Qualys Acquires Container Security Firm Layered Insight
2.11.18 securityweek IT

Security and compliance solutions provider Qualys on Tuesday announced the acquisition of Layered Insight, a company that specializes in protecting container-native applications.

Layered Insight was acquired for $12 million. The deal also includes another $4 million that is tied to an earn-out, and $4 million for the employment of key employees through 2019.

Similar to earlier acquisitions made by Qualys, the company will keep Layered Insight’s employees. Co-founders Asif Awan and John Kinsella will join Qualys as CTO of Container Security and VP of Engineering in Container Security, respectively.

Qualys unveiled a new product designed for securing containers across cloud and on-premises deployments in June 2017.

With the acquisition of Layered Insight, the company hopes to further improve its solutions, including with deeper visibility into containers, the ability to detect and prevent breaches during runtime, and extended visibility, compliance and protection for serverless container-as-a-service (CaaS) installations.

Qualys expects to complete integration of Layered Insight technology into its cloud platform by the second quarter of 2019.

“By integrating Layered Insight’s unique technology into the Qualys Container Security App, we will add the ability to provide dynamic analysis of running containers, and automated enforcement of the container environment,” said Philippe Courtot, chairman and CEO of Qualys.

“Layered Insight's unique technology brings transparent orchestration to container security. The ability to instrument images pushes automated deployment deep into the DevOps CI/CD pipeline, thus removing the resistance at deployment. This instrumentation provides real-time visibility into containers at run-time complementing our current capabilities of accessing container images in the build system for vulnerabilities and configuration issues,” Courtot added.