Cloudflare has acquired the zero trust infrastructure access startup BastionZero founded to secure remote access to critical infrastructure, including servers and databases.
Through this acquisition, it will provide increased security, compliance, and control for hybrid and remote IT teams by eliminating the need for long-lived credentials. The deal will centralize the management and security of IT infrastructure such as Kubernetes clusters, simplify zero trust practices, and reduce reliance on outdated VPN setups.
BastionZero was founded in May 2020 by Sharon Goldberg, an associate professor in Boston University’s computer science department who previously co-founded Commonwealth Crypto. The company has 11 employees and raised $6 million in seed funding in May 2022 from Dell Technologies Capital, Akamai, and Digital Garage of Japan.
Traditional VPN setups are becoming outdated due to their overly permissive access, and Cloudflare said buying BastionZero will address this issue by providing more secure and flexible remote access. The deal will increase command and control and ensure just-in-time permissions by granting access only when necessary and monitoring access with identity-aware logging, according to Cloudflare.
Gartner last month named Cloudflare a niche player in the security service edge market alongside Broadcom, iboss and Versa Networks, and analysts praised its sales strategy, sales execution and geographic strategy. Gartner criticized Cloudflare for lacking common SSE features such as advanced DLP and file sandboxing and an R&D strategy focused on closing technical gaps.
The BastionZero deal comes two months after Cloudflare purchased observability startup Baselime to enhance the developer experience on serverless platforms as well as open-source deployment platform PartyKit. A month before that, Cloudflare bought multi-cloud networking startup Nefeli Networks to enable better network and security management within the cloud.
