The pandemic accelerated what was already underway: an urgent pace of cloud adoption by organizations.
Microsoft has been a key player in that digital transformation and just announced it is acquiring cybersecurity firm RiskIQ.
Although Microsoft did not mention a price, Bloomberg says Microsoft is paying $500 million in cash.
So what does RiskIQ do and why would Microsoft want to buy the company?
Why did Microsoft buy RiskIQ?
RiskIQ positions itself as a leader in threat intelligence and attack surface management.
And the attack surface is expanding rapidly through digital transformation such as remote work and cloud adoption.
That was a key reason to purchase the company, according to Microsoft:
"As organizations pursue this digital transformation and embrace the concept of Zero Trust, their applications, infrastructure, and even IoT applications are increasingly running across multiple clouds and hybrid cloud environments. Effectively the internet is becoming their new network, and it's increasingly critical to understand the full scope of their assets to reduce their attack surface.
RiskIQ helps customers discover and assess the security of their entire enterprise attack surface—in the Microsoft cloud, AWS, other clouds, on-premises, and from their supply chain. With more than a decade of experience scanning and analyzing the internet, RiskIQ can help enterprises identify and remediate vulnerable assets before an attacker can capitalize on them."
And RiskIQ says it will be able to expand its original mission because of the acquisition.
"We built RiskIQ's technology to address this new frontier and help customers see their attack surfaces and leverage threat intelligence from a global, outside-in perspective. By understanding the deep digital relationships in their unique attack surface and how it connects with the worldwide attack surface, organizations could know how they were most vulnerable and take swift and decisive actions against threats."
For more information, read the statement from Microsoft or the statement from RiskIQ.
