Zscaler acquires microsegmentation startup Airgap Networks

Zscaler Inc. in the present day introduced that it has acquired Airgap Networks Inc., a startup with a software program platform designed to enhance the safety of enterprise networks.

The deal’s monetary phrases weren’t disclosed. Santa Clara, California-based Airgap beforehand raised greater than $18 million from buyers. It counts a number of Fortune 500 corporations as clients.

Nasdaq-listed Zscaler is a serious supplier of cybersecurity software program. Its purposes assist enterprises discover vulnerabilities of their cloud workloads, guarantee enterprise information is simply shared with licensed customers and carry out associated duties. The corporate’s product portfolio generated $525 million in income final quarter, up 25% from the identical time a 12 months earlier. 

Airgap Networks, the startup Zscaler has acquired, supplies a so-called microsegmentation platform of the identical title. The software program can restrict information visitors between an organization’s gadgets and purposes to scale back the chance of breaches.

Hackers usually use a tactic referred to as lateral motion to breach enterprise networks. First, they compromise a susceptible system corresponding to a server that was by chance left accessible by way of the general public net. The hackers then use the compromised system as a springboard to entry different belongings in the identical community. 

Airgap Networks’ platform prevents methods from exchanging information with each other until they strictly require the flexibility to take action. A advertising and marketing utility, for instance, may be prevented from connecting to databases utilized by the finance division. Blocking pointless connections between know-how belongings makes it harder for hackers to unfold malware from system to system.

Traditionally, implementing such community isolation took a big quantity of effort and time. The reason being that directors needed to manually specify which methods a given workload could entry and which it could possibly’t. Airgap Networks says that its platform automates a lot of the handbook work concerned in creating microsegmentation guidelines, which saves time for customers.

The platform additionally supplies quite a few different options. Final 12 months, Airgap Networks launched a chatbot known as ThreatGPT that permits directors to seek out details about potential breaches utilizing pure language prompts. The platform additionally makes it potential to visualise community information in graphs. 

“Airgap can present visibility and coverage enforcement at each linked endpoint with out including any software program to these delicate endpoints,” Naresh Kumar, the vice chairman and normal supervisor of product administration at Zscaler, detailed in a weblog put up. “This method eliminates the chance of east-west lateral motion on native networks in addition to the complexity of conventional segmentation approaches like east-west firewalls, with out {hardware} upgrades or operational disruption.”

Zscaler plans to combine the corporate’s know-how with its Zero Belief SD-WAN platform. The latter providing can be utilized to safe the WAN, or wide-area community, that hyperlinks an organization’s places of work and different geographically disparate belongings with each other. Airgap Networks’ software program will complement Zscaler’s present microsegment options, that are utilized by a number of thousand clients. 

Picture: Zscaler