McAfee acquires cloud security firm Skyhigh Networks

McAfee is acquiring privately-held security startup Skyhigh Networks to bolster its new cloud business unit. Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

Skyhigh Networks was founded in 2011 as a Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) technology vendor providing access control and visibility for cloud application usage. To date, Skyhigh has raised about $106 million in venture capital funding. Once the deal closes in early 2018, McAfee intends to use Skyhigh's technology as the foundation for a new cloud business unit.

"Skyhigh Networks had the foresight five years ago to realize that cybersecurity for cloud environments could not be an impediment to, or afterthought of, cloud adoption," said McAfee CEO Chris Young stated.

Skyhigh CEO Rajiv Gupta will join McAfee to run the company's cloud business. In a blog post, he said the deal will give Skyhigh access to more financial resources to invest in its product roadmap. "Combined with McAfee's endpoint security capabilities and operations center solutions with actionable threat intelligence, analytics and orchestration, we will be able to deliver a set of end-to-end security capabilities unique in the industry," Gupta said.

The acquisition of Skyhigh is the first acquisition for McAfee since the company was spun out from Intel as a standalone company in April.