Palo Alto Networks Acquires CirroSecure

I’m excited to announce the acquisition of CirroSecure and with it the expansion of our platform’s ability to safely enable the applications that form the backbone of today’s businesses.

Increasingly organizations are turning to SaaS applications such as Box, Dropbox, or salesforce.com that are highly collaborative in nature, yet often store some of an organization’s most sensitive data.  Securing these sanctioned applications requires a new level of visibility and control that, up to this point, hasn’t existed within the industry.  Ultimately organizations must have the ability to peer deep into the application, tracking usage at a granular enough level to allow for more effective control.  This control must allow for better management of access privileges and data sharing, from both corporate and personal devices. 

The addition of the CirroSecure technology to the Palo Alto Networks Enterprise Security Platform provides organizations with this necessary functionality by extending visibility down to the individual file, folder and user that’s operating within the SaaS application.  The CirroSecure technology then applies deep analytics into the day-to-day usage in order to quickly determine if there are any DLP or compliance-related policy violations.  Then, through use of granular context-aware policies, violations can trigger an immediate response such as the quarantine of a user or data.  This complete visibility, coupled with granular policy controls, moves organizations from a position of speculation to one of knowing exactly what’s happening to its sensitive SaaS application data at any given point in time, while automatically responding to contain or eliminate risks.

This innovative technology will be available the second half of 2015 via a new Palo Alto Networks service.  Over the course of the next few months we’ll share more detail with regards to future strategy, product features, and demonstrations.  If you’d like these periodic updates, make sure to visit our announcement page at go.paloaltonetworks.com/saassecurity and sign up for automated updates.

Scott Gainey

[Palo Alto Networks Blog]