Fortinet Buys CyberSponse for SOAR Capabilities

Fortinet this week confirmed plans to acquire CyberSponse, provider of security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) technology, with plans to integrate its SOAR capabilities into the Fortinet Security Fabric. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Today's businesses operate in a time when legacy systems are no longer sufficient to maintain visibility into network environments. New technologies and use cases enter organizations with security as an afterthought, resulting in a complex piecemeal network where control is difficult. Cyberattacks have grown more advanced and harder to detect, leading to longer dwell time.

SOAR technology is intended to help businesses maintain greater visibility over increasingly complex networks. It generally comes with three capabilities: threat and vulnerability management, incident response, and operations automation to orchestrate workflows, processes, policy execution, and reporting. In a statement, Fortinet officials point out these functions build on the Security Fabric technology it has offered for the past four years.

Enter CyberSponse, a company founded in 2011 to create a virtual appliance-based SOAR platform. It has raised $7.6 million over five rounds of funding; the latest was in March 2016. CyberSponse's platform consolidates and triages alerts from a range of security tools, automates threat analysis and repetitive tasks, and uses playbooks to inform incident response.

Read more details here.

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