McAfee swoops for Skyhigh Networks

Vendor's revival continues with acquisition of CASB player

McAfee has continued its revival as an independant company with the acquisition of Skyhigh Networks.

Skyhigh Networks becomes the latest in a string of vendors in the cloud access security broker (CASB) space to be acquired by larger players over recent years.

CASB was named one of the hottest upcoming technologies last year by Gartner, with tech giants including Oracle, Forcepoint, Cisco and Blue Coat all making CASB acquisitions in recent times.

Skyhigh CEO Rajiv Gupta will join McAfee's leadership team and its organisational structure will "remain generally intact", according to McAfee.

"Skyhigh Networks had the foresight five years ago to realise that cybersecurity for cloud environments could not be an impediment to, or afterthought of, cloud adoption," McAfee CEO Chris Young said.

"They pioneered an entirely new product category called cloud access security broker that analysts describe as one of the fastest-growing areas of information security investments of the last five years - where Skyhigh continues to innovate and lead. Skyhigh's leadership in cloud security, combined with McAfee's security portfolio strength, will set the company apart in helping organisations operate freely and securely to reach their full potential."

According to Gartner, 85 per cent of large enterprises will utilise CASB platforms for cloud services by 2020, up from less than five per cent today.

McAfee became a newly independent company eight months ago, after Intel span out its security assets to PE house TPG Capital.