UPDATED 12:10 EDT / NOVEMBER 09 2015

NEWS

Microsoft buys Secure Islands for reported $150 million to bolster hybrid cloud strategy

Microsoft Corp. is continuing its shopping spree in Israel with the acquisition of Secure Islands Ltd., a data governance provider that helps organizations control who can access their sensitive business documents and under what conditions. The outfit counts itself among the biggest beneficiaries of the rapid increase in the amount of corporate information moving outside the firewall.

Its digital rights management platform has been adopted by UBS AG, Vodafone Group Plc and numerous other global enterprises in recent years as part of their efforts to ensure that the files workers keep in the cloud don’t fall into the wrong hands. That was already a difficult feat to achieve before all those documents moved beyond the safety of the data center, where administrators enjoy full reign over the flow of information. When a file resides on the servers of a third party provider or an employee’s device, they don’t have nearly the same level of control.

Secure Islands offers to make up for the reduced enforcement capability outside the firewall by enabling organizations to take the necessary precautions before their data leaves their on-premise infrastructure. Its platform uses monitoring agents deployed at strategic locations throughout an environment to track information from the very moment it’s created. After a new entry is detected, the built-in machine learning algorithms automatically determine its sensitivity and apply the appropriate access restrictions using the Azure Rights Management Service.

That should make integrating the technology into the cloud platform relatively straightforward once the transaction closes, which is undoubtedly one of the main reasons why Redmond chose Secure Islands over the numerous other data governance providers in the same weight class. The price of that convenience was $150 million, according to the report in Israeli business journal Globes that first leaked word of the deal last month while the terms were still being finalized.

The acquisition will enable Microsoft to make Azure Rights Management Service much more attractive for the growing number of organizations that are relying on a combination of on- and off-premise infrastructure to accommodate their fast-expanding data troves. That segment constitutes the main pillar of Redmond’s strategy to differentiate from fellow cloud giant Amazon Inc., which doesn’t yet have much of a presence in on-premise data center. But judging by the rate Jeff Bezos’s firm has been churning out new features for its platform, that may change at any moment.

Image via Stux

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