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Zscaler Looks to Solidify Its Entry Into the CASB Market With the Acquisition of Cloudneeti

Zscaler has announced its intent to buy cloud security posture management (CSPM) vendor Cloudneeti. The move suggests that Zscaler is serious about entering the CASB market.

Zscaler expects that the acquisition will enable the addition of the following features to its CASB offering:

• Complete data protection and exposure prevention: Data protection policies apply across locations, users, and application types to ensure consistent and comprehensive data loss prevention in compliance with regulations such as GDPR.
• Unified compliance assurance: A single platform that provides compliance visibility and violation mitigation across SaaS applications, such as Microsoft Office 365, and cloud service providers, including Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, to ensure government laws and industry regulations are followed.
• Automated risk reduction: Automated remediations that ensure cloud applications are not vulnerable to outside threats through the application of industry and organizationally defined policies.

Source: Zscaler at SoftwareReviews, as of April 2020

“Cloudneeti augments Zscaler’s data protection capabilities and will dramatically improve organizations’ cloud security by discovering and eliminating some of the most common causes of data breaches and compliance violations,” said Jay Chaudhry, Chairman and CEO of Zscaler. “Whether caused by SaaS applications being configured incorrectly or a developer accidentally misconfiguring a new public cloud application, these preventable data protection lapses are behind some of the biggest breaches in history. I am thrilled to welcome the Cloudneeti team to the Zscaler family.”

Zscaler is not currently listed on SoftwareReviews as a CASB vendor because its offering does not provide all the mandatory features expected of a full CASB system. This will likely change as Zscaler continues to build out its product.

Our Take

Zscaler made its name as a pioneer in the cloud-based secure web gateway (SWG) market. Until recently, however, Zscaler has been fairly subdued about its plans to enter the CASB market. This is likely due to its strategy of partnering with CASB vendors rather than directly competing with them. The Cloudneeti acquisition suggests that Zscaler has every intention of moving into this space and expanding its current service offerings.