RSA Security acquires Aveksa

Announced today, RSA Security has acquired Aveksa, a business-driven identity and access management vendor. The term business-driven refers to Aveksa’s view that identity and access governance decisions are better taken by business owners, rather than left to the IT department or security, since business owners are more likely to be in a position to understand what entitlements are appropriate for which roles. The news should come as no real surprise to industry watchers since Aveksa stated recently that it was either looking for additional funding or, potentially, an IPO.

Aveksa will become part of RSA’s Identity Trust Management product group. RSA already offers its own identity and access management (IAM) capabilities, based on its adaptive IAM vision. It states that it is acquiring Aveksa for its strong user management and provisioning capabilities, and for improving its overall capabilities in terms of adding intelligence and business context to IAM.

This acquisition will help take RSA further down the path towards its overall vision of intelligence-driven security, leveraging insight from roles, processes and big data across enterprise, cloud and mobile platforms. Aveksa will aid in providing the rich identity context that will help it to enhance situation awareness within its products, including RSA Security Analytics. Aveksa has long recognised the importance of the intelligence that can be gleaned from big data, integrating with SIEM and log management capabilities from partners to pull in data from multiple sources into its own database. This will allow it to fit nicely into RSA’s overall security portfolio.

Aveksa has shown itself to be highly innovative and has seen strong growth recently, especially in its primary target market of mid-sized organisations. Now within the RSA fold, it will have the resources necessary to fulfil its vision further, as well as helping RSA to further its own vision of intelligence- and context-driven security.