The acquisition of Shape Security expands F5’s portfolio and increases the company’s overall cyber security application offerings.
The technology company, F5 Networks, wrapped up the year with the $1 billion purchase of Shape Security to improve cyber security applications. This is the largest purchase in the company’s history, but is it worth it?
Shape’s Cyber Security Techniques
Shape Security provides cyber security for some of the world’s largest and most popular websites and mobile apps, such as the banking app, Zelle. Some of the company’s other main clients are airlines, banks, government agencies, and retailers. The company uses abuse, bot, and fraud defenses to stop cybercriminals from hacking sensitive information and preventing data breaches.
The company sets itself apart from other cyber security companies with its patented platform which assesses the flow of data from the user into an application and employs analytics that are cloud-based to evaluate if the traffic is healthy and normal or if it could be a threat.
Advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence abilities have allowed the company to be priced at $1 billion. Shape is a leader of this abuse and fraud prevention which adds a new dimension to F5’s offerings making it an attractive acquisition.
Two Companies Coming Together
F5 Networks currently exists within 80% of Fortune 500 organizations’ telecommunication infrastructures. Time and resources will be dramatically reduced for companies that utilize F5’s networking capabilities with the addition of security from the Shape platform.
F5 Network’s CEO, François Locoh-Donou, stated that, “With Shape, we will deliver end-to-end application protection, which means revenue-generating; brand-anchoring applications are protected from the point at which they are created through to the point where consumers interact with them—from code to customer.”
Locoh-Donou also went onto say that cyber security is a quickly growing adjacent market and with the addition of Shape, the company will be better suited for protecting clients in a complex and widening multi-cloud setting.
Shape Security’s CEO, Derek Smith, also commented that “F5 provides the optimum traffic flow insertion point for Shape’s industry-leading online fraud and abuse prevention solutions.” He believes with F5’s “global go-to-market scale” the companies can protect substantially more clients and their applications from malicious cyber-attacks.
This acquisition will allow F5 and Shape to transform cyber security and offer various organizations to complete end-to-end application protection. Together the companies have the potential to save billions of dollars for organizations that could succumb to fraud and abuse. These companies’ coming together foreshadows just how important data security will be in 2020.
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