McAfee continues its rapid expansion with the acquisition of Skyhigh Networks. No more than eight months since it resurfaced back in the market as an independent company, spinning out from Intel, McAfee is reinforcing its position in the market as a pure play cybersecurity company.

Offerings from both companies will bring a more holistic approach to securing data moving to cloud; focusing on endpoint and cloud as critical control points. The offerings will also be linked to the security operations centre, giving users actionable threat intelligence, analytics and orchestration, 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. Skyhigh will benefit from McAfee’s global scale and integrations to McAfee’s product portfolio to 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 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.”

Skyhigh Networks’ portfolio provides complete visibility into content, context, and user activity across SaaS, PaaS and IaaS environments. They are also leaders in 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.”