One Identity Acquires Balabit

One Identity acquired Balabit, a leading provider of privileged access management (PAM), privileged account analytics and log management solutions that help businesses reduce the risk of data breaches associated with privileged accounts, for a number of key strategic reasons, including:

• Helping customers get IAM right. As a business, we are always looking for opportunities to deliver more value to our customers and partners in the name of helping them get IAM right. The acquisition of Balabit represented a unique opportunity to do just that.
• Further enhancing the portfolio. From the very beginning, we’ve been focused on building the industry’s most complete IAM portfolio. The acquisition of Balabit’s is yet another important step in that direction, one that enables us to further build upon the depth of our PAM solution and our overall IAM portfolio with best-of-breed session management, privileged account analytics and log management capabilities.
• Privileged Access Management (PAM) is more important than ever. The role PAM plays in ensuring an organization is safe from both internal and external threats has never been greater. With Balabit in the fold, we now fully control the future of the privileged session management and privileged account analytics capabilities we deliver to our customers and partners, assuring that we can and will continue to deliver a best-of-breed PAM solution that combines the best of One Identity and Balabit technology for the long term.
• Single-vendor simplicity. Organizations are increasingly seeking to streamline the number of vendors with which they partner. At the same time, few organizations are able to deploy every aspect of a complete IAM solution – such as governance, access management, privileged management and identity as a service – as a single project. By incorporating Balabit’s technology into our already modular and integrated portfolio, we better empower organizations to start their IAM journey from anywhere and build out based on their specific needs.
• Rich partner ecosystem. Like One Identity, Balabit’s customers rely on their trusted partners to deliver technologies they can count on. Balabit has a robust global partner network, one that we can leverage to further expand the reach and market penetration of our own core solutions. Balabit can likewise leverage the One Identity partner network to achieve a similarly beneficial outcome.
• Combining forces to do more. One Identity and Balabit already have a strong OEM partnership, and today’s announcement is a natural evolution of that relationship. By acquiring Balabit into the One Identity business, we can better align its development strategy and roadmap with that of the broader One Identity portfolio, further expand our reach and visibility in the fast-growing PAM market, and become even more responsive to customer and prospect requirements in this increasingly competitive space.

Balabit is a leading provider of privileged access management (PAM), privileged account analytics and log management solutions that help businesses reduce the risk of data breaches associated with privileged accounts. Balabit’s integrated PAM solution provides protection from threats posed by high-risk, privileged accounts, while its privileged account analytics solution provides an additional layer of protection by collecting and analyzing data from privileged sessions for anomalous activity.

Balabit’s solutions include privileged session management and privileged account analytics, which together help organizations prevent, detect and respond to cyber-attacks involving privileged accounts, including both insider threats and external attacks using hijacked credentials.

Working in conjunction with existing security tools, Balabit’s PAM capabilities enable a flexible and people-centric approach to improving security, without adding additional constraints to working practices.

Balabit was founded in 2000, and since that time, has developed a proven track record that includes 25 Fortune 100 customers and more than 1,000,000 corporate users worldwide. The company is headquartered in Budapest, Hungary, and operates globally with offices across the United States and Europe, together with a network of reseller partners.

Balabit offers three primary products:

• Privileged Session Management (PSM). Balabit’s Privileged Session Management (PSM) solution controls privileged access to remote IT systems, records activities in searchable, movie-like audit trails, and prevents malicious actions. PSM is a quickly deployable enterprise device – completely independent from clients and servers – that integrates seamlessly into existing networks. It captures the activity data necessary for user profiling and enables full user-session drill down for forensic investigations.
• Privileged Account Analytics (PAA). Privileged Account Analytics (PAA) integrates detailed data from PSM, as well as a variety of contextual data, and processes them using unique sets of algorithms, in the process generating behavior profiles that are continually adjusted using machine learning. It detects suspicious activity by identifying unusual and risky deviations to baseline activity, offering a wide range of outputs from risk-based alerts to automated session termination.
• syslog-ng. syslog-ng delivers the log data critical to understanding what is happening in IT environments. Whether it’s user activity, performance metrics, network traffic or any other type of log data, syslog-ng can collect and centralize it. syslog-ng helps organizations remove data silos and gain full-stack visibility of their IT environments.

Generally speaking, our expectation is that Balabit’s products will be integrated within the privileged access management (PAM) section of the current One Identity portfolio. One Identity is a Quest Software business, and is run by John Milburn, President and General Manager.

Balabit customers can expect to benefit from this acquisition in a number of ways. One Identity and Balabit have been rock-solid OEM partners for quite some time, working together to solve critical challenges for customers and partners. Currently, Balabit’s session management technology is embedded into the recently announced One Identity Safeguard solution.

With this acquisition, One Identity’s PAM solutions will include Balabit’s machine learning-driven, privileged account analytics, which are critical to building a complete PAM and IAM stack. The acquisition also enables us to further develop Balabit technology to create an even more powerful solution organizations can leverage to solve their critical PAM challenges.

Balabit’s customers are assured that Balabit will have a long-term home within One Identity, and that we will continue to invest in the Balabit product line in both short and long term. The addition of Balabit’s technology to the broader One Identity portfolio enables customers to acquire and implement their products within the context of a complete PAM solution, one that will now include privileged password management, privileged session management, advanced analytics, log management, AD bridging technology, and advanced management of UNIX environments.

Balabit customers and partners should continue to contact Balabit technical support as they do today, and to place purchase orders with Balabit and Balabit partners as they do today.

Balabit’s log management products are a critical and valued part of this acquisition, and will function as a standalone business within the broader One Identity family. Zoltán Györkő, CEO of Balabit, will assume the role of vice president of this newly formed business, reporting directly to John Milburn. The business will be staffed with its own sales, marketing and product management resources to ensure continuity and continue building on its track record of growth and success. We will also actively look for opportunities to leverage any synergies that exist between Balabit’s log management products and other solutions in the One Identity portfolio.

Though our support strategy is still being developed, every effort will be made to ensure that Balabit’s customers and prospects continue to receive the level of high-quality support to which they are accustomed. Our expectation is that Balabit’s customers, prospects and partners will eventually be able to take advantage of One Identity’s global support offerings, including One Identity’s award-winning support website.

One Identity customers can expect to benefit from this acquisition in a number of ways. One Identity and Balabit have been rock-solid OEM partners for quite some time, working together to solve critical challenges for customers and partners. Currently, Balabit’s session management technology is embedded into the recently announced One Identity Safeguard solution.

With this acquisition, our PAM solutions will incorporate Balabit’s machine learning-driven, privileged account analytics, which are critical to building a complete PAM and IAM stack. The acquisition also enables us to further develop Balabit technology to create an even more powerful solution organizations can leverage to solve their critical PAM challenges.

The addition of Balabit’s technology to the broader One Identity portfolio enables customers to acquire and implement their products within the context of a complete PAM solution, one that will now include privileged password management, privileged session management, advanced analytics, log management, AD bridging technology, and advanced management of UNIX environments.

We believe that there is the potential for tremendous partner synergy as a result of this acquisition. Both One Identity and Balabit have built an active and loyal network of global partners – partners whose customers count on them to deliver solutions they can trust. Balabit’s global partners can ultimately expand their reach and market penetration by making use of One Identity’s core solutions, while One Identity’s partners can ultimately leverage Balabit’s technology to achieve the same beneficial outcome.

Balabit’s global partner ecosystem will be welcomed into the One Identity Partner Circle. We will have more details on the partner integration process in the coming weeks and months.

As with customers, please note that for the immediate term, the transaction does not change the way partners will work and interact with either One Identity or Balabit.

We believe that there is the potential for tremendous partner synergy as a result of this acquisition. Both One Identity and Balabit have built an active and loyal network of global partners – partners whose customers count on them to deliver solutions they can trust. One Identity’s partners will be able to leverage Balabit’s technology to achieve the same beneficial outcome.

As with customers, please note that for the immediate term, the transaction does not change the way partners will work and interact with One Identity.