Qualys, Inc., a pioneer and leading provider of cloud-based security and compliance solutions, announced it has acquired Layered Insight, a global leader in container-native application protection.

"This acquisition brings Qualys to the forefront of container security," said Philippe Courtot, chairman and CEO, Qualys. "With a highly scalable architecture, Layered Insight allows us to add runtime capabilities and automated enforcement to our current Container Security solution."

"As a customer of both Qualys and Layered Insight, GE Digital sees the value of this acquisition," said Al Ghous, Sr. Director of Cyber Security at GE Digital. "It brings highly scalable container-native application protection to Qualys' exceptional vulnerability assessment capabilities. We look forward to the availability of the integrated solution to address our security challenges for all types of workloads." 

By acquiring Layered Insight, Qualys extends its current capabilities to include deep visibility and runtime application protection for containerized and serverless workloads. The integrated solution will automatically correlate deep runtime behavioral analysis with Qualys' leading threat protection capabilities to deliver DevOps teams unmatched runtime application protection without added container management complexity. 

Layered Insight's technology will help Qualys customers gain:

• Deeper visibility into containers by mapping runtime behavior to gain a multi-dimensional (network, storage and system) and comprehensive understanding of applications running in a containerized environment.
• The ability to detect and prevent security breaches during runtime. Users can set alerts for detected anomalies or enact auto-generated behavior policies to enforce control on the containers.
• Extended visibility, compliance and protection for serverless Container-as-a-Service (CaaS) deployments, such as AWS Fargate and Azure Container Instances, by instrumenting the visibility and protection within application images and language runtimes.
  

The combined Qualys Container Security solution will offer customers coverage of inventory, vulnerability management and  compliance, as well as runtime visibility and protection capabilities from build to deployment stages across on-premises, cloud or CaaS environments.

As with all Qualys acquisitions, key Layered Insight employees have joined Qualys, including co-founders Asif Awan as CTO of Container Security and John Kinsella as VP engineering, Container Security.

"We couldn't have asked for a better growth platform for Layered Insight solutions than Qualys," said Awan. "Qualys' massive customer base provides the perfect springboard for realizing our vision of putting Layered Insight technology in the hands of millions of users. We are very excited to join the Qualys team and work together on the shared vision of providing the best comprehensive security solution for all types of application workloads, running anywhere."

Layered Insight solutions are fully containerized and are built on a highly scalable architecture. Qualys expects the Layered Insight Solution to be integrated into its Cloud Platform by the second half of 2019.