XM Cyber Partners Getting Extended Cloud Security with Confluera Acquisition

XM Cyber partners can provide all aspects of cloud security with the hybrid cloud security provider’s acquisition of Confluera.

Confluera provides next-generation cyberattack detection and response for the cloud. XM Cyber now offers a comprehensive cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) solution. This uses the company’s attack path modeling to prioritize and assess real risk to critical assets in the cloud.

Together with Confluera, XM Cyber’s Continuous Exposure Management platform will provide all aspects of cloud security. That includes identifying and fixing risk regarding cloud identities; identifying vulnerabilities and the detection and response of actual cyberattacks in real time; and managing best practices and compliance.

XM Cyber, Confluera Work Well Together

Boaz Gorodissky is XM Cyber’s co-founder and CTO.

XM Cyber’s Boaz Gorodissky

“We work so well together because we’re both looking at the environment through attack path modeling,” he said. “For example, XM Cyber shows our customers how an attacker could take advantage of a cloud secret found in the on-premises environment, move into the cloud, escalate privileges of an elastic compute cloud (EC2), and compromise [public cloud storage] buckets with sensitive information through a chain of events. Now with Confluera, we will detect if this attack path is actually happening in real time, alert our customers and help them stop the attack before it reaches the [storage] buckets.”

With the addition of Confluera, organizations can continuously monitor their cloud environments in real-time to see if they are actually being exploited. They can block the attacker’s progress before any damage is caused.

XM Cyber Partners Get Holistic Cloud Security Solution from Single Vendor

“XM Cyber’s partners can now have a single vendor providing a holistic cloud security solution that brings the power of attack path analysis to both detection and prevention,” Gorodissky said. “Having a consolidated platform with a unified graph model will allow for better synergy between the security functions in organizations, which would help partners develop relationships with more functions at each customer, create cross-sell opportunities based on the already adopted attack path mindset, and more. Service providers could also benefit from the ability to create a proactive MDR offering, which would help customers detect attacks while continuously hardening the environments.”

The competitive edge comes from bringing the attacker’s perspective to both prevention, and detection and response, he said. The ability to predict complex attacks in hybrid environments helps create “powerful” detection capabilities together with Confluera.

“Confluera has a unique and robust product for cloud attack detection and response,” Gorodissky said. “Yet vendors must provide more capabilities in today’s market. Together with XM Cyber, Confluera’s partners could now sell a solution that is both extremely strong and also brings the wide coverage organizations are looking for.”

XM Cyber’s Strategy

With backing from the Schwarz Group, XM Cyber wants to bring a holistic, hybrid cloud and on-premises exposure management platform. This will allow customers to manage their security and see all ways attackers can breach them, Gorodissky said.

“In order to achieve this strategy,” he said, “XM Cyber is growing both organically and non-organically together with strategic tech alliances and partners. With the Schwarz Group, we are constantly looking for innovative startups with strong teams to allow us to grow faster.”

Abhijit Ghosh is Confluera‘s co-founder and CTO. He will lead the development and integration of Confluera’s CxDR platform with XM Cyber as vice president of CxDR.

Schwarz Group’s Abhijit Ghosh

“We are very excited to join forces with XM Cyber to deliver a comprehensive cloud security platform,” he said. “The technologies complement one another. They cover the prevention and detection aspects of security, with a common attack path modeling-based approach of unifying diverse visibility to identify multi-stage attacks. We are thrilled about leveraging this synergy to address our shared mission of protecting hybrid cloud environments from advanced attacks.”

The new real-time detection and response capabilities will be available soon.

The acquisition of Confluera comes less than a year after XM Cyber acquired Cyber Observer to expand its cloud security posture management (CSPM) capabilities.