Highlights:
- After cataloging a company’s data assets, the startup’s software identifies potential cybersecurity concerns.
- According to Polar Security, its software can identify problems with both regulatory compliance and cybersecurity vulnerabilities.
IBM Corp. announced buying Polar Security Inc., a startup that assists businesses in securing the data they save in the cloud against hackers.
In announcing the acquisition, IBM omitted any mention of the money involved. As reported in the past, the company was to spend around USD 60 million on Polar Security. According to reports, the business failed to find a buyer “for lack of runway” and attracted takeover interest from Datadog Inc., a publicly traded provider of observability software.
Based in Tel Aviv, Polar Security came out of stealth last year with USD 8.5 million in startup money. With the aid of its platform, businesses can search the public cloud for sensitive data like customers’ credit card information. Polar Security claims its algorithms can also locate sensitive data in software-as-a-service programs.
After cataloging the company’s data assets, the startup’s software identifies potential cybersecurity concerns. It can assist admins in locating file repositories that don’t require a password. Additionally, it pinpoints more subtle cybersecurity problems, such as user accounts with extensive access to sensitive information.
The startup’s platform prioritizes issues according to severity to assist administrators in first addressing the most pressing problems. It produces remedy ideas to take extra precautions and expedite the troubleshooting process.
According to Polar Security, its platform can identify problems with both regulatory compliance and cybersecurity vulnerabilities. The platform, for instance, can determine whether a business maintains financial data in a software-as-a-service application that is not authorized to store such data.
It promises to make other tasks related to regulatory compliance easier. To comply with local laws, some datasets must be retained in the country where they were created. According to Polar Security, their platform may assist businesses in identifying when data is unintentionally transferred to a cloud data center in a different jurisdiction.
The platform is built on an architecture that is referred to as agentless. This makes installation easier for clients since they don’t need to deploy additional software in their cloud environments. According to Polar Security, businesses may set up their platform in as little as a few minutes.
Dinesh Nirmal, Senior Vice President of products in the software division of IBM, said, “An agentless platform that connects within minutes, Polar Security can automatically find unknown and sensitive data across the cloud, including structured and unstructured assets. Polar Security classifies the data, maps the potential and actual flow of that data, and identifies vulnerabilities.”
After the acquisition, IBM intends to incorporate the startup’s software into its Guardium cybersecurity portfolio. More than six tools are available in the product range for businesses to encrypt corporate data, patch holes, and carry out associated operations.
