Palo Alto Networks (PAN) today announced plans to acquire Evident.io, a predominantly API-based cloud monitoring vendor for $300 million in cash.

Evident.io has a large mind share among Forrester’s end user clients and is also regularly mentioned by other cloud workload security management (CWS) vendors as a viable competitor.

With PAN expanding Aperture into a Cloud Security Gateway (CSG, also known as a CASB) offering to secure SaaS cloud apps, Evident.io will be a key component in PAN’s portfolio to secure IaaS workloads and sets an interesting precedent and template for other network security pedigree vendors such as Cisco, Forcepoint, and ZScaler to combine/tune their assets beyond CASB use cases to focus on IaaS/PaaS protection.

On the other hand, point CWS providers such as CloudCheckr, CloudPassage, Dome9, Trend Micro will face increasing competition from vendors providing a complete suite of cloud security solutions.

Forrester expects that the following factors will define how PAN’s acquisition of Evident.io fares:

  1. Integrating PAN’s Aperture and last-mile network security capabilities with Evident.io.
  2. Supporting containerization (Docker, Kubernetes, and their respective orchestration platforms) in Evident.io.
  3. Adding and strengthening agent-based CWS policy enforcement capabilities.
  4. Improving network security (host-based firewalls, IDS/IPS) features, integrating with existing PAN assets in this domain.
  5. Imbuing support for malware detection and privilege escalation into the resulting combined solution.