McAfee acquires Skyhigh Networks cloud security provider, with the aim of ‘establishing the leading company to provide the cybersecurity architecture of the future.’
Skyhigh Networks, with other organizations such as Netskope, is in the ‘cloud access security broker’ (CASB) space, defined by Gartner as “on-premises, or cloud-based security policy enforcement points, placed between cloud service consumers and cloud service providers to combine and interject enterprise security policies as the cloud-based resources are accessed.”
To explain it in a simple way, CASBs are gatekeepers ensuring traffic between on-premises devices and cloud providers are compliant. Skyhigh secured a total of $106.5 million in funding across four rounds, with the most recent being a $40m series D. At the time, the company said it would use the money to ‘carry (itself) to productivity’.
It has been assumed that Rajiv Gupta, Skyhigh CEO, will run McAfee’s new cloud business unit, with Skyhigh’s existing organizational structure remaining ‘generally intact’, McAfee said. The move can also be seen in the wake of McAfee’s structure; the company announced in April it was operating as a new standalone company, in the process closing the funding put in place by Intel, who purchased the security provider in 2011 and called it Intel Security for the past three years.
Gupta said, “Becoming part of McAfee is the ideal next step in realising Skyhigh Networks’ vision of not simply making the cloud secure, but making it the most secure environment for business.”
He further added, “McAfee will provide global scale to further accelerate Skyhigh’s growth, with the combined company providing leading technologies and solutions across cloud and endpoint security – categories Skyhigh and McAfee respectively helped create, and the two architectural control points for enterprise security.”
The company has not disclosed the financial terms of the acquisition.
