UK cybersecurity vendors in double acquisition

Mimecast and Sophos buy start-ups to bulk up their respective offerings

Mimecast and Sophos have nabbed tech start-ups in the UK and US, respectively.

Mimecast has purchased London-based Simply Migrate, which specialises in archived data migration technology.

It marks the third acquisition in the last 12 months for the "profoundly non-acquisitive" vendor.

Mimecast stated that the cost and complexity of legacy data migration is a major issue for large organisations in moving to its cloud-based archiving solutions.

It claimed that this acquisition will offer customers a faster and more cost-effective route to its cloud.

"Legacy archiving systems are outdated and unable to handle the growth and ever-changing demands of a modern enterprise," said Peter Bauer, Mimecast CEO.

"Many organisations struggle with the ballooning email storage volumes alongside other unstructured data types, coupled with the cost and management burdens of storing it on-premise.

"The technology Simply Migrate offers is engineered to provide end-to-end migration into the Mimecast Cloud Archive, helping to cut costs and operational complexity while achieving a superior result with more flexible access to data, case management, supervision and more."

Fellow cybersecurity vendor Sophos also looked to enhance its offerings by gobbling up US-based start-up DarkBytes, which was founded last March.

Sophos' latest addition is a unified platform which delivers security operations centre services to organisations of all sizes.

The vendor said that the acquisition will bring it a team experienced in managed detection and response.

Joe Levy, Sophos CTO, said: "Sophos predicts that eventually all IT security products will evolve into adaptive, managed services as more organisations realise that they are unable to scale resources fast enough to respond to today's threats."

"The strength and architecture of the DarkBytes platform will accelerate Sophos' plans to introduce global managed security services that will eventually span end-point, firewall, mobile devices, wireless APs, and more."

Dennis Griffin, founder and former CEO at DarkBytes, said that the end-point is the new perimeter of cybersecurity.

"We built our unified platform to simplify high-end security operations using the combination of end-point sensors and cloud-delivered analytics as the best way to achieve this," he said.

"Our vision for using cloud-based, next-gen technology to make enterprise-grade cybersecurity simple to use made Sophos a natural home for the next stage of our development."

The financial details of either deal were not disclosed.