McAfee to acquire Skyhigh for cloud security

McAfee has announced a definitive agreement to acquire Skyhigh Networks to enhance its cloud security portfolio.

Skyhigh Networks and McAfee will complement each other’s portfolio and mission, allowing customers to modernize 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 cybersecurity architecture of the future, with endpoint and cloud as the critical control points, linked by the security operations center 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 organizational 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 realize that cybersecurity for cloud environments could not be an impediment to, or afterthought of, cloud adoption,” said 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 organizations operate freely and securely to reach their full potential,” added Young.

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 realizing Skyhigh Networks’ vision of not simply making the cloud secure, but making it the most secure environment for business,” Gupta said.