Rapid7 Acquires Alcide, Strengthens Focus on Cloud

Security firm Rapid7 has confirmed its acquisition of Alcide, a Kubernetes security provider, for roughly $50 million. This marks the company's second cloud-focused acquisition in the last year.

Tel Aviv-based Alcide was founded in 2016 and has so far generated $12.3 million in funding, as reported by Crunchbase. Its security platform was built for Kubernetes environments and aims to help organizations protect growing Kubernetes deployments by scanning for threats and configuration risks, enforcing policies, and protecting the development-to-production process.

The idea is to build in Kubernetes security throughout the DevOps life cycle as more businesses leverage the cloud to accelerate development, according to a company statement. As part of this, more developers are turning to Kubernetes to build and deliver containerized applications. 

Rapid7 plans to use this acquisition to expand its cloud security offering and combine Alcide's cloud workload protection (CWPP) capabilities with its existing cloud security posture management (CSPM) and cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) capabilities. 

The deal underscores Rapid7's growing focus on cloud security. Last April it confirmed plans to buy CSPM vendor DivvyCloud for approximately $145 million; in a statement, officials pointed to a need for businesses to secure multicloud environments. The year before, Rapid7 bought network monitoring firm NetFort to build out its cloud-based security analytics platform.

Read the full press release and Rapid7 blog post for more details.