Zscaler has agreed to buy Boston-based startup Edgewise Networks for an undisclosed sum – its second recent acquisition following a deal for Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) Cloudneeti.
NASDAQ-listed security firm Zscaler said the deal “broadens the Zscaler cloud-native platform and secures application-to-application communication to deliver stronger security in public clouds and data centers.”
Edgewise fingerprints software in its environments, so that instead of allowing application communication based on trusted IP addresses, ports, and protocols, etc., it identifies workloads based on a range of techniques including executable signing, Portable Executable (PE) header values, CPU serial
numbers, provisioned host name, and more, then uses machine learning to build recommended policies around access control decisions.
It describes [pdf] this as zero trust identity (ZTID) management.
The company supports 10 distributions of Linux, Windows 7 onwards, and any Windows Server operating systems. Supported container environments supported include Kubernetes, Docker, and AWS Elastic Container Service.
San Jose-based Zscaler’s CEO Jay Chaudhry said: “Egewise is highly innovative technology that enables application segmentation without having to do traditional network segmentation which is often done with virtual firewalls. We are excited to welcome the Edgewise team to the Zscaler family.”
“We are proud to have made zero trust security achievable in complex, multi-cloud environments. Our core innovation is the use of software identity verification to simultaneously strengthen security and simplify operations,” said Peter Smith, CEO of Edgewise in a canned statement.
“Edgewise automates the identity-based policies making it easy to reduce the attack surface across public cloud, multi-cloud, data center and even container environments. We are thrilled to join the Zscaler family and share our innovation with the global Zscaler customer base.”
