Moving to complement its current cyber security offerings around endpoint protection, McAfee on Monday said it has agreed to acquire Skyhigh Networks, a leader in software technology that helps provides security between an organization’s on-premise infrastructure and a cloud infrastructure.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Both companies are privately owned.
“Skyhigh is an ideal complement to McAfee’s strategy, one focused on building and optimizing mission-critical cybersecurity environments for the future,” Christopher Young, McAfee’s CEO, said in a blog post discussing the deal. “Cloud security has historically been an afterthought of, or impediment to, cloud adoption.”
Young said that Skyhigh pioneered the cloud access security broker product category “that analysts describe as one of the fastest growing areas of information security investments of the last five years,” adding that Skyhigh continues to innovate in this area. The CASB technology allows organizations to extend their security to cloud services.
A McAfee spokesman told Defense Daily via an email response to questions that the pending deal accelerates the company’s three-point strategy, which identifies the endpoint and cloud as “the architectural control points,” is aimed at bringing more automation and analytics to the security operations center, and an open systems approach that makes it easier for buyers to purchase the security technologies they want for seamless integration and information sharing.
With the acquisition, which McAfee expects to close in early 2018 following regulatory approvals, McAfee will stand up a new cloud business unit led by Rajiv Gupta, CEO of Skyhigh.
“As part of McAfee, we will have access to even greater resources to accelerate delivery of Skyhigh’s product roadmap, further advancing our vision of making cloud the most secure environment for business,” Gupta said in his own blog post. “And combined with McAfee’s endpoint security capabilities and operations center solutions with actionable threat intelligence, analytics and orchestration, we will be able to deliver of a set of end-to-end security capabilities unique in the industry.”
The McAfee spokesman said that Skyhigh has over 300 employees. Neither company had “formal” financial advisers for the deal, he said.
Skyhigh’s customers include more than 30 percent of the Fortune 100 companies.