Trend Micro is stepping up its cloud security arsenal with its $70 million acquisition of Cloud Conformity, a cloud security posture management (CSPM) company.

The acquisition “instantly” broadens the cloud services Trend Micro can secure and resolves often overlooked security issues caused by cloud infrastructure misconfiguration, the company said. The acquisition aims to give Trend Micro a competitive advantage over other cloud security companies.

Kevin Simzer, Trend Micro’s COO, tells us his company’s partners, along with its customers, will now have access to complementary Cloud Conformity solutions that will help partner organizations “continuously improve their security and compliance posture through automated configuration checks and remediation steps.” Trend Micro partners with MSSPs, MSPs, resellers, SIs and cloud service providers.

Trend Micro’s Kevin Simzer

“This acquisition allows for a more simplified approach to security and compliance across organizations’ entire cloud environment,” he said, “including AWS and Azure with Google Cloud coming soon — providing security guardrails to let them go faster and do more.”

This acquisition builds upon Trend Micro’s “continuous innovation” in cloud security, adding complementary capabilities that automatically identify and fix a range of cloud infrastructure configuration issues, the company said. It also optimizes costs and helps ensure compliance with industry regulatory standards such as Payment Card Industry Security Standard (PCI), the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

“Trend Micro will retain all 50 of Cloud Conformity’s employees and all of its 125-plus customers,” Sizmer said. “In terms of services, integration will be very fast, as the offerings are complementary and a natural and perfect fit. In fact, Trend Micro and Cloud Conformity sales teams will start collaborating today to ensure our customers get the best of both worlds immediately.”

There is no overlap between the two companies, which is why this acquisition makes so much sense for Trend, he said.

“Our research is clear that organizations of all sizes are adopting cloud-based delivery and, in doing so, are often using not only compute services, but also storage, messaging, and many other services,” said Fernando Montenegro, principal analyst with 451 Research. “With this acquisition, Trend Micro is able to extend its security offerings to organizations looking for assistance with cloud security beyond securing compute workloads.”

“We are excited for the opportunities that will come from being part of the leading cloud security provider — amplifying what we do best, while allowing our offerings to expand in ways we couldn’t have done on our own,” said Michael Watts, Cloud Conformity’s CEO. “We think customers will love this simplified approach to security and compliance across their entire cloud environment, including AWS, Azure and Google Cloud — providing security guardrails to let them go faster and do more.”