Symantec has announced the planned acquisition of Fireglass, adding the agentless isolation solution to its integrated Cyber Defense Platform.
Fireglass’ agentless isolation solution eliminates malware and phishing threats by preventing potentially harmful content from ever reaching user endpoints or the corporate network. The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions, and is expected to close in the third calendar quarter of 2017. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Greg Clark, Symantec CEO, said: “Integrating Fireglass’ isolation technology with Symantec’s existing endpoint, email and secure web gateway solutions could reduce security events by as much as 70%, while virtually eliminating advanced threats spread by web browsing or email content.
“Isolation is a key element of securing the cloud generation and is even a productivity gain for both the end-user and security operations center.”
Guy Guzner, founder and CEO of Fireglass, added: “Fireglass’ industry-leading isolation technology helps customers battle zero-day attacks and other serious vulnerabilities, making it an essential element for protecting email, messaging and web browsing.
“With Symantec’s global scale, we’re excited to bring this groundbreaking technology into the hands of more customers.”
In an email to Infosecurity, Scott Crawford, research director of the Information Security Channel at 451 Research, said that Symantec follows the likes of Cylance, Carbon Black and others in adding functionality to endpoint detection and response.
Crawford also claimed that this move further emphasizes the distinction that Blue Coat brings to Symantec. “In a market dominated by legacy approaches to endpoint and network security, further emphasizing the role that cloud-based technologies can and will play in protecting organizations from threats before they reach the enterprise network or the endpoint”.
He said: “It also speaks to the range of competitive approaches vendors are bringing to the proactive protection of endpoints before those endpoints encounter threats directly. Fireglass’ technology per se is not new, capitalizing on a long history of the application of desktop and application virtualization to deliver endpoint content without exposing endpoints to malicious functionality, but the way Fireglass has developed the technology aligns well with the Blue Coat portfolio.”