Blue Coat Systems, a provider of Web traffic filtering and business assurance products and services, plans to buy security analytics specialist Solera Networks, which uses data mining techniques to classify network traffic and detect potential security threats.
The acquisition is expected to be finalized within the next 30 days, the two companies said Wednesday.
BlueCoat declined to disclose the financial terms of the deal. The company, which is based in Sunnyvale, California, and has over 15,000 customers worldwide, plans to use Solera's technology to add security analytics and forensic capabilities to its future offerings.
Blue Coat hopes that the combination of its own Web-based threat intelligence with Solera's "DeepSee" analytics platform will help customers more rapidly identify and respond to security incidents and data breaches.
The Solera DeepSee platform uses real-time deep packet inspection to identify suspicious network traffic that could indicate the presence of advanced persistent threats (APTs) and other zero-day -- previously unseen -- malware attacks.
DeepSee can detect hundreds of applications and protocols as well as metadata attributes from network sessions and provides a dashboard for real-time reporting, visualizing graphical representations of the captured data, receiving alerts and notifications, automating tasks, responding to incidents and more.
According to Blue Coat Systems CEO Greg Clark, the ability to efficiently mine a large dataset of network history in order to react and resolve security issues in real time is an essential component of the modern security architecture.
