Sophos is beefing up its public cloud security portfolio by acquiring Avid Secure, which offers an artificial intelligence (AI)-based cloud security analytics, compliance and DevSecOps platform.

The platform provides end-to-end protection in public cloud services such as AWS, Azure and Google. The acquisition is part of Sophos’ cloud business strategy.

Avid Secure is a small, privately owned company with headquarters in San Francisco, and engineering operations in Gurgaon, India.

Sophos’ Dan Schiappa

“Over the coming months, Avid Secure technology and services will be offered through the Sophos portfolio and available through Sophos channel partners,” Dan Schiappa, Sophos’ senior vice president and general manager of products, tells us. “Sophos’ mission is to deliver the most effective cybersecurity solutions to its customers and partners and is driven to build or buy the very best technology. Moving forward, customers and partners will benefit from the accelerated innovation and advanced approach to protection that Sophos and the team at Avid Secure can deliver together.”

Rik Turner, principal analyst at Ovum, said any serious cybersecurity company, and particularly one focused exclusively on business customers such as Sophos, needs to have a public cloud security offering today. Increasing numbers of customers are moving workloads to hybrid environments, and “even multicloud strategies appear to be finally taking off over the last year or so,” he said.

“Without knowing the specifics of the Avid product, I’d say an AI-based analytics platform for security probably means they will be training algorithms to detect anomalies within their cloud environments, maybe lateral movement between workloads or whatever, which is a logical way to approach such a problem,” he said.

In terms of cloud security, Trend Micro enjoyed some early-mover success in data center/cloud security, which has  made up for their lack of North American clout in areas such as endpoint security, Turner said.

“As a U.K. immigrant, maybe Sophos seeks to emulate that success, though in the meantime the U.S. native companies such as Symantec and McAfee have, of course, been moving to beef up their own offerings in that market,” he said.

“We built the Avid Secure platform to revolutionize the security of public cloud environments in a process efficient way,” said Nikhil Gupta, Avid Secure’s CEO and co-founder. “We are proud of our innovative AI-powered technology that provides enterprises with end-to-end continuous security analytics, visibility and compliance to protect their data and maximize their investments in public cloud services. The opportunity to join Sophos in their mission to evolve cybersecurity into an intelligent, integrated system presented a perfect fit for our engineering vision. I, and the whole team at Avid Secure, look forward to what we can achieve together.”