Fortinet snags security automation vendor CyberSponse

Fortinet announced on Thursday that it has bought Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR) vendor CyberSponse. Fortinet announced on Thursday that it has bought Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR) vendor CyberSponse. With today's continuous evolution of cyberthreats and the increasing number of point security products, enterprises are faced with complex and costly security defenses. Further exacerbating security for enterprises, there's also a lack of skilled cybersecurity professionals. To combat the increased complexities, enterprises and service providers need to simplify their operations and maximize the efficiency of today’s security operations centers (SOCs) by consolidating and triaging alerts from a wide range of security products. They also want to automate analysis and the repetitive tasks in order to save resources, and leverage playbooks to enable real-time incident response. SOAR is a stack of software solutions that are designed to help companies collect valuable data. The information collected using SOAR allows businesses and other organization to understand security threats coming from different sources and then respond to low-level events often without the need of human input. “The growing number of security tools being deployed by enterprises have introduced operational complexities that make organizations more vulnerable to breaches," said Ken Xie, founder and CEO of Fortinet, in a statement. "With the integration of CyberSponse’s powerful SOAR platform into the Fortinet Security Fabric, we will offer customers accelerated incident response and the ability to standardize and scale processes that will enhance security posture and reduce business risk and associated costs.” The combination of Fortinet and CyperSponse will provide enterprises with a centralized point of visibility and control using more than 325 connectors that integrate with all of the major security vendors. It will also include more than 200 out-of-the-box playbooks that are preconfigured to automate incident response action sequences and routine tasks. Arlington, Virginia-based CyberSponse was founded in 2011 and had raised a total of $7.6 million in funding, according to Crunchbase. With security always top of mind for enterprises and service providers, expect more unified security manage deployments going forward. AT&T bought AlienVault, which develops tools that identify and manage cyberattacks through its Unified Security Management (USM) platform last year, and then deployed a managed threat detection and response service in July based on the AlienVault technology.