Gigamon's Icebrg Acquisition Creates Stronger Network Security Tool

**Editor’s Note: Read our list of 20 top antivirus software providers offering products and services via channel partners or here for a recap of the biggest channel-impacting merger and acquisition news from April and May.**

Cybersecurity company Gigamon is acquiring Icebrg, a Seattle-based firm that provides data collection, processing and analytics capabilities.

The combination of network traffic visibility from Gigamon’s platform, and Icebrg’s detection and triage of threats will allow enterprises to reduce risk and keep pace with the rapidly evolving threat landscape, according to Gigamon. Financial details regarding the acquisition weren’t disclosed.

Gigamon’s Phil Griston

Phil Griston, Gigamon’s senior director of partner marketing and development, tells Channel Partners that for partners that run their own MSSP business, this is an “ideal solution to use.”

“It has been built with multitenancy from the start so an MSSP has oversight to all their customers’ data while being able to provide individual views for each customer,” he said. “The Gigamon security analysts enrich the data with a variety of threat intelligence information and include actionable remediation instructions within the detections they create — ideal for an MSSP to quickly understand the problem and remedy it.”

The offering will extend the portfolio a partner can offer to new and existing customers to include a “compelling new security solution,” Griston said.

“This solution will give partners more reason to talk with, and sell to, the security analysts within their customer base,” he said. “For partners wanting to offer incident-response (IR) services, or other security consulting services, this new solution provides a compelling tool to quickly gain insight and understanding of what is happening on the network. It can be deployed on most networks in a couple of hours, providing an immediate ‘source of truth’ as to what is really happening on the network.”

Icebrg has a number of MSSPs and other services companies that work with it and utilize its offerings for delivering services, Griston said. Gigamon doesn’t expect these relationships to change and the partners will be brought into the Gigamon channel programs, he said.

“Icebrg was founded on the premise that today’s security vendors are not addressing the needs of enterprise security professionals,” he said. “Like them, we believe this offering has the potential to change how enterprises secure their environments. Most organizations use a set of disparate security tools that lack integration and require significant correlation to provide an accurate and reliable view of the threat environment. With Icebrg, threat detection is accelerated so that customers’ security operations centers (SOC) and [IR] teams can focus on the response and mitigation of the most significant threats to their organization rather than spending time collecting, correlating, normalizing and managing data. Interestingly, the majority of Icebrg’s customers use Gigamon products to feed the data lake with rich network meta data which offers a natural synergy — which will be enhanced through future portfolio integration.”

“We are excited to join Gigamon, a company that shares our vision and desire to reshape the security market,” said William Peteroy, Icebrg’s co-founder and CEO. “The combination of the high-quality network data from the GigaSecure security delivery platform and the Icebrg cloud-based platform will power the next generation of security capabilities. Together, our expertise in networking and security will help SOC teams focus on defending against the most severe threats in their environments.”