Global cybersecurity solutions provider Palo Alto Networks has acquired Bridgecrew, a developer-first cloud security company, for approximately $156 million in cash. Bridgecrew co-founders, Idan Tendler, Barak Schoster and Guy Eisenkot, and their teams will join Palo Alto Networks.
Through this acquisition, Palo Alto Networks is making a further bet that cloud security must ‘shift left,’ with security increasingly performed during the DevOps process.
Bridgecrew is a pioneer in ‘shift left’, focusing on infrastructure as code (IaC), where infrastructure configuration is codified during development. The company’s developer-first IaC security platform offers developers and DevOps teams a systematic way to enforce infrastructure security standards throughout the development lifecycle. The proposed acquisition will enable Palo Alto Networks’ Prisma Cloud to provide developers with security assessment and enforcement capabilities throughout the DevOps process.
“Shift left security is a must-have in any cloud security platform,” said Nikesh Arora, chairman and CEO of Palo Alto Networks. “Developers don’t want to wait until runtime to find out their security is not working, and the CISO charged with protecting the entire organization certainly values higher security from fixing issues earlier in the development lifecycle. We are thrilled to welcome Bridgecrew, and their widely adopted and trusted developer security platform, to Palo Alto Networks. When combined, Prisma Cloud customers will benefit from having security embedded in the very foundation of their cloud infrastructure.”
Security Across Application Lifecycle
With the addition of Bridgecrew, Palo Alto Networks is now able to deliver security across the full application lifecycle. Once integrated, Prisma Cloud customers would benefit from a single platform that will deliver cloud security from build time to runtime, “seamlessly” connecting security and DevOps teams. This again highlights the need for a comprehensive approach to cloud security that simply can’t be achieved with point products.
Bridgecrew’s open-source IaC scanner, Checkov, has gained significant early traction with developers, surpassing 1 million downloads in 2020 – its first full year of availability. Also, Bridgecrew’s full security platform is seeing good early traction across many cloud-first organizations and several industries.
Palo Alto Networks says it will continue to invest in Bridgecrew’s open-source initiatives as part of its ongoing commitment to DevOps security.
“We have dedicated ourselves to building developer-first tools that bridge the gap between developers and cloud security,” said Idan Tendler, co-founder and CEO of Bridgecrew. “By joining Palo Alto Networks, we will be able to bring codified cloud security to the developer community on a wider scale. We look forward to working together to continue shifting cloud security left.”
