Deloitte Plans to Acquire Cloudquest to Expand its Cloud Cybersecurity Footprint

Today, Deloitte declared plans to acquire CloudQuest, a cloud security posture management provider based in Cupertino, California. According to the Deloitte’s cyber cloud leader and principal Vikram Kunchala, the Terms of the deal weren’t revealed, but it will strengthen Deloitte’s existing cloud cybersecurity offerings to handle the security workflows and improve data security.

“While the global pandemic had decelerated certain things, it could not slow down the cloud migration or reliability for the majority of organizations,” Kunchala narrated in a press release. “As organizations put efforts to build or advance their security program for cloud or hybrid-cloud environments, we’re growing and expanding the range of our services and solutions to help our clients continuously track, prevent, and revive security threats.”

Some experts forecast that forensics tools only provide 5% or less of the data required to inspect a cloud attack. Forensics analysts believe that an attack is not a worthwhile further investigation because it requires humungous effort to have a detailed analysis. However, these attacks are not reducing. Based on the report from IronNet, about 20% of organizations gets affected by cyber-attacks six or more times a year. 80% say that they have experienced at least one high-severity cyber-attack last year, which required a board-level meeting to resolve.

CloudQuest

CloudQuest was founded in the year 2017 by Nishan Sathyanarayan, Ramesh Menon, and Vijay Sarathy. It offers a platform to analyze the security of a company and act to solve potential issues. The company features hierarchy-aware orchestration of Google Cloud Platform (GCP) that allows it to use GCP-specific information — like the event origin or resource access permissions — to decide about the ways to handle automation in response to security events. Their technology integration with a range of enterprise ticketing and security analytics tools helps to automatically create tickets and assign them to the owners, based on the priorities defined by the rules criteria. It processes the data, using resources within the cloud deployment of the organization, and ensures that the details remain under the control of the organization.

According to Sarathy, joining Deloitte will enable CloudQuest to develop its capabilities, helping organizations defend the “Gen-X” security threats and promoting modernization to adopt more efficient cloud security competences. He quoted that, “This new episode is one that my cofounders … and I always wanted to achieve as we worked to help those in the cloud to fast-track their cybersecurity efforts.”.

The CloudQuest acquisition for Deloitte represents the company’s latest expansion into a cloud security market that is estimated to be worth $20.9 billion by 2027. Earlier this year, the firm acquired Root9B, a Colorado Springs-based provider of advanced cyber threat detecting services and solutions. Root9B offers customized managed services, vulnerability assessment and penetration testing, along with defense forensics, incident response, defensive security and training on hunt operator.

According to Deloitte risk and financial advisory cyber and strategic risk leader Deborah Golden, “We see remarkable opportunity in innovative approaches that help organizations securely renovate and operate while also realizing competitive benefit — and we are constantly investing to bring the most advanced solutions to our clients. Our acquisition of CloudQuest signifies our thoughtful commitment to transforming along with our clients, competing actively in the market, and vigorously building out tech-enabled methods that position Deloitte cyber as an absolute business enabler.”