RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK – Arvind Krishna is not taking his foot off the CEO pedal when it comes to acquisitions. IBM announced another deal early Tuesday – the fifth so far this year and now more than 30 since Krishna took over the top job at Big Blue (he’s also chairman) in April 2020.

Tech news site TechCrunch reported the sales price as being some $60 million.

The latest addition is Israel-based startup Polar Security which specializes in cloud data and putting a special emphasis on so-called “shadow data” – data that isn’t being tracked or managed, says IBM.

Many of the deals have focused on the cloud [the key to its $34 billion deal for Raleigh-based Red Hat in 2019], cybersecurity and artificial intelligence.

Financial terms weren’t disclosed.

Polar Security tackles ‘cloud data chaos’

We felt the pain caused by the cloud data chaos

Data creation has become chaotic. Data is no longer centralized in a single database or storage, but decentralized throughout the cloud infrastructure, regions, VPCs and services, as well as flows between workload apps.

Security and compliance teams simply don’t know where their data stores are, what sensitive data is inside, and where the data can go or is going.

If you don’t know that sensitive data exists and can’t follow where it flows, you can’t protect it.
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We created Polar Security to relieve these pains at their core.

Source: Polar Security

“Founded in January 2021, Polar Security is a pioneer of data security posture management (DSPM) – an emerging cybersecurity segment that reveals where sensitive data is stored, who has access to it, how it’s used, and identifies vulnerabilities with the underlying security posture, including with policies, configurations, or data usage,” IBM explained.

“An agentless platform that connects within minutes, Polar Security can automatically find unknown and sensitive data across the cloud, including structured and unstructured assets within cloud service providers, SaaS properties, and data lakes. Once discovered, Polar Security classifies the data, maps the potential and actual flow of that data, and identifies vulnerabilities, such as misconfigurations, over-entitlements, and behavior that violates policy or regulations.”

Polar Security technology will be made part of IBM’s  Guardium data security suite.

Read the full announcement at: https://newsroom.ibm.com/IBM-to-Help-Automate-Cloud-Data-Protection-with-Acquisition-of-Polar-Security

IBM employs thousands of people across North Carolina, owns Raleigh-based Red Hat and operates one of its largest campuses in RTP.