Cloudflare Strengthens SASE Offering with BastionZero Acquisition

Cloudflare announced the acquisition of zero-trust startup BastionZero in a move that will bring zero-trust infrastructure access controls to the company’s Cloudflare One platform.

Founded in 2020, BastionZero’s zero-trust infrastructure access platform provides zero-trust control to enable users to remotely access infrastructure targets in any cloud or data center, while helping organizations simplify and secure their business-critical systems.

The company’s acquisition will see Cloudflare add these infrastructure controls such as servers, Kubernetes clusters and databases to its SASE platform.

By expanding its VPN replacement offering to include infrastructure resources, the provider says security teams will be able to centralize management of more of their hybrid IT environment while employing zero trust practices to keep DevOps teams productive and secure.

In a statement, Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, said the move will give IT teams remote access to key resources through a more secure and flexible alternative to traditional VPN setups.

“The world of work has changed radically. Employees expect to be able to do their work effectively from anywhere,” he explained.

“There is no reason why teams managing an organization’s most important systems can’t have the same flexibility. Including BastionZero on Cloudflare One gives IT teams secure access to their organization’s most important internal processes, wherever they are.”

The acquisition of BastionZero will expand Cloudflare’s capabilities

Launched in 2020, Cloudflare One provides organizations with secure access to edge services (SASE) and edge security services (SSE) capabilities to ensure the right employees have access to the right internal systems and data.

The company said the addition of BastionZero will enhance its security capabilities by eliminating the risks associated with long-lived passwords and credentials, and will also increase control with just-in-time policy options that ensure individuals only have access to information and systems when they need it. they need.

The newly strengthened platform will also be better equipped to enhance compliance by providing just-in-time permissions to any user attempting to access core systems and servers – locally or remotely – while maintaining centralized policy controls and identity-aware logging.

Additionally, BastionZero will eliminate the need for legacy, bypass security patches between systems, Cloudflare said, enabling faster access across complex infrastructure with policy control and observability.

“Scalable and secure remote access to corporate servers and other infrastructure is a challenge for every IT team and developer,” commented Sharon Goldberg, co-founder and CEO of BastionZero.

“But proprietary solutions increasingly pose security risks and operational costs. This acquisition enables us to deeply integrate BastionZero’s unique cryptographic approach to simple, passwordless infrastructure access with the world’s largest secure access services edge (SASE) network.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.