McAfee has acquired NanoSec, a multicloud, zero-trust application and security platform, after collaborating with the company for more than a year.

McAfee will add NanoSec’s capabilities into its Mvision Cloud and Mvision Server Protection products to reduce risk in cloud and container deployments. NanoSec’s technologies enhance McAfee’s existing cloud access security broker (CASB) and cloud workload protection platform (CWPP) capabilities.

Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

Rajiv Gupta, senior vice president and general manager of McAfee’s cloud security business unit, tells us the acquisition means partners will have “the industry’s most comprehensive and best-in-class cloud security platform to address their customer’s needs for data security, threat protection, governance and compliance as they adopt cloud services.”

McAfee’s Rajiv Gupta

“The Mvision Cloud platform addresses security needs across device to cloud, in SaaS, PaaS and IaaS environments, in hybrid and multicloud environments, and across the develop-deploy-operate life cycle of their application workloads,” he said. “And now with NanoSec, the Mvision Cloud platform also covers comprehensive support for containerized workloads.”

Customers moving their workloads to the cloud are looking for a consistent way to address configuration, vulnerability and run-time security needs across virtualized and containerized workloads, Gupta said. NanoSec’s application-identity-based tracking and microsegmentation enable visibility into east-west traffic flow and a new way to gain visibility into and protect from lateral threats that may emerge in their cloud environments, he said.

“NanoSec’s application identity-based approach is patent-pending and unique because it does not rely on ephemeral IPs, which make for fragile policies and which is the approach taken by most competitors,” he said. “NanoSec’s ability to learn, compute risk and block lateral spread of threats in a cloud deployment is also uniquely differentiated in the industry.”

McAfee‘s go-to-market strategy relies heavily on partners, Gupta said.

“NanoSec fits neatly into our overall business and channel strategy,” he said. “The NanoSec team, like McAfee, strongly believes in the critical role of partners to best address customers’ needs. NanoSec’s products will be part of the Mvision Cloud suite and as this gets rolled out, partners will have the same level of support and training as any other Mvision Cloud product.”

NanoSec’s existing team will be integrated into McAfee’s cloud business security unit.

“Joining forces with McAfee means that our groundbreaking capabilities including our unique application-identity-based approach for app-level protection and microsegmentation will be available on a global scale,” said Vishwas Manral, NanoSec’s founder and CEO. “McAfee has demonstrated not only its leadership in cloud security, but its desire to continually innovate and deliver new capabilities that reshape how organizations can operate workloads and applications safely in the cloud. It felt like a natural fit to join McAfee to deliver to application-development and security professionals greater visibility and control over detecting, responding and resolving threats to reduce risk.”