The Respond Analyst is an XDR engine that accelerates cyber investigation and response by automating the correlation of multi-sourced attack evidence using cloud-based data science models that ingest data from a comprehensive set of security technologies. This technology will become a key part of the Mandiant Advantage platform, bringing vendor-agnostic XDR and investigation capabilities that integrates with any customer environment. Further, the combination of cloud-based correlation and intelligent data science models will be used in the delivery of Mandiant Managed Defense, speeding response times and providing better security outcomes for customers while scaling existing Managed Defense resources to protect more customers.

“With Mandiant’s position on the front lines, we know what to look for in an attack, and Respond’s cloud-based machine learning productizes our expertise to deliver faster outcomes and protect more customers,” said Kevin Mandia, FireEye chief executive officer. “This creates a learning system with new capabilities that will enable us to expand our Mandiant portfolio and drive new XDR revenue through our Mandiant Advantage platform.”

The Respond Analyst automates the investigation and triage of security data, at machine speed, with a level of depth and consistency unmatched by human analysis. Using a proprietary intelligent decision engine, the Respond Analyst provides built-in reasoning and judgment to make better decisions, faster without the expensive security engineering and professional services required of most security operations tools. The combination of Respond Software’s XDR capabilities with deep, real-time knowledge of attacker tools and techniques derived from Mandiant frontline expertise and intelligence will enable customers to more quickly identify the weak signals of an attack, understand their adversary, and respond quickly to stop an attack before the adversaries are able to accomplish their mission.

“Customers rely on our XDR engine to investigate more alerts, at a deeper level, for far less cost than existing processes and tools,” said Mike Armistead, Respond Software chief executive officer prior to the acquisition. “Respond’s product dramatically reduces time spent investigating false positives as it connects the dots among siloed, multi-vendor security controls in an easy-to-deploy cloud-based package. Now coupled with Mandiant’s world-class threat intelligence and incident response expertise feeding our models, customers can be confident the most up-to-date and relevant attack tactics and techniques are recognized and appropriately escalated. This results in more coverage, faster resolution of incidents, and ultimately, less risk at lower cost.”

The transaction closed on November 18, 2020 and is valued at approximately $186 million in cash and stock, exclusive of assumed unvested stock options.

Image source: Adobe Stock.

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Veeam’s Acquisition of Kasten Aims to Accelerate Protection of Kubernetes-Native Workloads

PagerDuty Completes Acquisition of Rundeck

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Researchers at 451 Research, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence, report that nearly three-quarters of organizations are currently using or planning to use Kubernetes within the next two years. Veeam believes this shift creates a massive opportunity for the future of data protection and the acquisition reinforces its commitment to support customers’ business transformation to future-ready architectures. With this new acquisition, Veeam will integrate Kasten into its market-leading Cloud Data Management platform for modern data protection and radically simplify data management for enterprises.

As applications using microservice-based architectures have quickly gained traction in the enterprise, this shift has established a new segment of application development methodology known as DevOps. Containers are a critical component of this DevOps-led infrastructure and application modernization, and Kubernetes has emerged as the dominant container orchestration platform – creating a significant opportunity for a single data protection platform that includes virtual, physical, cloud and Kubernetes environments. Veeam recognizes the strategic importance of this environment, the increasing importance of providing modern data management that is deeply integrated into Kubernetes, and the growth of DevOps to improve quality, increase scalability, and accelerate application delivery while reducing daily management. With the Kasten K10 Data Management Platform, Veeam will now be able to offer enterprise operations teams an easy-to-use, scalable, and secure system for Kubernetes Backup and application mobility with unparalleled operational simplicity.

“Veeam was built on offering the best data protection for virtual and modern data infrastructures, and we have continued to expand our offerings to include industry-leading protection for physical and cloud environments. With the acquisition of our partner Kasten, we are taking a very important next step to accommodate our customers’ shift to container adoption in order to protect Kubernetes-native workloads on-premises and across multi-cloud environments. This significant milestone strengthens Veeam’s commitment to continue to deliver the industry’s leading Cloud Data Management platform that will support data protection for container-based applications built in Kubernetes environments.” – Danny Allan, Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President of Product Strategy at Veeam

While the Kasten K10 platform will continue to be available independently, it will also be integrated into Veeam Backup & Replication to offer a comprehensive data management solution. With Kasten’s protection of container workloads and Veeam support for virtual machines, physical servers, SaaS applications and cloud workloads, this best of breed technology will provide all organizations a single platform for modern data protection.

“The enterprise landscape is shifting as applications rapidly transition from monoliths to containers and microservices. With Kubernetes at the core of this infrastructural shift, Kasten’s innovation in Kubernetes-native data management combined with Veeam’s expertise in Backup, both on-premises and in multi-cloud environments, will significantly advance the state of modern data management. Veeam’s success has been a beacon of inspiration for the Kasten team and we are very excited to join forces with a company where there is so much philosophical alignment.” – Niraj Tolia, Chief Executive Officer at Kasten

Kasten will operate as a separate Kubernetes Business Unit (BU) within Veeam. Kasten’s founders, Niraj Tolia and Vaibhav Kamra, will lead the business unit – Tolia as its President and General Manager, and Kamra as Chief Technology Officer, Kubernetes BU. All teams including sales, marketing, R&D, and customer service will stay intact to continue growing the business with increased investment in people and resources.

Veeam’s commitment to the Kubernetes community will also continue through the contribution to Open Source and other community projects that Kasten has supported, including the Kubernetes Storage Special Interest Group and the Data Protection Working Group in Kubernetes, which aim to improve storage operations and promote data protection support for the Kubernetes user base. Additionally, Veeam will continue to support Kanister, Kasten’s open source project that extends support for and execution of data management tasks in Kubernetes, and the development of kopia, a fast and secure open-source tool to manage Backups.

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Portshift’s team brings cloud-native application security capabilities and expertise for containers and service meshes for Kubernetes environments to Cisco, allowing the company to move toward the delivery of security for all phases of the application development​ lifecycle.

The acquisition of Portshift represents Cisco’s focus on the next wave of innovation by anticipating, investing in and incubating new technologies that we can scale and take to market. Through Cisco’s Emerging Technologies and Incubation (ET&I) group, Cisco incubates and advances new and emerging technologies that address Cisco’s customers’ most challenging enterprise IT issues. Application Security is one of the initial focus areas of ET&I.

“Today, the application security space is highly fragmented with many vendors addressing only part of the problem. The Portshift team is building capabilities that span a large portion of the lifecycle of the cloud-native application. They bring cloud native application security capabilities and expertise for containers and service meshes for Kubernetes environments to Cisco, which will allow us to move toward the delivery of security for all phases of the application development​ lifecycle.” – Liz Centoni, Senior Vice President, Emerging Technologies and Incubation, Cisco (in a blog post)

When the acquisition closes in the first half of Cisco’s FY21, the Portshift team will join Cisco’s ET&I group.

The post Cisco to Acquire Portshift to Enhance Application Security appeared first on Digital IT News.

Rundeck democratizes automation in the IT organization, giving engineering, IT, customer service and security teams a self-service way to run automated machine-centric workflows – or runbooks – to prevent, diagnose and resolve incidents without needing to escalate to an expert.

“We now depend on digital services to live, learn, work and connect, causing a fundamental shift for every business, with digital transformation initiatives accelerating to meet business and customer demands. This puts immense pressure on the teams responsible for the online customer experience. Since March alone, there’s been a 40% increase in incidents across the board, and digital teams are working an extra 10-15 hours per week firefighting. Rundeck combined with PagerDuty can now automate the entire incident response lifecycle, reducing costs, saving time and optimizing customer experiences and revenue.” – Jennifer Tejada, Chief Executive Officer at PagerDuty

The aggregate purchase price for the acquisition was approximately $100 million, excluding adjustments, paid approximately 60% in cash and 40% in PagerDuty common stock.

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