Microsoft has been a tear recently, throwing its stockpile of cash toward bettering its product offerings through acquisitions. And, while the company has snatched up a bunch of cross-platform mobile apps in the mix, its focus has been primarily centered on the Cloud. Also of interest, is that many of its new Cloud-based acquisitions have come from an unlikely source: Israel.
In the last year the software company has bought Aorato for cyber security, Equivio for text analysis, and N-trig for its digital pen technology. All Israeli-based companies.
With Microsoft's latest proposed Israeli-based acquisition, Adallom, it is seeking to deliver a cloud access security platform for visibility, governance and protection of data. Using an agentless system that requires no network configuration, Adallom's API's integrates into the Hybrid Cloud infrastructure for enterprises and serves as a sort of liaison firewall to capture and secure data. This API layer serves as a command and control mechanism. Data passes through Adallom where it is monitored for potential active security weaknesses and delivers alerts.
Additionally, Adallom can:
-
Provide comprehensive intelligence into application usage
-
Monitor privileged user accounts
-
Prevent sensitive data leakage to unmanaged devices
-
Manage sharing of confidential corporate data
-
Identify malicious data exfiltration
-
Address regulatory and compliance mandates for data in the cloud
Out of the box, Adallom currently supports AWS, Dropbox, Office 365, Box, Salesforce, Successfactors, Google Apps, Okta, Servicenow, Ariba, Yammer, Jive, and Centrify, but using the APIs, can support almost any application whether it is running in a Private Cloud or in Azure, AWS, or Rackspace.
The purchase will reportedly cost Microsoft $320 million, making it the largest acquisition in Israel so far. Adallom has its headquarters in Palo Alto, California with its Israel development center in Tel Aviv's Ramat Hahayal.
Of note, Adallom was the company that exposed a severe vulnerability in Office 365 back in 2013.
