McAfee Completes Skyhigh Networks Acquisition, Establishing the Company as a Device-to-Cloud Cybersecurity Leader

McAfee announced the completion of its previously announced acquisition of Skyhigh Networks. With the close of this deal, Skyhigh Networks becomes part of the McAfee Cloud Security Business Unit.

Skyhigh is an ideal complement to McAfee’s strategy – one focused on building and optimizing mission-critical cybersecurity environments for the future. Skyhigh Networks pioneered the cloud access security broker (CASB) market segment that analysts describe as one of the fastest growing areas of information security investments of the last five years. With this technology, McAfee can now offer a cloud portfolio that addresses the three primary challenges of managing multi-cloud environments—visibility into networks, workloads and data, advanced threat protection and pervasive data protection.

 “Today’s announcement marks a new milestone for the future of our company,” said Chris Young, chief executive officer, McAfee. “With two industry leaders coming together under one company, we will make cybersecurity an enabler to the transformative power of our digital age. We are focused on securing customers from their devices to the cloud, giving customers access to market-leading capabilities in the architectural control points that matter most.”

According to McAfee’s 2017 cloud adoption and security report, Building Trust in a Cloudy Sky, 93% of organizations use some form of cloud services. McAfee cloud security solutions provide visibility, advanced threat protection, and data protection controls across all clouds to secure network traffic, workloads, and data. The multi-cloud security management of Skyhigh Security Cloud (Skyhigh), McAfee Cloud Workload Security (McAfee CWS) and McAfee Virtual Network Security Platform (McAfee vNSP) allows administrators to identify and secure critical cloud resources.

Security professionals know the importance of the cloud, but need a way to ensure their networks, workloads and data are all protected. McAfee solutions help in the following ways:

Visibility into the Cloud

McAfee cloud security solutions help organizations identify where their critical resources reside in the cloud. Skyhigh identifies sensitive information using keywords, data patterns, fingerprints, metadata, and file types – and analyzes behavior across all cloud services, users, and devices. McAfee CWS allows administrators to apply security controls across multiple cloud infrastructure environments, to discover and monitor potentially thousands of cloud workloads and virtual networks. Additionally, with McAfee vNSP, administrators can inspect and analyze all traffic to, from, and within cloud environments.

Threat Prevention

Threat prevention measures are implemented to layer protection across networks, workloads, and files, so that administrators can take immediate and automated remediative action. McAfee CWS monitors cloud workload configuration profiles, prevents advanced threats with machine learning, and applies application whitelisting to automatically enforce workload compliance policies. In parallel, McAfee vNSP provides the opportunity to visualize threat sources within log flows, and uses sandboxing, dynamic behavioral analysis, and machine learning to stop threats from traversing the network. Skyhigh detects unusual behavior indicative of an insider threat, compromised account, or privileged user threat.

Data Protection

Skyhigh helps identify and control access to sensitive information already in, moving to, or originating in the cloud. Administrators can consistently enforce sharing permissions within applications, manage access controls across multiple environments, restrict the ability to download sensitive data to unmanaged devices – controlling the potential for oversharing information – and protect both structured and unstructured data with information rights management and encryption.

What customers are saying:

“McAfee’s acquisition of Skyhigh Networks brings two security leaders together,” said Ivaylo Uzunov, manager of Information Security at Carlson Wagonlit Travel. “The integration of their security offerings will provide a holistic data visibility and control for cloud applications, while preserving policy enforcement and compliance.”

What partners are saying:

“One of the main issues our customers are trying to tackle is how to protect their sensitive data in the cloud,” said Darren Carroll, Director Security and Risk Management Practice, SHI. “They need to understand the applications in use, and where their data exists, and how users are interacting with their most critical assets. Through the Skyhigh Cloud Security Platform, we can offer security administrators market leading capabilities to protect their sensitive data by monitoring, orchestrating and managing data security across multiple cloud environments. This allows us to bring end-to-end security from devices to cloud services so that companies can adopt the cloud to accelerate their businesses.”  

“As Optiv’s clients continue migrating at an exceptional pace to cloud environments, they need support to make clarity out of the chaos to better secure their cloud data,” said John Turner, senior director, cloud security for Optiv. “CASB technologies are a critical part of any cloud security strategy, and we’re pleased to see one of our key partners, McAfee, expand their product portfolio by acquiring a CASB leader like Skyhigh Networks. These technologies are a critical piece of Optiv’s comprehensive suite of solutions and services that help organizations remove complexity and maximize protection while optimizing their investments.”