Ivanti Acquires RiskSense to Beef Up Patch Management Capabilities

Ivanti has acquired RiskSense, the provider of risk-based vulnerability management and prioritization.

Ivanti has already integrated RiskSense Vulnerability Intelligence and Vulnerability Risk Rating. It prioritizes and quantifies adversarial risk. This feature is available to Ivanti Neurons for Patch Intelligence customers who also have RiskSense licenses.

Ivanti didn’t say how much it’s paying for RiskSense.

Sri Mukkamala is Ivanti’s senior vice president of security products and former RiskSense CEO.

Ivanti’s Sri Mukkamala

“This combination is going to be a huge benefit for the channel partner community,” he said. “With this acquisition, we’re continuing to add new capabilities, which in turn creates more opportunities for success for our partners. Solutions from the combined companies are expected to reduce the mean time to detect, discover, remediate and respond to cyber threats. Together, Ivanti and RiskSense will provide security and IT teams with context and adaptive intelligence around what their organization’s exposures are to vulnerabilities that are being actively exploited, including whether those vulnerabilities are tied to ransomware, and then enable them to quickly remediate those threats.”

Critical Time for Cybersecurity

Ivanti said this combination comes at a critical time, as the White House is encouraging organizations to use a risk-based assessment strategy to drive patch management and bolster cybersecurity against ransomware attacks. Furthermore, Gartner listed risk-based vulnerability management as a top security project that security and risk management professionals should focus on in 2021 to drive business value and reduce risk.

“One of the key elements this provides is proactive intelligence,” Mukkamala said. “This is critical for partners to help customers with preventing cyberattacks rather than reacting and responding (aka ambulance chasing). The why-what-how makes this very unique and brings 50%-60% operational efficiency to partners and MSSPs. Data defines and drives the conversations with this M&A.”

RiskSense Partners to Benefit

RiskSense partners will also benefit from the ability to grow their business, Mukkamala said.

“We will have hybrid offerings,” he said. “Customers will have an ability to buy RiskSense solutions as-is and expand to Ivanti offerings. They can also buy a bundle that will have both the offerings.”

Jim Schaper is Ivanti’s chairman and CEO.

“Ivanti has been a leader in patch management for many years,” he said. “But the acquisition of RiskSense will take our capabilities to an even higher level. This combination will allow us to provide our customers with a holistic view of vulnerabilities and exposures, and then enable them to take fast action through Ivanti Neurons for Patch Intelligence. Customers will be able to greatly reduce their attack surface and risk of breach because of the vulnerability intelligence and the resulting remediation prioritization based on actively trending exploits and ransomware attacks.”