HelpSystems has announced its latest acquisition, Beyond Security, for an undisclosed amount. The news comes just two months after Beyond Security release its latest product, beSECURE XDR. The acquisition brings more cloud-based tools to the HelpSystems portfolio especially in the vulnerability scanning and detection market.
Kate Bolseth, CEO, HelpSystems, said: “Our global customers trust us to provide them with powerful, reliable security software to protect their data and infrastructure from malicious adversaries.
“Beyond Security meets strong demand from overburdened IT and security professionals whose hybrid environments grow more complex every day. We’re pleased to help customers get control of this and are delighted to welcome the team of vulnerability experts and their well-known solutions to HelpSystems.”
Why Beyond Security?
It’s a good question. This is the third acquisition that HelpSystems has made in 2021 and the eighth in the last 18 months. Some of that spending is about acquiring new capability, and some appear to be about strengthening the company in key areas.
In February, it acquired Digital Defence for its vulnerability management and threat assessment tools. Adding Beyond Security and its beSECURE XDR tool to those of Digital Defence makes sense. As both tools are cloud-native, they should be easily integrated. Both provide a cloud platform that allows customers to identify risk and vulnerabilities. Additionally, both have active partner programmes that extend their reach.
What Beyond Security adds is its support for on-premises and multi-cloud environments. It also has an active bug bounty program.
It will be interesting to see how long it takes to integrate the two products or whether HelpSystems will leave them to run independently. While there is value in the latter option, creating a single solution makes more sense. Only time will tell as to what it plans to do.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean?
2021 has seen a significant jump in the number of security companies being acquired. Last year, 70 were acquired, this year it is on target to be over 100. This is the third time HelpSystems has made an acquisition in 2021 and it is unlikely to be the last. The big question here is, who does it buy next?
The answer to that will depend on where the company’s CEO, Jim Cassens, sees an opportunity. He has already grown the company to be a significant player across a lot of different areas of cybersecurity.
However, Cassens has not yet built a framework into which all the acquisitions can slot in to create a single powerful platform. Most of the acquisitions are still trading as separate entities with, in many cases, limited integration between them. It is a strategy that seems to be working at the moment but will that change going forward?
