INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Enterprise Security
POWERED BY
McAfee acquires Skyhigh
Networks to modernise
cybersecurity for cloud
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M
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.”
cAfee and Skyhigh Networks have
announced a definitive agreement
to combine businesses, with
McAfee acquiring Skyhigh Networks for
an undisclosed amount. The move comes
less than eight months after McAfee
established itself as one of the world’s
leading pure-play cybersecurity companies,
dedicated to being the preferred
cybersecurity partner to customers.
Skyhigh Networks and McAfee will
complement each other’s portfolio and
mission, allowing customers to modernise
their cybersecurity environments and
protect their most valuable asset – data –
as it moves to the cloud. The combination
of McAfee and Skyhigh will establish
the leading company to provide the
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.
72
INTELLIGENTCIO
Chris Young, CEO, McAfee
cybersecurity architecture of the future, with
endpoint and cloud as the critical control
points, linked by the security operations
centre with actionable threat intelligence,
analytics and orchestration, and enabled by
an open ecosystem.
Skyhigh Networks CEO, Rajiv Gupta, will join
McAfee CEO Chris Young’s leadership team
to run McAfee’s new cloud business unit.
Skyhigh’s existing organisational structure
will remain generally intact, ensuring
continuity for customers and partners. At
the same time, Skyhigh will benefit from
McAfee’s global scale and integrations to
McAfee’s broad and deep product portfolio
to even better protect customers.
“Skyhigh Networks had the foresight five
years ago to realise that cybersecurity
for cloud environments could not be an
impediment to, or afterthought of, cloud
adoption,” Young stated. “They pioneered
an entirely new product category called
cloud access security broker (CASB) that
analysts describe as one of the fastest
Skyhigh Networks’ innovative portfolio
provides complete visibility into content,
context, and user activity across SaaS, PaaS
and IaaS environments; leads the market
in advanced controls and automation to
correct policy violations in cloud services;
leverages data science and network effects
across billions of events to identify and
stop threats; applies protection to data that
persists in the cloud or outside the cloud;
and delivers an extensible platform for
cloud providers to enable Skyhigh controls
for their SaaS applications, and enterprises
to enable controls for custom applications
developed in-house.
“Becoming part of McAfee is the ideal next
step in realising 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.”
Young posted an open message to company
stakeholders with Gupta doing the same,
each providing additional evidence of
the company’s combined value upon
transaction close, expected shortly after
completing certain regulatory approvals and
satisfying customary closing conditions. n
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