IBM has dipped its toes back in the M&A market to snap up — no, not Cloudera — a little known cloud security minnow called Spanugo.
The deal is Big Blue’s first acquisition since its mammoth $34 billion buyout of Red Hat, announced in October 2018.
(A move for mainframe services firm T-Systems in January 2019 fell through on German competition regulator concerns).
Santa Clara-headquartered Spanugo was founded in April 2017 and has raised money once — a seed round announced in July 2018.
It offers SaaS-based products including a tool to help users discover on-premises and cloud objects where security controls should be deployed, set security policies, and use APIs to perform “event-triggered validations, for example upon cloud environmental changes”.
Despite its size, IBM said the acquisition represented a “major step in advancing IBM’s differentiated capabilities in security and compliance for our enterprise clients, including those in highly regulated industries,” as Howard Boville, SVP, Cloud, IBM put it in a release today.
IBM will integrate Spanugo software into its public cloud.
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The move comes after IBM last year boasted what it described as the world’s first “first financial services public cloud”.
“The addition of Spanugo software will help accelerate the availability of a security control center that will enable IBM clients to define compliance profiles, manage controls and, in continuous real time, monitor compliance across their organization,” IBM said today.
The company added: “When an organization is audited, for example, Spanugo’s technology can efficiently and transparently demonstrate cybersecurity compliance in real time… Spanugo software will be incorporated into a suite of capabilities within IBM public cloud services.”
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