Kaspersky acquires Brain4Net, extends network security offering

Kaspersky has acquired an emerging company, Brain4Net. The organisation has been developing solutions and services to help enterprises and service providers adapt modern technologies, such as Software-Defined Wide-Area Network (SD-WAN) and Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV), with existing network infrastructure.

Brain4Net's team is joining Kaspersky, and will contribute to building Kaspersky's network security strategy, as well as a Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) and evolved XDR offering.

By acquiring Brain4Net, Kaspersky states it aims to bring a new SASE offering to the market as a unified platform, which will combine Kaspersky's security solutions and technologies with Brain4Net's network orchestration and control capabilities and expertise.

Due to this move, Kaspersky will be able to offer its enterprise customers both security and connectivity services.

In particular, Kaspersky's future SASE offering will eventually include a cloud access security broker (CASB), cloud secure web gateway (SWG), cloud workload protection platform (CWPP), cloud security posture management (CSPM), zero trust network access (ZTNA), and other services.

This acquisition will also allow Kaspersky to evolve its existing solutions into full-scale Extended Detection and Response (XDR).

SASE brings various benefits for XDR, including the ability to collect telemetry from network traffic, stop an attack anywhere across the edge and the network, and simplify orchestration and management due to a single point of control through SASE.

The new XDR offering based on a cloud-native EDR solution is designed to provide visibility and advanced functionality for Al-based detection and auto response logic across all endpoints and the network.

In particular, Kaspersky XDR will bring a wide range of automated incident response scenarios (from blocking a file execution on an endpoint to blocking certain network segments or internal infrastructure for certain users or types of users) along with network segmentation tools.

Furthermore, the company states Kaspersky XDR will be based on unified server architecture and will provide centralised management from a single web console.

Customers will be able to control and protect all popular entry points for potential threats: network, web traffic, email, workstations, servers, and virtual machines.

Working together, the XDR platform with SASE will allow enterprises to implement a zero-trust strategy.

In addition to built-in advanced technology detection and analysis, the platform will benefit from world-leading threat intelligence (TI) which is continually updated and validated by Kaspersky experts.

These components will become a part of the single ecosystem, which is Kaspersky's vision for the future of corporate cybersecurity.

The central element of this ecosystem is Kaspersky Open Single Management Platform. It will become a single cloud-native technological platform to build Kaspersky XDR and will use deployment model agnostic architecture, the company states.

This way, the platform could be used across the public cloud, private cloud or even on-premises.

Kaspersky chief business development Andrey Efremov says, "We are excited to join forces with Brain4Net's talented team who have already built mature world-class technologies and services for network orchestration and control.

"I'm confident that their knowledge and experience, combined with Kaspersky's most awarded security technologies and recognised threat expertise will blend perfectly with our vision for corporate security, while new offerings will help security officers speed up threat detection, investigation and remediation, reducing mean time to response.

Brain4Net CEO and co-founder Max Kaminskiy says, "We are delighted to join the Kaspersky team. The spread of SD-WAN technology needs a strong business scenario, that is why we are partnering with Kaspersky XDR.

"Brain4Net's choice of technologies confirms the high level of the company's products and competencies. Together we will continue to make the world a safer and more comfortable place."