chaudhry said in April.
“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. I am thrilled to welcome the Cloudneeti team to the Zscaler family,” he added.
