Blue Coat Systems, Inc., a market leader in enterprise security, today announced it has acquired Perspecsys, Inc., a leader in enterprise cloud data protection solutions. With this acquisition, Blue Coat significantly expands its cloud security offerings while enhancing the industry’s most robust hybrid cloud portfolio. This expanded portfolio positions Blue Coat as a leader in the Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) segment and sets a new bar for data protection within cloud applications.

“CASBs have become the primary means of layering security onto SaaS (Software as a Service) applications,” said Mike Fey, Blue Coat president and COO. “Industry analysts predict substantial growth for this space over the next five years. As SaaS deployments continue to increase, this technology will become an essential component of enterprise data and cloud security.”

This acquisition enables Blue Coat to offer the industry’s widest range of CASB capabilities within its market-leading Secure Web Gateway portfolio. Together, Perspecsys and Blue Coat deliver the industry’s leading solution for protecting data in an era of user-led cloud application consumption, dramatically enhancing security for corporate-approved cloud applications and services.

As dependency on cloud applications grows, enterprises are faced with a number of issues regarding data privacy, compliance and security. These include compliance requirements for Personally-Identifiable-Information (PII), as well as payment (PCI) and protected health information (HIPAA); strict data governance and regional residency rules for multinational companies; and most prominently, the continuous global news of data breaches. These concerns can be an inhibitor to the adoption of cloud applications for many organizations.

Perspecsys’ Cloud Data Protection platform solves the key business risks associated with data compliance, privacy and security for enterprises as they move to adopt cloud-based applications. Through the use of its patented cloud data tokenization and encryption capabilities, Perspecsys puts enterprises in complete control of their data at all times, regardless of where the data resides, both while in use and at rest in the cloud. By removing the risks associated with placing sensitive data in the cloud with applications such as salesforce.com, ServiceNow and Oracle, Perspecsys effectively makes the public cloud private.

“To gain control over the explosion of cloud application usage, our customers tell us that the proxy is the logical location to implement CASB features and with our historic strength and understanding of web applications it is a perfect fit,” said Greg Clark, Blue Coat CEO. “Given that more than 50 percent of our customers are based overseas, and as we look to expand our vision for cloud protection, we are paying close attention to the unique needs of multinationals that reside or are doing business in geographies with strict compliance and data sovereignty requirements. Perspecsys has delivered an approach for encrypting and tokenizing data in the cloud that can actually be used in the real world by global customers, making it a disruptive force in the market and a great addition to Blue Coat. In summary, Perspecsys’ capability reduces corporate cyber-crime risk. Management of data at rest via tokenizing or encrypting is rapidly becoming a critical element of cyber defense for both corporate owned infrastructure and cloud applications.”

“We’re excited to be joining forces with Blue Coat. As the largest content security provider on the planet and a leader in CASB, Blue Coat is the logical source for these security services,” said David Canellos, Perspecsys CEO. “Enterprises want to buy this class of solution from Blue Coat and Perspecsys’ Cloud Data Protection is a natural complement to Blue Coat’s widely recognized portfolio of cloud and proxy technologies.”