Akamai Acquires Guardicore in $600M Deal

Cybersecurity firm Akamai has confirmed it will acquire Guardicore for approximately $600 million.

Tel Aviv-based Guardicore, founded in 2013, provides microsegmentation and workload protection tools for data centers and public clouds. Its tech is designed to limit user access to only applications authorized to communicate with each other as a means of reducing the attack surface. The company has raised $110 million in funding, its latest round a $60 million Series C in May 2019.

Akamai plans to add Guardicore's microsegmentation capabilities into its zero-trust security portfolio, which already includes Web Application Firewall, Zero Trust Network Access, Domain Name System Firewall, and Secure Web Gateway tools.

"But to be secure in today's world, enterprises also need a second layer of defense to block the spread of malware after it has gained a foothold within the corporate infrastructure," officials write in a statement. Guardicore's technology will provide this capability, they say, as well as create more visibility into application flows and across data center and cloud applications.

Akamai and Guardicore weren't the only companies with M&A news this week. Security operations company Arctic Wolf announced it will acquire Habitu8, a managed security awareness platform, for an undisclosed amount. Habitu8's platform will be added to the Arctic Wolf Security Operations platform to boost its security awareness and training programs.

Read more about the Akamai-Guardicore deal here and the Arctic Wolf-Habitu8 deal here.