Palo Alto Networks announced Thursday that it will buy Cider Security, a supplier of application protection and software supply chain security, for about $195 million in cash. According to Melinda Marks, a senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, this acquisition is a solid step toward enabling security to scale with modern software development.
PAN stated that Cider will enable its Prisma Cloud platform to safeguard the full application security lifecycle, from code to cloud.
“For cloud-native development, you have developers empowered to provision and deploy applications to the cloud to make them available for customers, partners, and employees, and while it increases productivity, it’s a challenge for security teams to keep up with the speed and protect the applications in these dynamic, exposed environments,’’ Marks told VentureBeat in an email interview.
Cider Security is an example of a company that incorporates observability into developer workflows, such as CI/CD pipelines, to improve security, she says.
PAN has purchased other companies and eventually integrated their technologies within its platform. According to Marks, these include Twistlock for container security and Bridgecrew for developer-focused security with automated infrastructure as code (IaC) and supply chain security.
Check Point, TrendMicro, Crowdstrike, and Lacework are among the other vendors in this market, and the latter has begun to make acquisitions with a similar purpose. Marks also mentioned younger firms such as Orca and Wiz.
The proposed transaction is likely to close in the second quarter of fiscal 2023, according to PAN.
