Michael Watts, CEO & Co-Founder of Cloud Conformity (L), and Kevin Simzer, Chief Operating Officer, Trend Micro (R)
Security vendor Trend Micro has purchased Aussie-founded cloud security start-up and Amazon Web Services (AWS) partner Cloud Conformity for US$70 million, in a move aimed at strengthening the vendor's cloud prowess.
Founded in Sydney in 2016, Cloud Conformity provides cloud security posture management (CSPM) and has its headquarters in the US, with offices in San Francisco, Dallas, Sydney, London, Montreal and Singapore.
The acquisition instantly broadens Trend Micro’s cloud security portfolio, adding complementary capabilities that automatically identify and fix a range of cloud infrastructure configuration issues.
It also optimises costs and helps addresses compliance with industry regulatory standards such as PCI, GDPR, HIPAA and NIST.
Cloud Conformity is an AWS Advanced Technology partner with competencies in security and cloud management tools. The company was named AWS Technology partner of the year for A/NZ 2019.
“We have been laser focused on building integrated security for the cloud since its birth over a decade ago, unlike other vendors who are now attempting to stitch together disparate cloud technologies,” Trend Micro CEO, Eva Chen, said. “As more enterprises move to the cloud, our customers feel they’re operating amid a wild-west approach to cloud implementations that leave them with unmanaged risk.
“Their [Cloud Conformity's] offering perfectly complements our own portfolio and provides immediate value to customers. Both the people and technology are a great fit for Trend Micro.”
As part of the acquisition, all of Cloud Conformity’s employees will be brought across to Trend Micro's ranks.
“We are excited for the opportunities that will come from being part of the leading cloud security provider – amplifying what we do best, while allowing our offerings to expand in ways we couldn’t have done on our own,” Cloud Conformity CEO, Michael Watts, said.
“We think customers will love this simplified approach to security and compliance across their entire cloud environment, including AWS, Azure and Google Cloud – providing security guardrails to let them go faster and do more.”
In a blog post, Trend Micro COO, Kevin Simzer, said mergers and acquisitions had never been Trend's default growth strategy, further stating its growth in the past 30 years had come from organic in-house development.
"Our strategy has always been focused on eliminating customer pain points...the most recent pain point we set out to alleviate is help customer's audit and solve misconfigurations of cloud workloads," Simzer said.
"We could have stepped up to this challenging new space by investing in some of our 2000+ talented engineering team members to address this customer pain. However, an ideal opportunity presented itself for us to add one of the industry leader's in this space, Cloud Conformity and ultimately accelerate into this new market opportunity.
"As an AWS partner of the year with a proven, scalable platform and 125 customers, they are culturally a perfect fit for us."
