McAfee has acquired cloud access security broker (CASB) solution provider Skyhigh Networks for an undisclosed sum. Together, McAfee and Skyhigh will create a company that helps organizations build and optimize mission-critical cybersecurity environments, McAfee CEO Chris Young said in a prepared statement.
More than 300 Skyhigh employees will join McAfee as part of the transaction, Young stated. In addition, Skyhigh CEO Rajiv Gupta will join McAfee's leadership team to run the company's new cloud business unit.
The acquisition also ensures that Skyhigh now can leverage McAfee's integrations and product portfolio to further protect its customers against cyberattacks and accelerate its growth, Gupta said. That way, Skyhigh can help organizations "unleash the power of the cloud," Gupta noted, by giving them total control over their data across cloud services.
Why Did McAfee Acquire Skyhigh?
Skyhigh represents an ideal complement to McAfee's strategy to safeguard communities, governments, nations and organizations against cyberattacks, Young said.
Both McAfee and Skyhigh are committed to creating the "cybersecurity architecture of the future," McAfee stated. Furthermore, the companies intend to explore ways to connect security operations centers (SOCs) with actionable threat intelligence, analytics and orchestration, McAfee said, to help customers optimize the value of their cybersecurity investments.
Meanwhile, the Skyhigh acquisition represents one of many recent McAfee moves that could help the company expand its global cybersecurity market presence.
McAfee last month launched Investigator, a security operations center (SOC) product that leverages analytics, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to curate and visualize cyber threat data. Investigator enables security analysts to automatically collect and visualize threat data, McAfee stated, and address cyber threats from the endpoint to the cloud.
In August, McAfee announced a 72-hour trial of the McAfee Virtual Network Security Platform (McAfee vNSP) on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The McAfee vNSP trial was launched in conjunction with the AWS Summit in New York and allowed participants to simulate real-world attack use cases, configure policy and review reporting dashboards, free of charge.
McAfee began operating as a standalone cybersecurity company in April. Today, the business boasts more than 7,620 employees across 190 countries and protects 378 million endpoints worldwide.
