Cloudflare, Inc., the leading connectivity cloud company, announced the acquisition of Kivera, a cloud security, data protection, and compliance platform. The combination of Kivera and the Cloudflare One platform will put preventive controls directly into the cloud deployment process, or ‘inline’, preventing security issues and risks before they happen to create a cloud journey that is faster, simpler, and more secure.
Gartner® estimates that, “through 2027, 99% of records compromised in cloud environments will be the result of user misconfigurations and account compromise, not the result of an issue with the cloud provider.” Traditional methods of addressing these risks—such as cloud security posture management (CSPM) systems or infrastructure as code (IaC) scanning tools—alert IT teams and developers only after something goes wrong, immediately putting these teams on defense. At the same time, the amount of data flowing between organizations and their cloud providers has ballooned, increasing the chances of data leakage, compliance issues, and, worse, opportunities for attackers.
“At Cloudflare, we want to make it easy for any organization to connect and protect everything connected to the Internet—and our global network puts us in the best position to do that for millions of users across the world. Almost every organization uses multiple clouds now to power their business, but that can translate to more risks and unintentional errors,” said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO, Cloudflare. “By integrating Kivera’s team and technology, we’ll be able to better help all of our customers work with any big cloud provider in the most secure, reliable manner.”
Cloudflare One is one of the fastest-growing platforms for single-vendor secure access service edge (SASE) and security service edge (SSE) services. Companies worldwide rely on Cloudflare One to ensure safe access to web, SaaS, and private apps or infrastructure, safeguard against cyber threats, and maintain robust data protection across their networks. With the integration of Kivera’s technology, Cloudflare’s SASE platform will soon bring additional, preventive cloud security all within a unified platform. Together, the companies will allow customers to:
- Safeguard all of their cloud environments: By detecting and then alerting security teams of cloud misconfigurations, the integration of Kivera’s technology creates a first line of defense for cloud deployment errors–across all of the major cloud providers.
- Enable preventive security with one click: Now organizations will be able to instantly protect themselves from cloud breaches caused by misconfigurations and human error, like accidentally allowing public access or policy inconsistencies.
- Keep sensitive data inside their organization: By easily drawing boundaries around their cloud resources and tenants, customers will be able to enforce cloud tenant controls that ensure sensitive data is not shared with external parties accidentally.
- Reduce ‘shadow’ cloud infrastructure: Every interaction between a customer and their cloud provider is enforced within preset standards, mitigating the risks of shadow IT that can lead to security vulnerabilities, compliance breaches, unmanaged costs, and data leakage.
- Streamline cloud security compliance: Customers can automatically assess and enforce compliance rules against the most common regulatory frameworks.
“For too long, the adoption of cloud computing has left security teams within organizations playing catch-up,” said Vernon Jefferson, Co-founder, Kivera. “As they do their best to ensure sensitive company data is protected and compliance obligations are met, they are bombarded by alerts that they then have to investigate. We believe there’s a better way—a way to give security teams the upper hand by eliminating room for error at the cloud configuration level. Kivera has solved this in an elegant way, and I’m excited to help bring this technology to the wider Cloudflare customer base.”
In May 2024, Cloudflare also acquired BastionZero, a Zero Trust infrastructure access company. This expanded the scope of Cloudflare One’s VPN replacement solution beyond apps and networks to infrastructure resources. Together, Kivera and BastionZero help to deliver centralized security management across hybrid IT environments, and provide a modern DevOps-friendly way to help enterprises connect and protect their hybrid infrastructure with Zero Trust best practices.
SOURCE: BusinessWire