McAfee will acquire cloud security company Skyhigh Networks, the company has announced, expanding out its portfolio beyond traditional endpoint protection.
Skyhigh specialises in cloud security, providing protection for IaaS, PaaS and SaaS services, and boasts over 30% of the Fortune 100 as customers. The acquisition news comes less than eight months after McAfee was spun off from previous owner Intel to become a standalone company once more, following a $7.6 billion acquisition deal in 2010.
"Skyhigh Networks had the foresight five years ago to realize that cyber security for cloud environments could not be an impediment to, or afterthought of, cloud adoption," said McAfee CEO Chris Young. "They pioneered an entirely new product category called cloud access security broker (CASB) that analysts describe as one of the fastest growing areas of information security investments of the last five years - where Skyhigh continues to innovate and lead."
"Skyhigh's leadership in cloud security, combined with McAfee's security portfolio strength, will set the company apart in helping organisations operate freely and securely to reach their full potential."
In an open letter to the company's stakeholders and customers, Skyhigh CEO Rajiv Gupta offered reassurances that the company's product portfolio will remain unaffected, aside from "more resources and acceleration in product innovation". Following the acquisition, Gupta will take a position on McAfee's leadership team, running the cloud security business unit.
"Becoming part of McAfee is the ideal next step in realizing Skyhigh Networks' vision of not simply making the cloud secure, but making it the most secure environment for business," Gupta said.
"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."
