Palo Alto Networks Acquires Cider Security to Strengthen Security with Modern Software Development

An announcement from Palo Alto Network was released on Thursday stating that the company is acquiring Cider Security, an application security and software supply chain provider. The acquisition, which costs approximately $195 million in cash, aims to strengthen the security of the application as the company adapts modern security software.

Acquiring Cider Security

Palo Alto Networks announced that it will be acquiring the application security and software supply chain security provider Cider Security for $195 million in cash, which is expected to close in the second quarter of 2023. Based on a report from Venture Beat, this is part of the company's plan for its Prisma Cloud platform to be Cider-supported. Through this, PAN's whole application security lifecycle will be secured from code to cloud.

Because of the diversity, greater speed, and being dynamic by nature, the software engineering ecosystem has introduced new gaps and challenges in cybersecurity. This makes PAN becomes one of the biggest vectors to receive cyberattacks. Chief Product Officer Lee Klarich stated that despite the organization using a public cloud that has an application infrastructure with tons of tools and applications that can access their code, they only have limited visibility to their configuration.

But she added, "Cider has made it possible to connect into infrastructure, analyze the tools, and identify the risks, as well as how to remediate them. We are acquiring Cider for their innovation that will help enable Prisma Cloud to provide this capability that anyone doing cloud operations has to have."

This is why the acquisition is very important to the company, as Cider's AppSec platform was built for much more convenient security. Financial Buzz reported that Chief Executive Officer Guy Fletcher stated that it was designed to make the engineering move fast. By only scanning the CI/CD pipeline, the company can already identify the vulnerabilities that have occurred and solve them right away.

Other Acquisition

Aside from Cider Security, PAN has been very strategic in investing in other companies as they make their portfolio to become broad as ever for the customers to adopt the cloud. For cloud infrastructure security, the company acquired Evident.io in 2018. For cloud threat defense, RedLock was also purchased. Fast forward to 2019 when the company announced its interest in Prisma as they aim to build out a platform that offers convenient access, data protection, and application.

Analyst's Take

Enterprise Strategy Group Senior Analyst Melinda Marks stated in an interview that this acquisition is a smart move from the company as it enables security and regulates modern software development.

She added, "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."

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Written by Inno Flores