Dated: November 5, 2018 (Assistant Press Photographer: Nine years after spending $1 billion on the navigation tool Waze, Google has reportedly spent $500 million to acquire another Israeli company, the threat detection firm Siemplify. This will be Google’s first acquisition in the international cybersecurity market and its fourth in Israel.
Sunil Potti, Vice President and General Manager of Google Cloud Security, announced the addition of Siemplify to his team on Tuesday. “To assist enterprises better manage their threat response,” Potti stated. Cloud services provided by Siemplify will form the basis for Google’s cloud activities and cybersecurity operations, with “the team’s talent leading the way,” as he put it.
Google pledged last summer to invest $10 billion in cybersecurity over the next five years in order to “strengthen cybersecurity, including expanding zero-trust programs, helping secure the software supply chain, and enhancing open-source security” and to train 100,000 Americans in fields like IT support and data analytics.
According to Google’s vice president of global affairs Kent Walker, “cyber-attacks are rapidly jeopardizing important data and key infrastructure,” making this August a “watershed moment” for governments and businesses to address cybersecurity.
The company, with headquarters in New York and offices in Tel Aviv, was created in 2015 by entrepreneurs Amos Stern (CEO), Alon Cohen (CTO), and Garry Fatakhov (COO). Stern “was in the IDF’s Intelligence Corps where he headed a cyber team before going on to work for Elbit Systems,” where he reportedly met his future business partners, as reported by CTech via Calcalist.
Simplify claims their “holistic security operations platform” helps businesses and organizations’ security analysts “work smarter and respond faster” to security threats. In order to aid security analysts in automating some duties, the company built a security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) system that can “integrate security tools to respond to cyber threats with speed and precision, while getting wiser with every analyst interaction.”
Chronicle, Google’s cloud-based cybersecurity solution, was born in Alphabet’s “moonshot factory,” X. SOAR will soon be merged into Chronicle. Stern wrote on Tuesday that he and the company’s other founders recognized from “experience developing and teaching security operations centers from across the world” that security analysts in major corporations and organizations need more tools to tackle attacks.