Microsoft Buys Aorato In $200M Deal

Microsoft Buys Israeli Hybrid Cloud Security Startup as it looks forward to meeting needs of business users

Microsoft seems to be quite busy with its purchase list right now and added to its card now is the Israel-based maker of security solutions called Aorato. First a well established mobile manufacturer and now this security business which was initially co-founded by veterans of the Israeli defense forces. We are not sure how this is going to end up like in the hands of Microsoft but prior to the purchase, Aorato was working towards gaining focus on enterprise services in the cloud and in hybrid on-premise and cloud environments. During this process, the company had employed machine learning which was helping in the detection of suspicious patterns.

Whatever has been going on between the two companies hasn’t surfaced up so openly. This is quite different to the deal Microsoft struck with Nokia earlier this year and no details of the deal have been disclosed today. However, something did come up to the surface when rumors regarding this deal were spiraling around and we caught a few sources saying that the deal would cost up to $200 million.

The Corporate Vice President of Cloud and Enterprise Marketing at Microsoft, Takeshi Numoto, revealed something on the deal in his blog post which said “With Aorato we will accelerate our ability to give customers powerful identity and access solutions that span on-premises and the cloud, which is central to our overall hybrid cloud strategy.” This deal clearly has its focus on numerous different trends which are not just limited to Microsoft but extend beyond that to the larger enterprise world.

Microsoft has been catering to the enterprise users since a while but the company had been looking for ways to amp it up a bit and looks like they found the perfect opportunity to do it. As the company is also shifting focus towards identity management, we might start to think of it as a direct competitor to those offering similar services such as Okta and others. With this acquisition Microsoft has clearly delivered the message that it wants to be close to business users and the needs of those users. Research and investment requires a lot of security and that is becoming a key concern of everyone. This need for security has continued to grow with more usage of cloud services. The increase in use of BYOD devices and use of apps that are in general harder for IT managers to control has worried all businesses which have become more vulnerable to data breaches.

Aorato was the perfect landscape for Microsoft and only recently it had developed a product which was exclusively for the Microsoft users. For the Microsoft Active Directory services it had created a behavior-monitoring firewall. Aorato’s major investors include Accel, Trusteer’s co-founders Mickey Boodaei and Rakesh Loonkar, Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors and Glilot Capital Partners and prior to this acquisition, it had managed to raise $11 million.

source: microsoft