IBM acquires compliance security company Spanugo

IBM announced today it has acquired Spanugo, a California-based provider of cloud cyber security posture management solutions.

To further meet the security demands of its clients in highly regulated industries, IBM will integrate Spanugo into its public cloud.

IBM previously announced its development of the world’s first financial-services-ready public cloud to satisfy requirements for regulatory compliance, security and resiliency for financial services institutions. With the acquisition of Spanugo, IBM is accelerating the availability of a security control center that will enable clients to establish compliance profiles, manage controls and monitor compliance in real-time.

Howard Boville, senior vice president and Head of Cloud Platform at IBM shared in a statement: “IBM is committed to building the industry’s most secure and open public cloud for business. With the acquisition of Spanugo, we have taken another major step in advancing IBM’s differentiated capabilities in security and compliance for our enterprise clients, including those in highly regulated industries,”

“Bringing Spanugo’s technology into our financial services-ready public cloud will help provide our clients with evidence of their ongoing compliance, in real-time,” Boville added.

Hillery Hunter, CTO of IBM Cloud added her own thoughts, telling IT Pro: “Strategically, this acquisition fits into the category of ongoing investments in our public cloud for regulated industries. In that sense, it means financial services, healthcare, all those clients, we see strategically that there is a second wave of public cloud conversations going on.

"This has only been accelerated in recent times and has to do with mission-critical workloads. When doing that, you have increasing concerns about security and the compliance of that cloud environment.”

Hunter explained the Spanugo acquisition will encourage IBM’s clients to “have even greater confidence in running mission-critical workloads on the public cloud and in transforming their overall businesses.”

As clients transfer sensitive workloads to the cloud, security and compliance become more complex. For businesses in highly regulated industries, such as financial services or healthcare, cloud environments are most useful when they are approved for sensitive information and are able to effectively run workloads subject to such strict regulatory and compliance guidelines.

Spanugo’s technology is not only able to demonstrate cyber security compliance in real-time but it also provides continuous cloud security to reduce the likelihood of a successful cyber attack.

“Spanugo’s strong domain knowledge and experience in security posture management is a natural complement to IBM’s public cloud offerings,” said Doc Vaidhyanathan, co-founder and chief product officer at Spanugo.

“By joining IBM on its mission to be the most secure public cloud for the enterprise, we’re able to deeply serve businesses across industries that require verifiable, audit-ready, real-time cybersecurity posturing,” Vaidhyanathan continued.

Spanugo was founded in 2017 by Doc Vaidhyanathan, Doss Karan and Janga R Aliminati. The company is headquartered in Santa Clara, California.