Cloudflare acquires Vectrix for CASB functionality

Cloudflare has acquired Vectrix to help businesses gain visibility and control of their applications. The acquisition adds modern cloud access security broker (CASB) functionality to Cloudflare's Zero Trust platform.

Cloudflare says the acquisition of Vectrix, a company that provides businesses with one-click visibility and control across all of their SaaS applications, will enhance its existing Zero Trust platform, Cloudflare One, by allowing security teams to scan third-party tools–including Google Workspace, GitHub, and AWS–to detect and mitigate issues such as inappropriate file sharing and user permission misconfigurations.

"Tens of thousands of organisations rely on Cloudflare One's Zero Trust platform to keep their teams and data secure," says Cloudflare co-founder and CEO, Matthew Prince.

"Cloudflare's global network blocks attempts to compromise data at multiple levels while accelerating traffic to the Internet. We're excited to welcome the Vectrix team to Cloudflare to help deliver the fastest, most secure, and robust Zero Trust platform for the enterprise."

Businesses are using more SaaS applications than ever before, driven by the need to operate more efficiently and collaboratively in distributed or hybrid work environments. According to Gartner's report, Forecast: Public Cloud Services, Worldwide, 2019-2025, 4Q21 Update, public cloud services end-user worldwide spending on Cloud Application Services (SaaS) is expected to grow from $174B in 2022 to more than $279B in 2025. This has increased the burden on security teams, who now have to monitor security across numerous applications with unique configuration settings, user access controls, and monitoring systems. The increased SaaS footprint increases the risk of security incidents from misconfigured settings, incorrect user access controls, or disgruntled employees.

"With Vectrix, IT and security teams can perform security scans across their third-party tools to better detect and mitigate issues ranging from unauthorised user access and file exposure to misconfigurations and shadow IT," says Cloudflare.

"Integrating Vectrix's API-driven cloud access security broker (CASB) with Cloudflare One provides enterprises with comprehensive Zero Trust, allows control of both data-at-rest and data-in-transit. Vectrix extends the security of Cloudflare's network to the data stored in SaaS applications, giving customers a single control plane for the security of their workforce and mission-critical resources."

Corey Mahan, co-founder and CEO of Vectrix, says, "Everyone uses SaaS applications, from sending emails to managing HR, but simply ticking the wrong box can leave a business's critical data exposed. By combining Vectrix's API first approach with the scale of Cloudflare's Zero Trust platform, we're able to give customers an easy and simple way to control how data from those applications are shared."

"Vectrix helps IT and security teams detect security issues across their SaaS applications. We look at both data and users in SaaS apps to alert teams to issues ranging from unauthorised user access and file exposure to misconfigurations and shadow IT," he says. "We built Vectrix to solve a problem that terrified us as security engineers ourselves: how do we know if the SaaS apps we use have the right controls in place? Is our company data protected? SaaS tools make it easy to work with data and collaborate across organisations of any size, but that also makes them vulnerable."