Imperva To Buy jSonar, Adding To Database Security Firepower

The data security vendors see massive potential in merging highly complementary solutions for locking down an ever-expanding landscape of data storage technologies and architectures.

Imperva has agreed to buy Goldman Sachs-backed jSonar in a deal that will forge a data security powerhouse offering a comprehensive portfolio of solutions to protect modern data architectures.

“We were on a mission to solve for roadblocks across the entire data cycle and provide an integrated data solution that runs the full gamut across security, compliance and privacy needs for our customers,” Imperva CEO Pam Murphy told CRN.

While Imperva, the only company that protects both applications and databases, built many of those capabilities itself, the addition of jSonar will round out the portfolio in what has become a rapidly expanding and increasingly complex data storage landscape.

Financial terms of the deal, still waiting for regulatory approval, were not disclosed. jSonar has dual headquarters in Waltham, Mass. and Vancouver, Canada and raised a total of $50 million in funding from Goldman Sachs this past June.

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There are more paths than ever to access data, from the network to applications to APIs to direct or privileged access to databases, Murphy said.

As such, the Redwood Shores, Calif.-headquartered cybersecurity vendor has seen customers struggle in recent years to protect all those paths across an ever-expanding set of data technologies.

“Every week there’s a new flavor of cloud database on the market. There are data lakes and data swamps and data stores. It’s become a very challenging environment for our customers to manage,” Murphy said.

Aiming to achieve a “fast and comprehensive way to help our customers secure that data across a diverse set of repositories, on-prem and in the cloud,” Murphy called Ron Bennatan, the founder and CTO of jSonar, to discuss joining forces.

“I told Ron, we have all this stuff you need, you have all this stuff we need,” she said.

Bennatan also saw a great fit, as the two companies had highly complementary solutions with minimal overlap.

“It was almost like someone got together and split the world, said you develop this and I develop this,” Bennatan said.

Founded in 2013, jSonar built its technology for what was then “a new world of data” spanning on-premises and cloud environments, Bennatan said.

The days of everyone using Oracle or SQL Server are gone, he said.

“Now everybody wants to use their fancy-schmancy new database, and it just creates an explosion of complexity for the security team,” Bennatan explained.

“We just want to help people simplify this journey. On one side there’s good security, and on the other side not putting shackles on the business,” he told CRN.

Because jSonar didn’t have legacy products, it could focus on the challenges posed by modern data architectures.

“We could just go to where people were challenged moving data around,” he said.

Bennatan, who previously founded Guardium, acquired by IBM in 2009, will lead Imperva’s data security unit, responsible for both lines of products, once the deal closes.

The companies already have a lot of joint customers, he told CRN. While they’ve done soft integrations on those accounts, once merged the products and companies will be tightly integrated.