Established in January 2021, the Israeli firm has built a data security posture management platform that enables data security, compliance, and governance professionals to know about their cloud data, while revealing details regarding sensitive data including its storage, accessibility, and usage

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Cloud data security firm Polar Security acquired by IBM. (Credit: Tokumeigakarinoaoshima/Wikimedia Commons)

IBM has announced the acquisition of cloud data security and compliance firm Polar Security in a move to support enterprises to automate cloud data protection.

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Polar Security, which was founded in Israel, assists businesses in identifying, continuously monitoring, and securing cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS) application data.

Besides, the firm addresses the rising problem of shadow data, said IBM.

Established in January 2021, the Israeli firm has built a data security posture management (DSPM) platform that enables data security, compliance, and governance professionals to know about their cloud data.

The platform reveals details regarding sensitive data including its storage, accessibility, and usage.

It also discovers vulnerabilities with the underlying security posture, including policies, configurations, or data usage.

With its DSPM platform, Polar Security can automatically trace unknown and sensitive data across the cloud. These include structured and unstructured assets within cloud service providers, data lakes, and SaaS properties.

Once identified, the cloud data security firm categorises the data, maps the potential and real flow of that data, and finds vulnerabilities, including over-entitlements, misconfigurations, and behaviour that breach policy or regulations.

Polar Security delivers remediation reports based on a risk-based prioritisation methodology to identify the most critical security issues and compliance breaches.

The report also provides an analysis of the root causes and practical solutions to address the issues.

Through the acquisition of Polar Security, IBM plans to integrate the former’s DSPM technology within its Guardium family of data security products.

The integration is expected to help IBM Security Guardium to deliver a data security platform to security teams that span all types of data across all storage locations, SaaS, on premises, and in public cloud infrastructure.

In February 2023, IBM acquired US-based GraphQL developer StepZen to help companies realise more business value from their data and application programming interfaces (APIs).