Summary Bullets:
- Palo Alto Networks’ acquisition of The Crypsis Group will enable the company to successfully build and strengthen detection and prevention capability in its Cortex XDR platform and drive market growth.
- Palo Alto will acquire a highly experienced team consisting of 150 security consultants with strong capabilities in incident response and risk mitigation.
Palo Alto Networks continues with its investment strategy with the latest acquisition of The Crypsis Group, an incident response, risk management, and digital forensics company, for $265 million. With this acquisition, Palo Alto Networks plans to strengthen its Cortex XDR platform to successfully eliminate and address cyber threats. In particular, Palo Alto will enhance functionality in its Cortex XDR platform in collecting rich security telemetry data, managing breaches, and initiating rapid response actions. The platform already has strong detection and response capabilities that natively integrate network, endpoint, and cloud data to stop sophisticated cyberattacks. It does this by continually identifying evasive threats with increased accuracy and by profiling user and endpoint behavior with analytics capabilities. The Cortex XDR also has strong machine learning (ML) capabilities to analyze data from Palo Alto’s networks as well as third parties to identify highly engineered threats targeting devices and systems. Building further enhancements on its Cortex XDR offering around prediction, prevention, and mitigation of cyberattacks – and at speed – will enable Palo Alto to differentiate in the marketplace as it moves forward with a highly effective detection and response platform that integrates endpoint, network, and cloud data.
Founded in 2015, The Crypsis Group’s service portfolio includes data breach response, cyber risk resilience management, digital investigations, data analytics and intelligence, and managed security services, while its Hadron offering is a next-generation endpoint detection and response (EDR) platform. In particular, Hadron focuses on capturing crucial forensic evidence related to historic malicious cyber activity in addition to ongoing monitoring and detection. It does this by taking a holistic view of endpoints, including both monitoring and forensic examination to ensure that investigators understand the scope of breaches. The company also possesses a highly skilled workforce, consisting of 150 security consultants that have substantial experience, backed up with strong frameworks and solutions in incident response and mitigation across a number of sectors covering government and healthcare.
At this stage in the acquisition, detailed announcements have not been made regarding how Palo Alto Networks will actually integrate the two separate businesses, or if The Crypsis Group will continue to run in isolation under the current branding but with backend capabilities and service functions integrated more closely to Palo Alto’s offering. What has been made public is that The Crypsis Group’s experts and insights will support the Cortex XDR platform, with a continuous feedback loop between incident response engagements and product research teams to prevent future cyberattacks. Overall, as Palo Alto Networks moves forward with the acquisition, the company expects to integrate The Crypsis Group’s processes and technology into Cortex XDR to further enhance its ability to safeguard organizations at every stage of the security lifecycle.
GlobalData would expect further detailed announcements to be made with respect to product integration with Palo Alto’s Cortex XDR Platform. However, a number of questions still remain, including where Palo Alto Networks sees the real value in The Crypsis Group’s value proposition – i.e., service capabilities in prevention, prevention, and resolution that will be leveraged more, or the product technology capabilities associated with the Hardon platform for example.
What is clear is that this latest investment by Palo Alto Networks further re-enforces the message to the market of the company’s growth ambitions and stake as a leading cybersecurity vendor in prevention, detection, and response through its market-leading Cortex XDR platform. This latest investment very much reflects the company’s evolving product strategy to drive efficiency and eliminate threats with greater accuracy.
IT Connection 