Privileged account security pioneer CyberArk has announced the acquisition of certain assets of privately-held cloud security provider Vaultive. It enhances the CyberArk Privileged Account Security Solution in several ways. It improves their ability to secure administrators., making it more granular. Vaultive’s non-disruptive nature capabilities also will make CyberArk’s solution easier to use by not disrupting the experience of the users being monitored.
“CyberArk is the pioneer in this space, and also the market leader,” said Udi Mokady, CyberArk’s chairman and CEO. “We also work hard on the innovation side, and with this acquisition, become the only vendor with the true capability of expanding privileged account security to administrators with this degree of granularity. The leader keeps on breaking away from the pack.”
CyberArk has been in business since 1999, with its head offices in Israel, and now with U.S. offices in Newton MA. They have approximately 1000 employees globally.
“We went public in 2014 because of the nature of the space,” Mokady said. “We protect the keys to the IT kingdom. What we do is mission-critical to the customers – allowing trusted users to manage the IT infrastructure. The other side of the business is doing the same thing for applications, so we manage credentials whether they are served to humans or applications. Last year, we made a major acquisition with Conjur, which strengthened us here in containers and dev/ops.”
Privileged account management [PAM] originated in large enterprises, and that is still CyberArk’s sweet spot, but they have been moving downstream from that.
“We have a large footprint in top enterprises, but we are going downmarket,” Mokady indicated. “We are in 50 per cent of the Fortune 100. However, we now have more than 3700 customers, and are in the upper echelon of the midmarket. It’s not an SMB solution.”
PAM also began as a direct play, and that has evolved as well.
“In the early years of CyberArk, we sold direct in the U.S., and were channel-centric everywhere else,” Mokady said. “That changed as we were successful with channels, and today about 60 per cent of the business is through channels.”
“Our channel business is growing faster than our business overall,” said Scott Whitehouse, CyberArk’s vice president of channels and alliances. “We have about 350 partners globally, which includes global SIs and a mix of regional and national channel players. We continue to add partners where it makes sense, but its all about quality rather than quantity. Whether we sell through channel depends how the customer wants to work with us, but channels are a big part of our growth plan, especially for anything that is cloud-related.”
The Vaultive acquisition is very much cloud-related. CyberArk was already strong in the cloud, so Vaultive isn’t extending their reach, but they will be enhancing their cloud capabilities.
“We have extended to the last cloud in the last couple of years and we now look at credentials just the same in the cloud,” Mokady indicated. “As customers move applications to the cloud, we help them on the journey. Vaultive would have been considered a CASB [Cloud Access Security Broker] but given their focus on the general business user, we are acquiring them to help us build deeper as we secure administrators.”
The Vaultive technology will enable CyberArk the only vendor able to extend privileged account security to Software-as-a-Service [SaaS], Infrastructure-as-a-Service [IaaS] and Platform-as-a-Service [PaaS] administrators in cloud environments with a greater level of granularity and control. It’s cloud-native and mobile-friendly capabilities will also enhance the CyberArk platform.
“Just as we already prevent takeovers by going after credentials, this will improve our ability to prevent takeovers from administrative users on the business side – and to do it very transparently, that has no impact on the way that these users work,” Mokady indicated
Mokady also said that this will have multiple positive impacts on CyberArk customers.
“There’s a deeper story here, and there’s a simpler and easier story,” he noted. “There is a net-new enhancement in the granularity, and a deeper understanding of the protocols of what the privileged business user is doing across SaaS, IaaS PaaS. The simpler and easier is in the improved ease of use and transparency.”
Whitehouse said that CyberArk channel partners should be excited about this.
“For our security-focused partners asked to do more around cloud implementations, this will mean more services work,” he stated. “Those partners who are more focused on DevOps consulting work can provide more secure solutions.”
