By Calvin Biesecker
Symantec Corp. [SYMC] yesterday said it has agreed to acquire Gideon Technologies, Inc., a small firm that provides federal government and commercial customers with a security management tool for cyber security that meets federal requirements, boosting the company’s capabilities in offering an automated, end-to-end solution to improve the cyber situational awareness and related reporting to its customers.
Gideon’s main product is SecureFusion, an automated situational awareness tool that allows customers to find its computing vulnerabilities and then manage the response and remediation. This is a new capability for Symantec, Gigi Schumm, vice president and general manager public sector for Symantec, told Defense Daily.
Moreover, SecureFusion is Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP)-validated, meaning it meets federal specifications for sharing data about cyber threats. This means the “immediate value” of the acquisition for Symantec will be the focus on federal customers given the priority placed on cyber security, Schumm said.
Symantec already offers security data feeds that help with threat identification, remediation tools and a management platform. SecureFusion “is kind of a final piece to that puzzle for us” for cyber situational awareness and management, she said.
The fact that SecureFusion is SCAP compliant also provides for an automated security management capability, Schumm said. Currently cyber security management is a “very manual process,” she added.
Symantec plans to used Gideon’s expertise to “make our data feeds that we already have SCAP compliant, so all of a sudden it enables us to provide the government with a seamless, end-to-end solution for situational awareness and global visibility and do it in a way that will fit into heterogeneous computing environments,” Schumm said.
Terms of the deal, which is expected to close by the end of March, were not disclosed. Symantec said the acquisition would be immaterial to its financial results. Georgia-based Gideon has 15 employees. Gideon did not use a financial adviser on the deal.