Amazon Web Services has acquired Sqrrl, a cybersecurity start-up that has its origins in the U.S. National Security Agency.
The software enables security analysts to hunt and investigate advanced threats using link analysis, machine learning algorithms, and perhaps most important multi-petabyte scalability.
"We will be joining the Amazon Web Services family, and we're looking forward to working together on customer offerings for the future," Sqrrl said in a message posted to its homepage. Axios reported in December that Amazon was in advanced talks to buy Sqrrl and said the deal could be worth more than $40 million. Terms weren't disclosed.
The deal, which Sqrrl confirmed this week on its website arrives as Amazon looks to drive new/additional business from U.S. intelligence agencies. In November, for example, AWS announced the formation of a "secret" region of data centers meant to handle computing and data storage jobs from those clients.
AWS currently leads the public cloud market with nearly $1.2 billion in operating income and over $4.5 billion in revenue in the third quarter. Competitors including Google and Microsoft are both clearly want to capture additional share of the market but that's going to be difficult to do with Amazon acquiring some of the best technology available today (
like this recent Sqrll acquisition) and releasing its own security tools, including Amazon Macie (
which it had originally acquried from Harvest.ai).
AWS has sought to enhance its cloud in the past year with security tools. In August AWS announced Amazon Macie, based on technology from a start-up it had acquired called Harvest.ai.