In the enterprise, security teams must strike a balance between protecting business records and providing employees with easy access to the data they need for their work. Microsoft Corp. today announced that it has acquired data governance startup BlueTalon Inc. to simplify the task for companies using its Azure cloud platform.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed. BlueTalon is based in Redwood City, California, and has raised more than $27 million from investors, most recently a $16 million funding round in 2016. Its backers include Data Collective, Bloomberg Beta and Stanford University’s StartX Fund.

BlueTalon has developed a platform that enables companies to provide centralized management of which employees can access what internal records. The software enables security teams to set access rules for popular databases and Hadoop deployments, as well as monitor that those rules are enforced.

Access policies can be highly granular. BlueTalon allows administrators to customize access rights for workers based on their job descriptions, the business group to which they belong and the sensitivity of the data they need to view. An analyst responsible for measuring their company’s sales performance, for instance, could be given access to customer purchase histories but not the credit card details associated with each transaction.

BlueTalon said its software is used by multiple Fortune 100 companies. But for Microsoft, the acquisition is as much about the BlueTalon team as its software — perhaps even more so. 

A source described the deal to SiliconANGLE as an acquihire, saying Microsoft wanted to hire the engineering team that built BlueTalon’s platform. Despite the startup’s inroads into the Fortune 100, the insider said that BlueTalon didn’t manage to create a strong revenue stream. That suggests that the acquisition price was likely modest relative to the $27 million in funding it has raised from investors.

“The revenue run rate wasn’t tracking and the tech team was solid, so Microsoft picks up a nice acquihire,” commented John Furrier, founder of SiliconANGLE Media and co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio. The broader context behind the acquihire, Furrier said, is that the shift of big-data workloads to the cloud has changed enterprise spending patterns and lowered demand for traditional solutions. 

Microsoft plans to fold BlueTalon into its Azure Data Governance group. “This acquisition is a huge force multiplier on BlueTalon’s mission to make data easily and safely accessible across the enterprise by providing high quality data governance and compliance solutions,” BlueTalon Chief Executive Eric Tilenius (pictured) wrote in a blog post.

The acquisition comes less than three weeks after Google LLC also bought a startup in the data management market, Israeli-based Elastifile Ltd., to enhance its competing cloud platform. That deal was reportedly worth about $200 million. 

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