Publicly traded cybersecurity provider Zscaler Inc. today said it’s acquiring Cloudneeti Corp., a Seattle startup that helps companies find configuration-related vulnerabilities in their cloud applications.

The financial terms were not disclosed. Zscaler expects the transaction to complete by month’s end.

Cloudneeti’s namesake product scans cloud applications for poorly defined security settings and other configuration issues with the potential to open the door to hackers. Cloudneeti says that its service works with workloads running on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft’s Azure and Google Cloud, as well certain popular software-as-a-service suites such as Office 365.

Information technology teams can customize what issues the service looks for by setting up security rules. An administrator could, for example, configure a rule that MySQL databases hosted on AWS should not be accessible from the public web. Cloudneeti will then display if there are any exposed MySQL instances in the organization’s AWS environment and rank them based on how urgently they should be fixed. 

“Whether caused by SaaS applications being configured incorrectly or a developer accidentally misconfiguring a new public cloud application, these preventable data protection lapses are behind some of the biggest breaches in history,” Zscaler Chief Executive Officer Jay Chaudhry noted in a statement. Cloudneeti’s technology, he said, will complement the capabilities of the company’s existing cloud security offerings.

Zscaler provides a solution called Private Access for securing employee connections to company applications running in a private cloud or the private cloud. It also offers Internet Access, which protects user traffic to software-as-a-service applications such as Office 365. Cloudneeti’s offering could potentially extend both solutions, but Zscaler didn’t go into detail about its plans for the startup after the deal closes.

Cloudneeti is the second player in the so-called cloud security posture management market to be acquired in recent memory. In November, Insight Partners-backed Aqua Security Software Ltd. bought CloudSploit Ltd., which had created a scanner for finding cloud configuration vulnerabilities.

Chaudhry spoke with SiliconANGLE Media’s video studio theCUBE last year about how Zscaler aims to “transform from this old world of a hub-and-spoke network — and security is this castle and moat — to the new world where the user can go directly to the application over any network.”

Photo: Zscaler