Cyber security company Netskope has acquired data security firm Dasera for an undisclosed amount.
This is technology M&A deal number 222 that ChannelE2E and MSSP Alert have covered so far in 2024. See more than 2,000 technology M&A deals for 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, and 2020 listed here.
Dasera has 43 employees listed on LinkedIn. While Netskope would not confirm to ChannelE2E how many of those employees would remain following the acquisition, Robert Arandjelovic, Netskope's senior director of product & solutions strategy, confirmed that Dasera employees who join Netskope will be fully integrated into existing teams.
Arandjelovic noted that Dasera’s presence across the U.S., India, Spain, and other regions will have an immediate positive impact for Netskope customers.
"Our customers view data as one of their crown jewels - and as their business grows and changes, they must know where it is, what it is, who is using it and for what purpose, and ultimately how to protect it so it is processed and stored properly,” Arendjelovic said.
'A Strategic Acquisition'
Based in Mountain View, California, Dasera was founded in 2019 by CEO Ani Chaudhuri and CTO Dr. Noah Johnson. The company’s leadership team will continue to play integral roles in Netskope, Arandjelovic told ChannelE2E.
For its part, Netskope is headquartered in Santa Clara, California and has 2,589 employees listed on LinkedIn.
The deal is being touted as a strategic acquisition, following Netskope’s buyout of Kadiska, a digital experience management for SASE firms, just over a year ago. The combination of these two acquisitions will support the company’s Netskope One platform, a cloud-native platform that offers converged security and networking services.
An Appealing Acquisition Target
Dasera’s work focuses on finding data and assessing it (and the data store) in structured and semi-structured data sets that are stored in hyperscaler platforms like AWS and Azure, PaaS repositories like Databricks and Snowflake, and on-premises environments.
According to Arandjelovic, these capabilities made Dasera an appealing acquisition target, offering customers advanced data security across various platforms, including web, SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, email, endpoints, and on-premises systems. This coverage extends to structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data stores, as well as data lakes. At the core of this is data security posture management (DSPM), which helps companies continuously monitor, assess, and improve their data security across all these environments. It ensures that sensitive data is protected, compliance requirements are met, and potential risks are identified and managed proactively.
"Our customers have told us that they are excited for DSPM capabilities to be part of the Netskope One platform, and they don't want to buy yet another point solution to tackle just one small part of the overall data protection problem,” Arandjelovic explained to ChannelE2E. “DSPM fits very well as part of a unified platform that can cover the full breadth and depth of data protection use cases. On top of that, when Netskope looks at acquiring a company, our focus is not only on technology but also on the cultural fit of the people with our cultural values. Dasera shares a similar vision for protecting sensitive data everywhere and operates culturally the right way."
Netskope saw an opportunity with Dasera to tackle some key pain points in expanding its DSPM offering. With DSPM adoption on the rise—Gartner predicts that over 20% of enterprises will be on board by 2026, up from less than 1% in 2022—many companies struggle with juggling multiple point products to cover all their needs. But for Netskope customers, that won’t be an issue. Instead of adding more tools, they can handle data security posture and other data protection tasks all in one streamlined, unified platform.
