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Zscaler announces acquisition of Cloudneeti, doubling down on data protection
Tue, 14th Apr 2020
FYI, this story is more than a year old

Zscaler, Inc has today announced its intent to acquire Cloudneeti, a Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) company.

With the acquisition, Zscaler will provide its customers with data protection coverage in the Zscaler Cloud Security Platform.

“Cloudneeti augments Zscaler's data protection capabilities and will dramatically improve organisations' cloud security by discovering and eliminating some of the most common causes of data breaches and compliance violations,” says Zscaler chief executive officer and chairman Jay Chaudhry.

“Whether caused by SaaS applications being configured incorrectly or a developer accidentally misconfiguring a new public cloud application, these preventable data protection lapses are behind some of the biggest breaches in history.

“I am thrilled to welcome the Cloudneeti team to the Zscaler family.

Cloudneeti chief executive officer and founder Gururaj Pandurangi says Zscaler is a perfect fit with the company.

“Pravin and I founded Cloudneeti with a vision to end breaches and compliance violations that are caused by entirely preventable misconfigurations as applications move to the cloud,” says Pandurangi.

“Cloudneeti was built in the cloud for the cloud, which is why Zscaler is such an exciting technological and cultural fit for the team.

“We are excited to be working with Zscaler to provide market-leading security assurance to help customers accelerate their digital transformation journey.

Zscaler already provides data protection for SaaS applications with CASB.

But with Cloudneeti, Zscaler can now extend that data protection to public cloud workloads, further improving Zscaler's data protection offerings.

As a result of the acquisition, the joint services of the two companies can provide customers with:
  • Complete Data Protection and Exposure Prevention: Data protection policies apply across locations, users and application types to ensure consistent and comprehensive data loss prevention in compliance with regulations like GDPR.
     
  • Unified Compliance Assurance: A single platform that provides compliance visibility and violation mitigation across SaaS applications like Microsoft Office 365 and cloud service providers including Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure to ensure government laws and industry regulations are followed.
     
  • Automated Risk Reduction: Automated remediations that ensure cloud applications are not vulnerable to outside threats by following industry and organisationally-defined policies.

In a report detailing innovation insight for cloud security posture management, Gartner found that organisations implementing a CSPM offering and extending this into development will reduce cloud-related security incidents due to misconfiguration by 80%.

Cloudneeti says that its service improves compliance assurance and reporting - a constant and complicated pain point for CIOs and their organisations.

It claims that its CSPM capabilities prevent application misconfigurations and compliance violations by checking SaaS, IaaS, PaaS, and cloud provider configurations, comparing them to industry and organisational policies to report on violations, and automating remediation with the help of machine learning.