Abigail Klein Leichman
November 16, 2014

On November 13, Microsoft announced its acquisition of Israeli enterprise security startup Aorato. Financial details of the sale weren’t disclosed, but according to The Wall Street Journal Microsoft paid close to $200 million.

“We are making this acquisition to give customers a new level of protection against threats through better visibility into their identity infrastructure,” wrote Takeshi Numoto, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for cloud and enterprise marketing, in a blog post.

“With Aorato we will accelerate our ability to give customers powerful identity and access solutions that span on-premises and the cloud, which is central to our overall hybrid cloud strategy,” Numoto continued.

Aorato’s approach uses machine learning to detect suspicious activity on a company’s network by comparing with baseline “normal behavior.” The software then takes appropriate measures to protect the network. Part of the technology’s innovation is a continuously updated view of all of the people and machines accessing an organization’s Windows Server Active Directory, used by most enterprises to store user identities and administer access to critical business applications and systems.

“We are excited about the technology that Aorato has built and, especially, the people joining the Microsoft team through this acquisition,” wrote Numoto.

In past years, Microsoft has purchased a dozen Israeli startups. It also maintains a major R&D center in Israel, which recently sponsored a local Innovate for Good competition .

Aorato, founded in 2012 in Herzliya, posted a statement that joining Microsoft “gives us a unique opportunity to … help customers at the broadest possible scale. With this acquisition, we will cease selling our Directory Services Application Firewall (DAF) product. As part of Microsoft, we will share more on the future direction and packaging of these capabilities at a later time.”

 

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