Check Point Buys Emerging Public Cloud Security Vendor Dome9

Check Point Software Technologies has purchased Dome9 to help customers secure multi-cloud deployments across Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

The San Carlos, Calif.-based platform security vendor said its acquisition of the Tel Aviv, Israel-based cloud security startup will boost its capabilities around intuitive visualization of security posture, compliance and governance automation, privileged identity protection, and cloud traffic and event analysis.

"Dome9 and Check Point's CloudGuard together provide the best cloud security solution in the industry," Gil Shwed, Check Point CEO, said in a statement. "Dome9's platform will add rich cloud management and active policy enforcement capabilities to Check Point's Infinity Architecture."

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Check Point said during its earnings call Wednesday that there was an initial cash consideration of $175 million for Dome9. Dome9 has received $29.3 million in four rounds of outside funding, with SoftBank leading a $16.5 million Series C investment in April 2017, according to CrunchBase. Check Point didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

Dome9 was founded in 2011 and currently employs 101 people, up from just 64 employees at this time last year and 41 workers two years ago, according to LinkedIn. The company's customers include many large enterprises such as Western Union, Pacific Life, Vanguard, Cadence and Centrify, as well as global systems integrators and MSPs, according to Check Point.

"Combining forces allows us to offer the most comprehensive platform to protect customer cloud deployments as they grow and evolve," Zohar Alon, Dome9 co-founder and CEO, said in a statement.

Dome9 provides a unified place to control cloud security policies and support multi-cloud environments and large-scale deployments. The protection goes beyond monitoring and security assessment to provide a true guardrail for cloud workloads, according to the company.

The offering is able to automatically detect and remediate time-sensitive or critical issues in a customer's environment, according to Check Point. Dome9 also provides privileged elevation for AWS IAM (identity and access management) users and roles with a multifactor authentication capability that fences sensitive admin operations, the company said.

The company can also construct a real-time topology of an organization's cloud security, including security groups, instances, and firewalls. This makes it easier for IT security teams to identify configuration drift, assess the impact of new vulnerabilities, and spot firewall rule misconfigurations quickly, according to Check Point.

Customers can also automatically and continuously assess their cloud security configuration using out-of- the-box test suites that check for compliance against regulatory standards, Check Point said. And Dome9 allows compliance teams to create custom rules in expressive language that's concise enough to fit into a tweet, eliminating the need to write hundreds of lines of code for a specific compliance policy.

Check Point said it plans to start integrating Dome9 right away and complete the process by the first quarter of 2019. Check Point partners can begin to sell Dome9, the company said, but should continue to work with their current sales representatives.

Dome9 will not replace Check Point's CloudGuard IaaS offering, but will instead be integrated with it. At the same time, customers will continue to have the option to procure Dome9 independently of other Check Point products.

This is Check Point's first acquisition since April 2015, when the company bought San Francisco-based startup Lacoon Mobile Security. Check Point's stock remains unchanged at $113.15 in pre-market trading Wednesday.