McAfee to Acquire Skyhigh Networks for Cloud & Endpoint Cybersecurity

McAfee and Skyhigh Networks announced a definitive agreement to combine businesses, with McAfee acquiring Skyhigh Networks for an undisclosed amount.

The move comes less than eight months after McAfee established itself as one of the world’s leading pure-play cybersecurity companies, dedicated to being the preferred cybersecurity partner to customers.

Skyhigh Networks and McAfee will complement each other’s portfolio and mission, allowing customers to modernize their cybersecurity environments and protect their most valuable asset – data – as it moves to the cloud. The combination of McAfee and Skyhigh will establish the leading company to provide the cybersecurity architecture of the future, with endpoint and cloud as the critical control points, linked by the security operations center with actionable threat intelligence, analytics and orchestration, and enabled by an open ecosystem.

Skyhigh Networks CEO Rajiv Gupta will join McAfee CEO Chris Young’s leadership team to run McAfee’s new cloud business unit. Skyhigh’s existing organizational structure will remain generally intact, ensuring continuity for customers and partners. At the same time, Skyhigh will benefit from McAfee’s global scale and integrations to McAfee’s broad and deep product portfolio to even better protect customers.

With this acquisition, McAfee demonstrates its continued investment in technologies that address customers’ most critical cybersecurity needs.

“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,” Young stated. “They pioneered an entirely new product category called cloud access security broker (CASB) that analysts describe as one of the fastest growing areas of information security investments of the last five years – where Skyhigh continues to innovate and lead. Skyhigh’s leadership in cloud security, combined with McAfee’s security portfolio strength, will set the company apart in helping organizations operate freely and securely to reach their full potential.”

Skyhigh Networks’ innovative portfolio provides complete visibility into content, context, and user activity across SaaS, PaaS and IaaS environments; leads the market in advanced controls and automation to correct policy violations in cloud services; leverages data science and network effects across billions of events to identify and stop threats; applies protection to data that persists in the cloud or outside the cloud; and delivers an extensible platform for cloud providers to enable Skyhigh controls for their SaaS applications, and enterprises to enable controls for custom applications developed in-house.

McAfee, less than eight months since its spinout as a standalone company, makes this move to accelerate innovation and growth as a company singularly focused on being the preferred cybersecurity partner for customers. This agreement is evidence of McAfee's ability to acquire leading next-generation capabilities as an independent pure-play cybersecurity provider.

“Becoming part of McAfee is the ideal next step in realizing Skyhigh Networks’ vision of not simply making the cloud secure, but making it the most secure environment for business,” Gupta said. “McAfee will provide global scale to further accelerate Skyhigh’s growth, with the combined company providing leading technologies and solutions across cloud and endpoint security – categories Skyhigh and McAfee respectively helped create, and the two architectural control points for enterprise security.”

Young posted an open message to company stakeholders with Gupta doing the same, each providing additional evidence of the company’s combined value upon transaction close, expected shortly after completing certain regulatory approvals and satisfying customary closing conditions.