VMware has officially acquired Carbon Black for $2.1 billion. The company first announced plans to take on the cloud-native endpoint protection provider at the end of August.
“Carbon Black brings us an industry-leading endpoint and workload security platform, with a cloud-native architecture, an AI-powered data lake and a smart, lightweight agent,” said Sanjay Poonen, chief operating officer for customer operations at VMware. “The Carbon Black platform, along with VMware NSX, VMware Workspace ONE, VMware Secure State and our future innovations, will deliver a highly-differentiated intrinsic security platform across network, endpoint, workload, identity, cloud and analytics. We believe this will bring a fundamentally new paradigm to the security industry.”
VMware explained the industry needs a new cybersecurity model where security is a distributed service and not a point tool. “Cybersecurity needs to shift from a reactive model that focuses on reverse engineering the attacks of yesterday, to a proactive approach that focuses on your applications, and looking at the behavior of everything that touches or composes your applications; workloads, networks, devices and users,” the company wrote in a blog.
As part of the acquisition, VMware will be launching a new security business unit with Carbon Black CEO Patrick Morley as general manager. According to VMware, Carbon Black will be the core of its security offering and will focus on providing advanced cybersecurity protection as well as behavioral insight to help better identity and response to attacks.
“From the beginning, Carbon Black has been all about collecting and analyzing key endpoint data to understand attacker behaviors, and help make our customers more resilient against advanced cyberattacks,” said Morley. “Joining VMware helps us reach a broader range of organizations, and enables us to build security into the underlying fabric of the compute stack. We are thrilled to join forces as we further our vision of creating a world safe from cyberattacks and see and stop modern attacks.”
