Following a spate of rumors, multinational cybersecurity company Palo Alto Networks has announced it will buy Israel-based Cider Security for about $195 million in an all-cash deal.
Cider focuses on application security, including technology that monitors suspicious activity around live applications in the cloud and the full ecosystem surrounding them. This encompasses code deployments and other sorts of modifications and updates covering code, continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD), and the wider supply chain.
“Cider has made it possible to connect into infrastructure, analyze the tools, and identify the risks, as well as how to remediate them. We are acquiring Cider for their innovation that will help enable Prisma Cloud to provide this capability that anyone doing cloud operations has to have,” Lee Klarich, Chief Product Officer for Palo Alto, said in a statement.
Palo Alto has raised $44 million from investors including Tiger Global and Glilot Capital Partners. The company has a market cap of nearly $47 billion and has experienced less volatility than its larger and more valuable consumer-facing counterparts though, like the others, it has seen its share price drop of late.
The purchase of Cider is Palo Alto’s first for 2022. It acquired Expanse for $800 million in 2020 and Bridgecrew for $156 million in 2021.
The company has a division that concentrates on application security, coalesced from previous acquisitions such as Evident.io, which forms the basis for its Prisma Cloud operation. It bought Evident.io in 2018 for $300 million.
Application security, which is a hot area in the enterprise IT universe, is a market that was worth approximately $6.2 billion in 2020, according to Mordor Intelligence. The space is vulnerable to attacks because of high levels of network activity and systems exposure.
