IBM has agreed to acquire a cloud security posture management startup, Spanugo, for an undisclosed sum. Big Blue plans to integrate Spanugo’s software into its public cloud to meet its customers’ security and compliance requirements in regulated industries such as banking and healthcare.
Cloud security posture management vendors provide security processes and tools to prevent and fix cloud misconfiguration, which is a significant cause of data breaches and compliance breaches in cloud applications. Furthermore, these companies are hot links and acquisition targets for large security vendors. These capabilities will be in a security control center, which IBM said will soon be available to customers for the assets Spanugo provides.
Howard Boville, IBM’s senior vice president of cloud, said in a statement, “Bringing Spanugo’s technology into our financial services public cloud will help provide our clients with evidence of their ongoing compliance, in real-time.”
Spanugo was founded in 2017, employed 23 people, and raised an undisclosed amount of seed capital in July 2018, according to LinkedIn and CrunchBase. The company said on its website that it is working with resellers, systems integrators, and IT auditors to deliver value quickly to enterprise customers. Spanugo’s software will be integrated into a set of capabilities in IBM’s public cloud services.
IBM said cloud environments in highly regulated industries, such as financial services, healthcare, insurance, and telco, are most effective when critical information is approved, and workloads are subject to stringent regulatory and compliance guidelines. Managing security and compliance becomes more complicated as customers increasingly move to the cloud with significant and essential workloads, IBM said.
“Spanugo’s strong domain knowledge and experience in security posture management is a natural complement to IBM’s public cloud offerings, “By joining IBM we’re able to deeply serve businesses across industries that require verifiable, audit-ready, real-time cybersecurity posturing.” Doc Vaidhyanathan, Spanugo’s co-founder and chief product officer, said in a statement.
IBM said that Spanugo’s technology could prove cybersecurity compliance efficiently and transparently in real-time when a company is audited. According to IBM, Spanugo also provides a continuous suite of cloud security development and adaptation to reduce the chance of a successful attack.
Meanwhile, Crunchbase reported that this is the first significant acquisition of IBM’s T-Systems mainframe service business from Deutsche Telekom for approximately $ 986 million since January 2019. Three months ago, IBM agreed to the massive acquisition of open-source software company Redhat for $ 34 billion.