Blue Coat Systems Buys Cloud Security Firm Elastica

Sunnyvale-based Blue Coat Systems, a security firm owned by Bain Capital, has announced that it has acquired Elastica, in a deal worth $300 million. Blue Coat Systems said that it plans to use the acquisition to help bolster its cloud-based security capability. 

Founded in 2012 and based in San Jose, California, Elastica develops security tools designed to protect cloud-based apps with the addition of machine learning and data science for extra visualization into infrastructure activity. Elastica’s core product is CloudSOC platform, which employs natural language and behaviour monitoring for conducting risk analysis. The company has more than 130 employees and 275 enterprise customers.Before the deal, Elastica has raised $6.3 million in Series A funding round. In March, it announced a $30 million funding round. Investors include Mayfield Fund, Pelion Venture Partners and Third Point Ventures. It competes with Bitglass, Netskope, Skyhigh Networks and Adallom, which now owned by Microsoft.

Mike Fey, CEO and President Blue Coat Systems, said in a statement: “Corporations are facing a dissolving perimeter”, “The traditional infrastructure-centric way of protecting users cannot support the cloud age.”

Based in Sunnyvale, California, Blue Coat Systems sells hardware that provides companies and government agencies visibility into encrypted web traffic flowing through their data centers. The company’s hardware are primarily used by enterprises and government agencies to block malware and malicious threats, control access to applications and content, censorship, prevents unwanted use of apps like uploading images to social networks or attachments in emails, and improves the performance of network applications. Blue Coat System was launched in 1996 under the name CacheFlow, and traded in NASDAQ until 201, when it was bought by private equity firm Thomas Bravo for $1.3 billion and began operating as a privately-held company. In March, Thomas Bravo sold the company to Bain Capital for $2.4 billion.

Blue Coat Systems has made a number of acquisitions since going private, including big data firm Solera Networks, malware analysis firm Norman Shark, cloud access security broker Perpecsys and the SSL appliance product line from fabless semiconductor firm Netronome. 

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