Palo Alto Networks Announces Plan to Acquire Bridgecrew

Palo Alto Networks announced its intentions to acquire Bridgecrew, a developer-first cloud security company. According to a press release, Palo Alto Networks plans to spend $156 million in cash for the acquisition; the proposed acquisition is expected to close during Palo Alto Networks fiscal third quarter. 

Palo Alto Networks operates as a security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) provider as well as a cloud-centric security vendor. Additionally, Palo Alto Networks focuses on enterprise firewalls, artificial intelligence, and analytics. With several endpoint security use cases including IoT security and mobile users, it also crosses into that category. 

Through the acquisition of Bridgecrew, Palo Alto plans to enable “shift left” security, enabling its Prisma Cloud to secure the entire application lifecycle. Shift Left security focuses on infrastructure as code (IaC), where infrastructure configuration is codified during development.

In a blog post, Chief Product Officer Lee Klarich stated the following concerning shift left security and the cloud: “To give you an idea of the current challenges faced by customers as organizations embrace the cloud, the number of developers rapidly pushing code into the cloud outnumbers the security professionals tasked with monitoring these changes for security issues by 10 to 1. As security teams mature their runtime security practices, this puts back-pressure on the developers to fix issues found after deploying to production. The imbalance not only risks delays in application deployments but also results in security missteps at the application development stage that may leave clouds exposed for attack and can be much more costly to fix when found after product release.”

You can learn more about Palo Alto Networks here. 

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