As cyberattacks grow more and more sophisticated, IT security has become an arms race with businesses scrambling to keep up with the latest attack method. In a response to this trend, security providers are increasing the sophistication of their solutions, and in some cases acquiring other security specialist companies in order to expand their offering. The managed security sector will continue to see fast-paced growth, valued at $14.3B in 2014 with expected growth to $31.9B by 2019.
Here is the recap of security service provider M&A activity from 2015:
SingTel acquired a 98% equity interest in Trustwave, a hosted threat, vulnerability, and compliance management company for an estimated $810M. The Singapore-based telco made the move in an effort to beef up its cloud and managed services offering.
Blue Coat Systems, a security vendor owned by Bain Capital, rounded out their portfolio with two purchases; Elastica, a startup that detects potentially dangerous cloud applications and Perspecsys, a leader in the cloud access security broker segment.
Level3 acquired a global DDoS mitigation firm, Black Lotus in an effort to round out their security capabilities. Black Lotus adds proxy-based mitigation services along with behavioral analytics technology to better protect application layers, which are often a target for DDoS attacks within the enterprise.
Check Point Software Technologies brought on Israel-based Lacoon Mobile Security, a company that helps to prevent cyberattacks on mobile phones. Customers of this company include the likes of Samsung, Intel, and Dell.
Alert Logic acquired Critical Watch, a company that offers security analytics and a vulnerability management platform to help security teams take appropriate actions. The acquisition will enhance Alert Logic’s vulnerability and configuration scanning as well as security analytics research capabilities.
LogMeIn purchased LastPass, a password management company, for around $110M. This acquisition came with a bit of controversy, as critics voiced their concerns over LastPass “selling out” to LogMeIn.
Microsoft acquired Adallom, an innovative company that helps customers protect their critical assets across cloud applications.
Proofpoint bought Emerging Threats, a cyber-intelligence vendor for $40M. The technology of the two companies are complimentary and the combination provides timely, actionable, end-to-end attack intelligence and protection for customers.
HP purchased Voltage Security, an encryption and tokenization solutions company. Voltage offers solutions that deal with data security, email encryption, and mobile data security among other services. It’s no surprise that this company was scooped up early in the year.
Don’t miss our next M&A post in this series – Network and Infrastructure Hardware Vendors. If you missed the Unified Communications recap, click here to view.
