Check Point To Buy Secure Remote Access Startup Odo Security

The acquisition of Odo Security will make working from home easier and safer by enabling organizations to securely connect any number of remote employees to everything from any location, Check Point says.

Check Point Software Technologies has agreed to purchase cybersecurity startup Odo Security to help enterprises enable secure remote access for employees to any application.

The San Carlos, Calif.-based platform security vendor said Tel Aviv, Israel-based Odo has developed a cloud-based, clientless secure access service edge (SASE) technology that secures remote access. The deal will make working from home easier and safer by enabling organizations to securely connect any number of remote employees to everything from any location, according to Check Point.

“Many organizations find themselves compromising security in order to deliver the connectivity required by their business needs,” Dorit Dor, Check Point’s vice president of products, said in a statement. “By incorporating Odo Security’s unique clientless, cloud-delivered secure remote access to our portfolio of threat prevention services, we help organizations overcome this dilemma.”

[Related: Check Point CEO Gil Shwed: ‘We Can Do Much More With The Channel’]

Terms of the deal, which is expected to close within a week, weren’t disclosed. Odo Security’s technology will be integrated into Check Point’s Infinity architecture and SASE vision, the company said. Check Point’s stock is down $0.43 (0.35 percent) to $122.35 in trading Wednesday morning.

Odo Security was founded in 2017, employs 20 people and hasn’t raised any outside funding, according to LinkedIn and Crunchbase. The company was co-founded by Or Zilberman, Gilad Steinberg and Noa Shakir, who served as Odo Security’s CEO, chief technology officer and chief product officer, respectively.

Many organizations overlooked critical aspects of security in the race to enable remote working at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, which Check Point said significantly increased their exposure to cyberattacks. Organizations now more than ever need to secure remote connectivity anytime, anywhere to any resource, according to Check Point.

Unlike traditional secure remote access tools, Check Point said Odo Security enables users to easily connect through a unified portal to a wide range of applications with no client or software installation. These applications can span the gamut from remote desktops and web applications to database servers and cloud and corporate servers, according to Check Point.

Security administrators can easily deploy Odo Security in less than five minutes from the cloud, gaining enhanced visibility including a full audit trail of user activity, according to Check Point. Odo Security’s zero trust architecture allows businesses to reduce their attack surface by applying the principle of least privilege and ensuring that only the right people can access the application in the proper context.

Check Point CEO Gil Shwed said in April that the company had witnessed a seven-fold increase in traffic to its product webpage discussing remote access VPN since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The need for remote access VPN was so great that Check Point was actually shipping the equipment to some customers before even receiving the order so they could get set up more quickly, Shwed said.

This is Check Point’s fifth acquisition in the past two years, according to Crunchbase. The company bought serverless security startup Protego in December 2019 to help customers avoid having vulnerable code deployed into production. A month earlier, Check Point bought security startup Cymplify to defend IoT devices against highly sophisticated attacks by hardening and protecting the devices’ firmware.

In January 2019, Check Point acquired emerging web application and API protection vendor ForceNock to bolster its advanced machine-learning protection capabilities. And three months before that, Check Point purchased emerging vendor Dome9 for $175 million to help customers secure multi-cloud deployments across Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

All told, Check Point has made 16 acquisitions over the course of its 27-year history, according to Crunchbase.