INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Netskope, a company that focuses on security in the cloud, announced today it has acquired Sift Security, a startup launched in 2014 to help
secure cloud infrastructure services like Amazon, Microsoft and Google using machine learning.
The company did not share terms of the deal,
but Sift 10 technical employees will become part of Netskope 500+ person team and Sift CEO Neil King will lead the Netskope IaaS product
management team moving forward.
While Netskope provides comprehensive cloud and website security from a single interface, Sift uses machine
learning to provide breach detection and automated response for Infrastructure as a Service environments, even across multiple
clouds.
Netskope founder and CEO Sanjay Beri says together the two companies can offer more security visibility than they had previously
&Sift Security enhances Netskope ability to uniquely gather and visualize the richest set of contextualized data on transactions across
nearly all of the services provided by the Netskope Security Cloud — including transaction visibility, DLP (data loss prevention), threat
protection, adaptive access control and anomaly detection,& he explained.
As with many deals these days involving companies with machine
learning expertise, while Netskope clearly values the Sift Security technology, it also is getting a technical team with machine learning
chops in the bargain.
&Sift Security has robust deep machine learning and behavioral analytics capabilities that help with the detection,
Sift engineers also bring valuable expertise in machine learning and anomaly detection to Netskope growing team of data scientists,& Beri
said.
Beri explained that it was ultimately more than a pure technology purchase or talent acquisition because at the end of the day the two
companies have to work together
That requires a good cultural fit too
&Neil King — Sift CEO and now head of IaaS Product Management for Netskope — and I met and started talking early in the year and over
time through many discussions (and over time having our engineering teams meet and spend time together) realized that together our companies
would be a great fit,& Beri wrote in a blog post announcing the deal.
While the infrastructure cloud vendors do a good job of securing their
data centers against attack, Beri says best practices point to a &shared responsibility model&, which holds that both cloud providers and
their customers play a role in overall security.
&Public cloud vendors are the first to tell [their customers] that they themselves are also
responsible for protecting their data
For instance, companies should not rely on public cloud vendors for application level security; nor can they rely on public cloud companies
to centralize the governance of multiple IaaS platforms,& Beri says
That where a company like his comes in.
Netskope was founded in 2012 and has raised over $231 million
Sift Science was founded in 2014 and raised over $3 million in seed capital
The deal closed last month.
