FireMon Acquires DisruptOps, Gains Cloud Security Operations Capabilities

Network security policy management vendor FireMon has acquired cloud security operations provider DisruptOps in a move that extends the former's security capabilities to public cloud infrastructure.

DisruptOps founder Jody Brazil will assume the CEO role at FireMon, a company he helped found and for which he was CEO before launching DisruptOps. Starting this week, the DisruptOps platform will be available from FireMon and its authorized resellers around the world.

The acquisition will help FireMon customers address a broad range of security and compliance issues as they move data to public cloud services, while DisruptOps customers will benefit from FireMon's size and scale, Brazil says. FireMon was looking to expand its security operations capabilities to the cloud, and DisrupOpts offered a way to acquire that capability. 

"We quickly identified a tremendous opportunity for both sides," Brazil says.

DisruptOps' technology is designed to help organizations monitor, detect, and respond to a variety of threats to data and assets in public cloud infrastructure. Some of the more common use cases for the technology include detecting cloud misconfigurations, unauthorized access, compliance issues, cloud exploits, and attacks targeting enterprise data in the cloud.

At a high level, the company is among many providers of so-called cloud security posture management (CSPM) tools that automate the identification and remediation of security risks across platform-as-a-service, infrastructure-as-a-service, software-as-a-service, and other cloud services. 

Analyst firms such as Gartner have projected that demand for CSPM capabilities will surge over the next few years from organizations looking to mitigate security risks stemming from avoidable misconfigurations, mismanagement, and mistakes as they move data, apps, and software development to the cloud. A report from MarketsandMarkets earlier this year estimated that demand for CSPM capabilities will grow from some $4 billion in 2020 to $9 billion in 2026.

Brazil says DisruptOps' value lies in its ability to not just help organizations identify potential cloud security issues, but to also route alerts to the right stakeholders, recommend remedial actions, and execute them — in automated fashion if configured to do so. 

"DisruptOps not only helps customers identify cloud security issues but more importantly helps them understand what those issues are, why they matter, how to prioritize them, and, really critically, distributing those capabilities to the right teams," he says.

The capability is vital given the way enterprises have organized around the cloud, Brazil says. DevOps teams, for instance, often have complete autonomy and different controls over their own cloud accounts. Those in large enterprises might have hundreds of cloud accounts, with each team having control over their accounts. 

"In one environment it might be all VM, another may be all serverless, and in another it might be traditional databases," Brazil notes. 

Each environment is unique to that team's need, so being able to connect security issues to the teams that can affect change is very useful. 

"We can say, here's the problem in your environment and here's how you can fix it," Brazil notes. "Our primary objective is not helping organizations find issues. Our primary objective is to help them fix it."

FireMon has not released details of its purchase of DisruptOps. Brazil himself described DisruptOps as a roughly 20-person firm that will now become part of a larger organization with thousands of enterprise customers in various stages of cloud adoption. The company was founded by Brazil, former FishNet Security CTO Brandy Peterson, and Rich Mogull and Mike Rothman, principals of analyst firm Securosis,

In 2020, Kansas City, Missouri-based DisruptOps raised $9 million in venture funding from Drive Capital and Rally Ventures. At the time, the company had described the funding as designed to accelerate product development and help improve its go-to-market capabilities.