Akamai has announced another all-cash acquisition of a startup, keeping with its trend of consolidating companies into its umbrella of holdings. This time around, it acquired Soha Systems, which provides enterprise secure access as a service, for an undisclosed sum, commenting that the amount was immaterial. For a sense of scale, it’s helpful to note that Soha acquired just under $10 million in funding from investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, Cervin Ventures, Menlo Ventures, and Moment Ventures.
The acquisition will augment security for Akamai’s cloud networking business (specifically its Cloud Networking Solutions) and work well with the company’s strategy of protecting and accelerating enterprise applications and services in the cloud. Securing employee access to enterprise applications deployed behind the firewall is a crucial element of information security for businesses, which must also deliver third-party access to critical applications hosted in both public clouds and private data centers.
Providing secure access to enterprise applications can become complex and demanding, sometimes requiring the deployment of on-premise hardware and systems, including Application Delivery Controllers, VPNs, identity management systems and application monitoring solutions. But businesses also need to take extra precautions in addressing security risks caused by lateral movement across the enterprise network. For example, employees who access enterprise applications via the internet using third-party devices that aren’t completely controlled by the enterprise create additional liabilities and increase risk.
“In many ways, the traditional enterprise model is ‘turning inside out’ with applications, employees and data moving to the cloud, well outside of the enterprise’s traditional zone of control,” explained Robert Blumofe, executive vice president, Platform, and general manager, Enterprise and Carrier Division, Akamai. “By adding Soha’s secure access technology to our Cloud Networking Solutions, we believe we are well positioned to help our customers take full advantage of the key trends, cloud and mobile, driving enterprise computing.”
The acquisition of Soha Systems will help Akamai offer businesses secure, cloud-based application access control, while improving and securing remote and mobile access to enterprise networks. The move makes sense from a business perspective, bolstering Akamai’s enterprise security offerings and making it a more attractive acquisition target by the likes of Google, which is struggling to compete with Amazon AWS.
“Enterprise security is undergoing a phase shift and Soha’s secure access service has been designed to address the unique challenges businesses are facing in this era of hybrid data centers and mobile users,” said Haseeb Budhani, co-founder and CEO,Soha Systems. “We look forward to fully integrating our groundbr