Zscaler, Inc., the leader in cloud security, announced it has acquired Edgewise Networks, a pioneer in securing application-to-application communications for public clouds and data centers. Edgewise Networks significantly improves the security of east-west communication by verifying the identity of application software, services and processes to achieve a zero trust environment which measurably reduces the attack surface and lowers the risk of application compromise and data breaches.
In today’s world of cloud and mobility, perimeter-based network security is becoming less relevant. Modern security should be focused on protecting users, applications and data. Zscaler secures connections between users and applications, based on business policies, without connecting them to the corporate network, known as zero trust network access. Edgewise broadens the Zscaler cloud-native platform and secures application-to-application communication to deliver stronger security in public clouds and data centers.
Enterprises face significant threats from attacks that can freely move laterally within the network as east-west traffic. A single compromised server allows an attacker to harm multiple servers and applications on that network. Edgewise discovers individual applications and their legitimate communication patterns and, using AI and machine learning algorithms, automatically creates and enforces authorized communication to provide application segmentation. We believe this is a far superior approach than legacy network segmentation for security.
“Zscaler was founded to innovate security in a cloud-first world. We are disrupting legacy network security, reducing business risk, improving the user experience, and consolidating security point products for our customers,” said Jay Chaudhry, Chairman and CEO of Zscaler. “Edgewise is highly innovative technology that enables application segmentation without having to do traditional network segmentation which is often done with virtual firewalls. We are excited to welcome the Edgewise team to the Zscaler family.”
“We are proud to have made zero trust security achievable in complex, multi-cloud environments. Our core innovation is the use of software identity verification to simultaneously strengthen security and simplify operations,” said Peter Smith, CEO of Edgewise. “Edgewise automates the identity-based policies making it easy to reduce the attack surface across public cloud, multi-cloud, data center and even container environments. We are thrilled to join the Zscaler family and share our innovation with the global Zscaler customer base.”