Palo Alto Networks, a global cybersecurity leader, has inked a deal to acquire Demisto for a total purchase price of approximately $560 million.
Demisto’s offers a unique security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) platform to identify cyber-threats and respond to them without requiring human review. According to the company’s website, their automated playbooks have helped reduce alerts by up to 95 percent.
“We have dedicated ourselves to the challenge of automation because we believe that relying on people alone to combat threats will fail against the scale of today’s attacks. Palo Alto Networks’ strategy resonates with our own vision. And we have found a like-minded team that shares our conviction that the future of security is all about automation and AI. We’re thrilled to be joining them to help make it a reality,”
Palo Alto Networks has high hopes that this technology will bring them closer to the application of AI and machine learning in automating certain processes which would subsequently streamline the security services offered to customers.
“We are delighted to welcome Demisto into the Palo Alto Networks family. Coupled with our Application Framework, Demisto will help us strengthen our commitment to security teams by delivering a platform that provides higher levels of integration, automation and innovation to prevent successful cyberattacks,” Nikesh Arora, chairman and CEO of Palo Alto Networks.
The Santa Clara-based company was founded in 2005 by Israeli-American engineer Nir Zuk. They produced and shipped their first firewall product in 2007 and showcased it as the world’s first next-generation firewall.
As Zuk explains it, he was working at Juniper Networks in 2004 when he began wondering why there hadn’t been any advances in the cybersecurity industry. “The existing firewalls were based on decade-old designs,” he said in an interview. “I wanted to build the next generation product…[and] decided to do it on my own.”
Since then, Palo Alto Networks has been challenging the internet security status quo and is currently enjoying the lion’s share of the market. In 2014, they founded the Cyber Threat Alliance with Fortinet, Mcafee and Symantec, a non-profit group with the goal improving cybersecurity for “the greater good”. They encourage collaboration between agencies within the industry by sharing cyber-intelligence threats with each other.
Palo Alto Network’s threat assessment team, named Unit 42 as a tongue-in-cheek reference to Douglas Adam’s answer to the ultimate question of life, is comprised of some of the industry’s leading cybersecurity researchers and industry experts. They routinely save the world from cybersecurity threats such as their 2018 discovery of “Cannon”, a trojan being used to target the United States and European governments.
The company’s mission does not stop there, however. They currently serve 60,000 enterprise customers and protect billions of people worldwide but there’s always another threat.
