Mimecast’s acquisition appetite appears to be unquenchable. Aware, a U.S.-based security outfit founded in 2017, is now part of the fast-growing company.
It is already Mimecast’s tenth acquisition and its third this year, after Elevate Security and Code42 had already been incorporated in January and July, respectively. Mimecast itself recently introduced a Human Risk Management (HRM) platform as well.
Tip: Mimecast tackles the biggest cyber threat of all: human error
Aware focuses specifically on collaboration apps like Slack and Teams. Their adoption poses problems for legacy security services, this company notes. Having addressed these threats as an independent company, Aware will now do so as part of Mimecast’s offering.
Aware’s platform uses AI models to find potential risks in the unstructured data of collaboration tools. The company’s main goals are to protect sensitive data and improve compliance. The commonality with Mimecast is that it focuses on the human element of IT threats, making the get-together of Mimecast and Aware solutions a natural fit. Aware itself is designed to integrate seamlessly within Slack, Teams, Zoom, Webex and more.
Added value of Aware
Simply put, Mimecast’s goal with the acquisition of Aware is to further protect organizations from human security threats. Such threats consist primarily of social engineering, or the attempts by hackers to deceive employees so they can infiltrate a corporate environment. Marc van Zadelhoff, Mimecast’s CEO, articulates this danger as follows: “The human attack surface has expanded significantly, and legacy tools weren’t built to understand the complexity of messages, @mentions, emojis, and GIFs. It creates more vulnerability in organizations’ ecosystems, leading to security gaps, blind spots, and missing context, and exposing businesses to the risk of regulatory fines, reputational damage, and loss of valuable intellectual property.”
Mimecast can better counter those problems with the new acquisition, Van Zadelhoff says. “Aware was developed to understand, detect, and mitigate human behavior risks in the platforms where people work and collaborate. This forward-thinking approach and AI-powered capabilities will help enable us to further expand our offerings and address the intensifying risk.”