Microsoft Bolsters Azure Data Offerings With Acquisition Of BlueTalon

The acquisition will bring enhanced capabilities around data security and data governance in the Azure cloud platform, according to Microsoft.

Microsoft has acquired a company focused on simplifying data security and data governance, BlueTalon, to improve the capabilities of Microsoft's Azure Data Governance offering.

The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

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Redwood City, Calif.-based BlueTalon offers solutions to remove "blind spots" in data security while also providing improved control and visibility of data, said Rohan Kumar, corporate vice president of Azure Data at Microsoft, in a blog post.

"BlueTalon provides a customer-proven, data-centric solution for data access management and auditing across the diverse systems resident in modern data estates," Kumar said. "This acquisition will enhance our ability to empower enterprises across industries to digitally transform while ensuring right use of data with centralized data governance at scale through Azure."

While an initial achievement by BlueTalon was developing a unified data access control for on-premises data estates, BlueTalon customers “increasingly began to migrate more and more of their data to the cloud and asked us to support them in that process," said BlueTalon CEO Eric Tilenius (pictured) in a blog post.

"As we began exploring partnership opportunities with various hyperscale cloud providers to better serve our customers, Microsoft deeply impressed us," Tilenius wrote.

Customers want to know that they can implement fine-grained compliance policies in the cloud, "so it’s fantastic to see Microsoft investing in those technologies," said Matt Alofs, who heads the Azure practice group at Washington, D.C.-based New Signature, in an email to CRN.

For partners, "the opportunity to provide expertise in configuring and maintaining these tools is huge," said Alofs, whose firm is an Azure Expert MSP and No. 407 on the CRN Solution Provider 500. "We’ve seen lots of customer interest in the recent past around using Microsoft’s published Blueprints for PCI/DSS compliance, and I’d expect the same to occur around BlueTalon’s tech."

Founded in 2013, BlueTalon last announced funding in 2016, saying at the time that the firm had collected more than $25 million. Investors have included Maverick Ventures, Data Collective and Bloomberg Beta.

BlueTalon's team will be joining Microsoft’s Azure Data Governance group, Tilenius said.