On Tuesday, Palo Alto Networks announced a definitive agreement to acquire Israeli-based cybersecurity company, Bridgecrew Technologies; the $156M all-cash deal, is expected to close in Palo Alto Networks’ fiscal third quarter. The acquisition will bolster Palo Alto Networks Prisma Cloud by enabling security assessments and enforcement capabilities throughout the DevOps process.
Why this transaction?
The York IE team chose this as our transaction of the week to discuss the growth in shift-left security and how this trend is affecting the DevOps process. Simply put, shift-left security is the idea that implementing cybersecurity protocols early on in the development process leads to more favorable security outcomes. In other words, as a solution or tool moves through the development process, security and vulnerabilities are addressed at every stage, not just prior to release. Palo Alto Networks is looking to add Bridgecrew’s automated network monitoring and security remediation to their Prisma Cloud platform, the partnership will bring security to the entire application lifecycle while also connecting security and DevOps teams more seamlessly. Bridgecrew has been a leader in the Infrastructure-as-a-Code (IaC) security market; Checkov, the company’s open-source platform saw more than 1 million downloads in the first year alone. By combining Checkov and Prisma Cloud, security will become embedded in every step of the developer process, further limiting the number of security alerts. The Bridgecrew deal represents Palo Alto Networks’ 7th acquisition of an Israeli-based technology company since their $200M acquisition of Cybera in 2012.
Cybersecurity Shifting Left
As organizations continue to automate, and digitization continues to expand across industries, more and more infrastructure is rooted in technology. As a result, cyber threats have become a serious concern for companies looking to protect their systems and customer data. Unsurprisingly, this trend has been prevalent for a number of years and the growing need for cybersecurity is not something new.
As we can see the graph above, created using our Fuel Platform, shows us that funding in cybersecurity has seen consistent interest since nearly 2012. In 2020 alone, more than $2.6B in funding was deployed to cybersecurity-related startups; we expect that as digitization and automation continue to be used across all industries, funding in cybersecurity will continue to grow at this accelerated pace. This latest shift-left trend in cybersecurity is just another example of companies looking to stay ahead of the industry while ensuring the security of their platforms.
