Search Engine Giant Elastic Acquires Israeli Cybersecurity Startup

Israeli policy definition and enforcement platform Build.security will be acquired by search company Elastic, the US-based company announced on Monday. The acquisition is expected to close during Elastic’s fiscal second quarter.

Financial details of the deal have not been disclosed.

The Build.security team will be the foundation of a growing Elastic presence in Israel and an R&D center the company is set to establish in Te Aviv. Amit Kanfer, co-founder and CEO of Build.security, will serve as site lead for the region.

Formerly known as Elasticsearch, Elastic was co-founded in 2012 by Israeli entrepreneur Shay Banon as a free open search and analytics solution. The company developed Elastic Stac which includes Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, and Logstash, and other software systems that allow users to search and analyze data.

Elastic bought Build.security, a company focused on security policy management for applications founded last year. The company leverages Open Policy Agent (OPA), an open source, general-purpose policy engine that enables unified, context-aware policy enforcement. The company’s technology provides developers with the building blocks they need to generate and manage best-practice authorization controls across enterprise applications at scale, while reducing security vulnerabilities. OPA is a graduated project of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF.)

Elastic and Build.security intend to build the ability to manage OPA policies in Kibana, enforce OPA policies through the Elastic Agent, and store the results of OPA policy executions within Elasticsearch using the Elastic Common Schema (ECS), the companies said.

The initial integration with Build.security will focus on Kubernetes admission controller, enabling security and compliance at deployment-time, and will continue with build-time policies scanning cloud configuration files. Elastic said users will be able to “shift left” and enforce security for their cloud-native applications earlier in app life cycles with this integration.

“For years, Elastic has provided millions of developers with power, free, and open technology,” said Kanfer. “We are excited to join forces with Elastic to deliver on the promise of a free and open policy management platform for cloud native environments, from code to cloud to runtime.”

“Since the inception of Elastic Security we have pioneered a vision for what Limitless XDR should be – the ability for customers to prevent, detect and respond to threats in real-time, all in a single platform. We have done this by bringing together SIEM for detecting threats, and endpoint security for protecting and remediating issues on all endpoints, including in the cloud,”  added Banon, “We are excited to join forces with Build.security to bring open policy management to Elastic Security, and invest in Open Policy Agent and its broad and emerging community.”