FireMon Acquires FortyCloud to Address Cloud Security

By Alicia Young
Web Editor

When the cloud was first introduced, a lot of companies were wary about putting it to use. The concept was kind of hard to grasp, and people didn’t know if they liked the idea of their information “floating around in the cloud somewhere.” Years later, companies are finally starting to feel more confident in making the decision to move information to the cloud. However, as more and more organizations adopt the cloud, they will undoubtedly be faced with security challenges.

There’s some good and bad news here. The bad news is that most cloud security issues are the fault of the organization, through a lack of understanding or inefficient hardware. The good news is that companies can recognize their weaknesses and work to improve them.

According to Gartner’s (News - Alert) 2017 Planning Guide for Cloud Computing, “Through 2020, 95 percent of cloud security issues will be the organization's fault, not the cloud provider's.” The report goes on to say, “Inadequate security practices can quickly turn an otherwise well-intentioned cloud initiative into a massive disaster for an organization.”

The issues concerning cloud safety and security are why FireMon is acquiring FortyCloud. FireMon provides solutions that deliver continuous visibility into and control over network security infrastructure, policies and risk. By using the FireMon Security Intelligence Platform, enterprise organizations, government agencies and managed services providers can improve the effectiveness of their network defenses by optimizing investments and speeding response to changing business demands. Meanwhile, FortyCloud is a cloud infrastructure security broker.

FireMon recognizes that managing the complexity of today’s networked environments is not always straightforward because they consist of a variety of dissimilar technologies and security controls in the cloud and on premise. To combat these security issues, FireMon is acquiring FortyCloud with the hopes of providing solutions to help effectively secure cloud infrastructure and make the transition to the cloud simpler by extending security and connectivity to the public cloud.

Although there are plenty of companies out there to choose from, FireMon chose FortyCloud because of its success in real world situations: “One of the most impressive aspects of the FortyCloud technology is the customer and market acceptance,” said Jody Brazil, co-founder and chief product strategist, FireMon.  “The FortyCloud team has built a great, multi-cloud security solution that is being used by many large and complex global organizations.  We look forward to working with them to further advance the great solutions they’ve already produced.”

FortyCloud’s suite of products has been successful so far, and is therefore trusted by many organizations already. So it’ll be easy for FireMon to promote FortyCloud’s products, along with its own additional features, including native cloud awareness to enhance management capabilities; cloud discovery and automated security group mapping; security object abstraction across the enterprise and multiple cloud environments; automation of security enforcement in multi-cloud environments.

FireMon’s Intelligent Security Management solutions offer policy and risk analysis, change management and security analytics and monitoring. With this platform, security professionals will have access to a centralized view of the traffic, rule usage and changes happening across the environment. This is an ideal solution to any cloud security issues that may arise as more and more businesses adopt the cloud. With the right tools in place, organizations can avoid cloud security issues caused internally, causing the number of businesses at risk to decrease.