Cyxtera to Buy Immunity, Boost Cybersecurity Chops

**Editor’s Note: Please click here for a look back at the biggest channel-impacting mergers and acquisitions from 2017.**

Cyxtera Technologies, which bills itself as a global secure infrastructure company, is buying Immunity Inc., a private firm founded in 2002, that offers offense-oriented systems vulnerability research, exploit development and penetration testing services. The news of the acquisition comes less than one year into the launch of Cyxtera by private equity firms Medina Capital and BC Partners.

With a mission to create a next-generation company for secure infrastructure, Cyxtera’s acquisition of Immunity is on target. When the acquisition is finalized, Cyxtera plans to incorporate Immunity’s offerings into its portfolio of threat analytics solutions and leverage the team’s capabilities across its global infrastructure platform and customer base.

Aside from having a good working relationship with Immunity – a lot of the current management at Cyxtera, including Medina Capital founder and managing partner Manuel D. Medina, who also happened to be founder of Terramark Worldwide, worked at Terramark, where they engaged in projects with Immunity – another big driver for the acquisition is the unique capabilities they bring to the table, Christopher Day, chief cybersecurity officer at Cyxtera, told us.

“I always wanted to be more successful at lending an offense-oriented approach to cybersecurity with a defensive approach,” he said, adding that a lot of companies talk about doing this but few deliver, with most taking a defensive approach to security.

Going on offense, which is what Immunity does, puts Cyxtera into a unique position.

“It allows us to do our own vulnerability research, exploit development — we can take a very detailed and investigative look at things like vulnerabilities,” Day said.

Immunity brings to the table Innuendo, an advanced penetration testing tool for modeling data exfiltration attacks; Canvas, an assessment tool that allows penetration testing and hostile attack simulations to be conducted by security professionals; and specialized attack and assessment services that include penetration testing, application assessments, vulnerability analysis, reverse engineering, architecture review and source-code review.

When the deal closes and Cyxtera incorporates Immunity solutions into its portfolio, the vendor says customers will benefit from a lineup that addresses the complete cyberattack life cycle, a comprehensive suite of offense and defensive solutions, and automated and continuous penetration testing and advanced adversary and simulation services, the company said.

To date, Cyxtera says it brings together a complete suite of authentication, access control and analytics capabilities with a data-center footprint, providing enterprises, service providers and public-sector organizations a secure infrastructure platform.

In September 2017, Cyxtera launched a global partner program that it kicked off with Avant, Westven and SageNet.

The transaction is expected to wrap this quarter, pending regulatory approval and customary closing conditions.

Cyxtera formed out of the sale of CenturyLink’s data center assets.