Fortinet Snaps Up SOAR Provider CyberSponse

Next-generation firewall and SD-WAN vendor Fortinet today announced the acquisition of CyberSponse, a security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) platform provider. The terms of the purchase were not disclosed. Next-generation firewall and SD-WAN vendor Fortinet today announced the acquisition of CyberSponse, a security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) platform provider. The terms of the purchase were not disclosed. Fortinet has had a close relationship with the Arlington, Virginia-based SOAR provider for some time. CyberSponse, which was founded in 2011 and has received approximately $7.6 million in funding to date, was a Fortinet Security Fabric Partner prior to the acquisition. According to Fortinet, CyberSponse’s feature set will further extend the automation and incident response capabilities of its FortiAnalyzer, FortiSIEM, and FortiGate products. “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 at 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 integration of these capabilities will, according to Fortinet, enable customers to consolidate and triage alerts from security products, automate data analysis and repetitive tasks, and leverage pre-defined playbooks to enable real-time response to threats. Joseph Loomis, CyberSponse founder and CSO, called the acquisition “an ideal match,” in a statement. “The combined powerhouse of Fortinet’s Security Fabric and CyberSponse’s SOAR technology will ensure customers are protected by the most sophisticated global security operations platform that includes hundreds of integrations enabling streamlined out-of-the-box playbook execution,” he said. Fortinet isn’t the only networking vendor to acquire a SOAR provider this year. In February, fellow security firm Palo Alto Networks shelled out $560 million for SOAR startup Demistro. AT&T Cybersecurity rolled out its own managed threat detection and response service based on the AlienVault unified security management platform in July. And in October, Splunk launched a unified security platform called Splunk Mission Control, which integrated SOAR features acquired from Phantom Cyber.