Advancing AI-driven analytics and insights for improved threat detection is the impetus behind Zscaler’s acquisition of Tel Aviv, Israel-based Avalor.
This is technology M&A deal number 69 that MSSP Alert and sister site ChannelE2E have covered so far in 2024. See more than 2,000 technology M&A deals for 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, and 2020 listed here.
The purchase price was paid predominantly in cash, with a portion delivered in the form of equity subject to vesting conditions, Zscaler said. The acquisition closed on March 13.
Zscaler, a cloud security specialist based in San Jose, California, is hailing a “major leap forward” for its Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange threat protection platform, which draws data from its more than 400 billion daily transactions.
Zero Trust and Data Fabric Unite
Zscaler notes that, over the past 16 years, it has amassed the what it calls the world's largest cloud security platform, building a substantial data set to develop AI-driven solutions, such as Zscaler Risk360 and Zscaler Business Insights.
Avalor’s Data Fabric for Security capability ingests, normalizes and unifies data across enterprise security and business systems, according to Zscaler. By expanding its zero trust platform by using Avalor’s data fabric, Zscaler said it can fully automate AI-driven analytics and decision-making in real-time without the complexity of data aggregation and collection.
Zscaler said that by leveraging its data foundation combined with Avalor’s Data Fabric for Security capability, it can proactively identify and predict critical vulnerabilities as well as improve operational efficiencies.
“AI is only as good as the underlying data, and many solutions lack the additional context and knowledge from data sources across the enterprise to truly leverage security specific AI models,” said Jay Chaudhry, CEO, chairman and founder of Zscaler. “Zscaler operates the world’s largest security cloud with the most relevant data to train security specific large language models (LLMs), and with the Avalor acquisition we can more effectively identify vulnerabilities while predicting and preventing breaches.”
The basic idea of zero trust security means that no one is trusted by default from inside or outside the network, and that verification is required from everyone trying to gain access to resources on the network. Zscaler’s zero trust complements Avalor’s data fabric — that being a layer of technology that sits between the big pile of all different kinds of data on one side and the applications that consume that data on the other side.
“We have long understood that being able to make sense of all the disparate security data sources in an organization is essential to understanding and improving risk posture," said Raanan Raz, Avalor co-founder and CEO. "That’s why we delivered the industry's first Data Fabric for Security to provide that aggregated platform,”
Raz noted that the first application running on Avalor’s data fabric is its Unified Vulnerability Management (UVM) module.
“By combining the Zscaler proprietary data sets with the 150 third party sources Avalor supports, we will be in a prime position to enhance our UVM capabilities and create new applications with additional cyber protection insights,” Raz said.
Zscaler Adds MSSP Partner
Zscaler partners with many MSSPs, and most recently, IT security and network services provider CentraComm announced that it had been formally authorized as a Zscaler MSSP partner.
CentraComm noted that it currently provides Zscaler professional and managed services for small, medium, and large businesses, both in the U.S. and globally. The Zscaler MSSP status is part of CentraComm's "CentraSecure" portfolio.
Zscaler Launches SASE Solution
In January 2024, Zscaler brought to market Zscaler Zero Trust SASE. This single-vendor SASE (secure access service edge) solution uses Zscaler Zero Trust AI to help organizations reduce cost and complexity while implementing zero trust security across users, devices and workloads, MSSP Alert reported.
Zscaler also announced the availability of its Zero Trust SD-WAN solution and portfolio of plug-and-play appliances to help customers modernize secure connectivity for branch offices, factories and data centers while also eliminating the need for ineffective firewalls and VPNs.
