This week IBM announced that they would be acquiring cloud cybersecurity company, Spanugo, for an undisclosed amount. The deal marks IBM’s first acquisition since Q1 of 2019 when they acquired mainframe services from Deutsche Telecom for a reported $986M. Founded in 2017, Spanugo set out to automate all aspects of cloud cybersecurity including compliance & risk assurance.
Why this transaction?
The York IE team made this acquisition our Transaction of the Week (TOW) because this deal highlights IBM’s commitment to creating the world’s first financial services public cloud. Late last year, IBM announced the rollout of it’s financial services cloud with hopes to provide automated and proactive security and lighten the regulatory burden felt by financial institutions in the cloud environment. With their recent acquisition, IBM says that they will be able to leverage Spanugo’s software to, “provide preventative and compensatory controls for financial services regulatory workloads, multi-architecture support and proactive and automated security”. In short, Spanugo’s software will allow IBM Cloud to audit and analyze compliance in real time.
IBM’s commitment to the cloud
IBM is moving quickly to complete the buildout of its financial services-ready public cloud. With hopes of launching in the fall, IBM has already partnered with its first customer Bank of America but will still need the help of smaller independent software vendors (ISVs) and SaaS providers who do business with financial institutions. IBM’s promise for a true Keep Your Own Key (KYOK) experience is backed by hardware based enclaves that enable customers to maintain complete control over their keys.
