Cloudflare acquires CASB Vectrix startup

We learned a few days ago that Cato Networks had beefed up its CASB offer. Now it’s Cloudflare’s turn to do the same, this time through a buyout. The supplier has just got hold of the start-up Vectrix. This is the second takeover of start-ups for the CDN (content delivery network) and security specialist after that of Zaraz last December. Since its creation in 2009, Cloudflare has made a total of 8 acquisitions.

With its latest acquisition, Cloudflare will bolster its SASE and Zero Trust One platform with technology to improve control and visibility of data scattered across enterprises’ multiple SaaS applications. And more specifically detect security issues such as configuration errors and unauthorized user access, as well as inappropriate file sharing and shadow IT activities. By beefing up its One platform, Cloudflare hopes to better fight its many competitors, including Cato Networks, Cisco, Fortinet, Netskope, Palo Alto Networks, Versa Networks, VMware, Zscaler, etc.

A quick integration to implement

“Vectrix was able to develop an easy-to-implement platform in part by leveraging APIs and the modern infrastructure stack we have today,” said Corey Mahan, co-founder and CEO of the startup that joins Cloudflare as Product Director. “The central component of an API-first approach is the access system, which powers integrations through an OAuth 2.0 application or vendor marketplace application to authorize secure API access to SaaS services. This means that the API-driven CASB works out of network bandwidth or in its direct path and will not cause any slowdowns or require configuration changes.”

By integrating Vectrix technology into One, Cloudflare customers could reduce reliance on other third-party solutions. In any case, this is what Matthew Prince says: “It means that more and more, our customers can consolidate suppliers and use Cloudflare for all their network and security needs”. Since its inception in 2020, Vectrix has managed to raise $2.2 million. Note that the other co-founders of Vectrix, Alex Dunbrack and Matthew Lewis, are also joining Cloudflare as well as 4 other employees. The amount of this buyback was not disclosed.