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Fortinet Expands SOAR Capabilities with CyberSponse Buyout

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Fortinet (FTNT - Free Report) recently announced the acquisition of Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR) provider CyberSponse for an undisclosed amount.

CyberSponse has served as a Fortinet Security Fabric partner and its buyout will help the company simplify its security operations. The deal is expected to further extend the automation and incident response capabilities of Fortinet’s offerings including FortiAnalyzer, FortiSIEM and FortiGate.

Why SOAR Counts

The combination of Fortinet’s Security Fabric and CyberSponse’s SOAR technology will strengthen the capabilities of security analysts across organizations.

Notably, growing number of point security products is spurring numerous security warnings that make security operations more complex than they already are. Moreover, cybersecurity skill shortage adds to the woes of handling this alert fatigue and address each notification efficiently.

To mitigate this difficulty, enterprises and service providers are trying to consolidate and systematize alerts from various security products, automate the appropriate and repetitive tasks to save resources and utilize playbooks to enable real-time incident response.

Per Gartner, the percentage of businesses with more than five professionals using SOAR tools is likely to surge to 30% in 2022 from less than 5% in 2019.

Vendors are taking advantage of enterprise interest in SOAR technology. Many large cybersecurity vendors pursued acquisitions of security automation and orchestration start-ups. For instance, Splunk purchased Phantom last year, Microsoft (MSFT - Free Report) bought Hexadite and Rapid7 took over Komand in 2017. Moreover, in 2016, FireEye added Invotas to its portfolio.

Acquisitions: Key Catalyst

Increasing incidences of high-profile data breaches in recent years led global businesses to up the ante on cybersecurity to make sure their data is not compromised on. With numerous cybersecurity companies competing for a share of the pie, consolidation is inevitable. Notably, each of the integrated companies specializes in a particular domain of cybersecurity.

Per a Momentum Cyber study, in 2018, the M&A activity in the cybersecurity space hit an all-time high with 183 deal wins.

To cope with the rising consolidation wave in the cybersecurity market, Fortinet seems to be following its peers’ footsteps. The company’s acquisition of CyberSponse comes close on the heels of its enSilo buyout in October this year.

Fortinet currently sports a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.

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