KuppingerCole Blog

I have been covering cybersecurity issues, first as a journalist then as an analyst, since 2006. In that 15 years I have heard the mantra that security is a boardroom issue hundreds of times. The subject has filled countless conference talks and media articles. It appears that the message is still not getting through if a speech by the new CEO of the UK National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) anything is to go by. In her first public speaking engagement in March this year, Lindy Cameron, said, you guessed it folks, security must be given more attention in the boardroom....

Data friction is arguably the biggest obstacle for every organization on its journey to achieve optimal business productivity. Even if you have not heard the term before, you’ve definitely faced its consequences in one form or another (most probably, even in multiple different forms). You need your product’s sales data for EMEA, but it’s not a top priority for your IT team? Your marketing team would love to derive better insights from your customer data, but your ERP system is not supported by their fancy cloud service? Your developers must wait several days to get an...

This week, SailPoint announced their intent to acquire ERP Maestro , a SaaS-based solution for monitoring SoD controls and manage access controls in business applications such as SAP. This announcement fits well into the SailPoint strategy of expanding their core offerings IdentityIQ and IdentityNow with additional SaaS services, such as AI-based identity analytics and, now, capabilities for in-depth management and control of access in business applications. Acquisition will help SailPoint in further expanding their offerings for business applications This acquisition also fits...

Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) platforms are attracting a lot of attention from many organizations, from enterprises to government agencies and even those on the upper end of Small-to-Mid-Sized Businesses (SMBs). The reason for this is clear: the cybersecurity landscape continues to evolve and get more complex in order to combat the corresponding rise in frequency and complexity of attacks. SOAR platforms can be the capstone application for Security Operations Centers (SOCs). Most organizations have a plethora of security tools already, such as Endpoint...

TPG Capital acquiring Thycotic in addition to Centrify, but leaving many questions unanswered Mergers and acquisitions are not uncommon in the tech industry, specifically in software. Even in the specialized area of Privileged Access Management (PAM), currently a $1.4bn market according to the KuppingerCole market sizing data, there have been several acquisitions in recent years. Despite its relatively small size, competition within the PAM market is fierce and it attracts startups and investors who realize that PAM has performed a growth spurt in the last years. This was due to both...

STG announced that they intend to acquire McAfee’s enterprise business for around $4B. The McAfee brand will continue to operate and focus on consumer cybersecurity. STG will pick up MVISION, Global Threat Intelligence, database security, unified endpoint security, CASB, CSPM, CWPP, DLP, SIEM, SWG, XDR, and policy management products and services. STG picked up RSA from Dell in September 2020. When the deal closed, STG stated that RSA would remain independent and would pursue growth in their most successful product lines: Archer, SecurID, NetWitness, and the Fraud & Risk...

On Wednesday March 10 th at 1am in the morning a fire started that destroyed a major data centre that provides cloud services from OVHcloud . Thankfully no one was injured but this should be a wake up call for cloud service users to check that they have factored the use of cloud services into their business continuity plans. Digital Transformation must include Business Continuity Planning As organizations go through digital transformation, they increasingly turn to using cloud services.  These allow them to develop new applications and create new ways of doing business...

Quantum computing is one of those topics that always seem to exist just out of our reach. Well over a decade ago we were promised that a real quantum computer will appear just in a few years, and for most people, this feeling remains the same even now. But is this assumption correct? Do we really need to wait a few years more until the fastest, biggest, and most reliable quantum computers will finally find their way into every industry? Or is it something we should already be considering today? Understanding (or at least trying to) quantum computing Now, I will not attempt to explain...

Okta will purchase Auth0 for $6.5B. Okta is a leading IDaaS vendor , originally focused on workforce but now addressing B2E, B2B, and B2C use cases. Okta’s solutions are designed for organizations that want to quickly enable cloud-delivered identity and seamlessly interoperate with other SaaS applications. Auth0 had a different entry point into the realm of IAM. Auth0 was aimed at developers, both in functionality and their marketing approach. Auth0’s founders knew that this was an underserved market. Consider a case where a company needs to expose one or two major...

Oracle has unveiled new interesting capabilities in the Oracle database today, which they refer to as Immutable and Blockchain tables . While I am not entirely convinced by the names they have chosen, I can absolutely get behind the overall Crypto-secure data management concept that has emerged along with them. Whenever people discuss various applications of cryptography for information protection, they almost inevitably tend to think about encryption or, in other words, protecting the data’s confidentiality. However, while keeping the data out of reach of unauthorized persons...