Data center software giant VMware Inc. is beefing up its cloud-native security offerings with the acquisition of a startup called Mesh7 Inc. for an undisclosed price.

Today’s deal reflects the growing importance enterprises are placing on securing their cloud-native applications and the microservices that are used to build them.

Mesh7 is a cloud-native application security startup that has built an observability platform to detect and mitigate any active threats to applications. It works by collecting and correlating contextual data from things such as application programming interfaces, public cloud data event logs, host processes, user identities and threat intelligence. It continuously monitors all of these to keep track of any behavioral changes that could indicate a vulnerability or a security breach.

The crucial thing from VMware’s perspective is that Mesh7’s observability platform is built on the open-source service mesh substrate Envoy. That matters because VMware’s Tanzu Service Mesh, which provides connectivity and security for apps and microservices across Kubernetes clusters and clouds, is also built on Envoy.

“Early on, VMware realized Envoy would become the platform for next-generation security services,” Tom Gillis, VMware’s senior vice president and general manager of Networking and Security, said in a blog post announcing the acquisition. “Tanzu Service Mesh controls the communication between thousands of application components, enforces security policy and measures performance and other critical functions, regardless of the underlying infrastructure.”

Gillis said the plan is to combine Mesh7’s technology with VMware Tanzu Service Mesh so its customers will have more visibility into which application components are talking to each other, and the different APIs they use.

“VMware Tanzu Service Mesh along with Mesh7’s API Security Mesh will enable customers to more effectively deploy distributed services and application layer security for modern cloud applications,” said Mesh7 founders Amit Jain and Pratik Roychowdhury in their own blog post.

Gillis said that he expects the combination of VMware Tanzu Service Mesh and Mesh7 will be especially appealing to developers and security teams. Those, he said, “will each gain a better understanding of when, where and how applications and microservices are communicating via APIs, even across multi-cloud environments, enabling better DevSecOps.”

Analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. told SiliconANGLE that VMware is great example of a big company that has built an entire ecosystem so it can pick and choose its acquisition targets.

“VMware created Envoy, Mesh7 built on it, and its offering is now becoming part of Envoy through VMware’s Tanzu service,” Mueller said. “It’s a smart R&D strategy and a win for customers, who get a more secure and observable Envoy offering.”

VMware’s acquisition of Mesh7 comes at a time when a lot of money is being thrown around in the cloud-native security market and illustrates the huge emphasis enterprises are placing on securing modern applications. Last month, Palo Alto Networks Inc. paid $156 million to acquire the Israeli startup Bridgecrew Ltd., which sells a platform that helps developers and DevOps teams to enforce infrastructure security standards throughout application development.

Elsewhere, some notable cloud-native security startups have been attracting huge capital from investors. This month, for example, Snyk Ltd., which sells a tool that’s used to scan code for vulnerabilities before it goes into production, raised a cool $300 million Series E funding round that brought its value to $4.7 billion. On the same day, Aqua Security Software Ltd. raised $135 million in its own Series E round, taking its value above the $1 billion mark.

Photo: Dell Technologies/Flickr